Sanjay Barbora
I chanced upon Jyoti Prasad Saikia’s name as I was mining through secondary literature for a book on keywords on politics and society in India. Such books have become commonplace in academic circles, where sociological shorthand makes up for lack of empirical details. My brief was to write something about the idea of “Seven Sisters”, a name used to denote the seven northeast states of the Indian union. I would have forgotten about my brief literature review and the piece that was subsequently published, had it not been for the egregious act of a nameless fact-checker who quietly slipped in a completely mistaken date of birth and death besides Mr. Saikia’s name!
Some weeks ago, I received a call from Mr. Saikia, who might as well have begun our conversation with Mark Twain’s line that rumours about his demise were highly exaggerated. After several telephonic conversations and a personal meeting, both he and I are trying to live down an embarrassing error that the editors of the published book have assured us will be rectified in subsequent editions. We have also discussed the origins of the phrase and this has led our conversations to Indian federalism. Saikia’s connection to the “Seven Sisters” is almost mythical, since he had been instrumental in giving weight to the concept.
As a young journalist in Tripura during the turbulent war of independence in Bangladesh, Saikia was privy to two simultaneous processes: (a) the emergence of a new country in the neighbourhood and (b) the creation of new states from the erstwhile province of Assam. In 1971, East Pakistan declared itself independent with logistic support from India and the Soviet Union. West Bengal and Northeast India were seen as the natural hinterland for Bangladeshi freedom fighters (Mukti Bahini), from where they could rely on local support and continue the armed struggle for the liberation of their homeland. In India, similar movements for secession had already taken root among the Naga, Mizo and Manipuri peoples. However, unlike the Bangladesh narrative of a country liberating itself from an autocratic military rule, India’s separatist struggles were managed in a somewhat different manner.
In the same year, the government of India enacted the North-East Areas (Reorganisation) Act, thereby enabling the creation of a state (Meghalaya) and union territories (Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh), by reorganising the state of Assam. This act was fraught with social and political tensions that erupted over demarcation of borders between Assam and the new states. In order to allay some of these fears and to ensure continuity in planning and developmental work, the government of India created the North Eastern Council through an act of parliament in the same year. In our conversations, Saikia mentioned how the former Chief Minister of Assam, Sarat Sinha, had enlisted his help in convincing Mr. Hokishe Sema about the need for all the seven states to participate in the NEC. Today, Nagaland is an integral part of the NEC and having heard Mr. Saikia’s stories about what transpired behind-the-scenes, it is not difficult to see how human affection, mutual respect and strategic alliances were important ingredients for federal experiments in the 1970s.
Seven Sisters, as Saikia tells it, was born from a need to unite the different constituents of the region, as well as caution them about the pitfalls of going their separate ways. It competed with other phrases – Saat Bhai Champa and Rainbow Region – before Saikia’s melancholic reference to Wordsworth’s poem “Seven Sisters, Or the Solitude of Binnorie” won the day. The Wordsworth poem had somewhat prophetic references to seven sisters forced to commit suicide when neglected by their father. From such foreboding beginnings, the idea of a cooperative federalism has had several interesting turns in Northeast India. Today, poised as we are at the cusp of seven decades of independence, the Northeast region finds itself at the proverbial crossroads.
Most states in the region face unenviable deficits in their budgets, as they scramble to invent new ways to earn revenue from their territories and peoples. Ironically, the quantum of money and resources that are being pumped into the region are indeed vast. The troublesome voices of dissent and insurgency have lost coherence, but so has the vision of a united front of the kind that Jyoti Prasad Saikia and his colleagues were trying to create during the period of transition in the 1970s. Rather, one sees the repetition of imperial policies in the form of financial and political control from New Delhi. One needs only to look at the number of times that national parties have changed chief ministers in Meghalaya, or the manner in in which unelected officials have overreached their mandate in places like Arunachal Pradesh, in order to understand our peculiar federalism. In addition, there is the ubiquitous go-in-alone disposition among the various states as they try and secure wealth by selling whatever collective natural resource they can see: mountains, rivers, minerals and forests.
Perhaps the only ray of hope lies in the resilience of the people of the region to forge a different kind of politics. Despite the shaky beginnings of my relationship with Mr. Saikia, I was able to understand the political considerations and vision behind the poetic origins of “Seven Sisters”. In his gracious gesture to reach out to me, I am reminded of countless other examples of solidarity that exists among the people of the region. For instance, every winter, Guwahati city comes alive with food festivals where people from all over the region display and taste each other’s cuisines. As they eat overpriced skewered pork and drink watered down rice beer, I am reminded that the idea of Seven Sisters – like the person who coined the name – is alive and lives without fuss among its people.
