By - Imkong Walling
During the Cold War, the geopolitical global landscape was divided into two ideological power blocs. One side was led by what was said to be a capitalist United States of America (USA) and the other was led by a professedly communist Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), now defunct. They were supposedly the first and the second world.
Both sides hated and demonised each other, and were nuclear-armed. Each bloc considered itself and its beliefs the centre of the universe.
Riding on their genocidal weapons capabilities, they lived by brinkmanship, their ideological rhetoric intermittently becoming an existential threat to the rest of earthlings living in a purportedly non-aligned third world.
But then cracks appeared in the Soviet bloc. It fell apart, giving way to a new global order, a world which seemed to project the beginning of an era of unbridled international cooperation under the patronage of one superpower.
Globalisation, free market, they called it, catchphrases that became memes before memes trended. Europe minus the post-Soviet Russian sphere of influence became the poster child of unrestricted, visaless travel. It seemed to trend, the world apparently becoming a global village, interwoven and interdependent like never before.
Contemporaneously, new power centres emerged. And, alongwith it popped up a renewed sense of exclusivist national interests, challenging the notion of international cooperation.
What are today termed to be neo-nationalist ideals spread, characterised in the surge in protectionist and anti-immigrant posturing by political leaders in recent years.
Similar nativist sentiments have prevailed at sub-national levels, India in particular. In a union where language and ethnicity have determined the drawing of state and district lines, certain states playing the son-of-the-soil tune appeared quite inevitable.
Out in the mainland, Mumbai, Maharashtra has seen it. In the northeast, almost all the states have seen and are experiencing it. A notion of cultural uniqueness believed to have been cultivated over centuries, combined with modern day economic interests — fear of usurpation of feeding grounds vis-à-vis jobs, business, land — stoking the rush of such sentiments.
In Nagaland, nativist underpinnings, fueled by a perceived fear of being out-populated and erasing of identity through sheer numbers, is evident in the current renewed push for the Inner Line travel regime for Indian citizens not native to Nagaland state.
A British colonial legacy, the ILP owes its origin to the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation (BEFR), 1873. It served British geopolitical interests in the eastern frontier of the subcontinent, and not of the natives as some would have been wont to believe.
Post independence, it was continued by the Government of India in the northeast, essentially to protect the indigenous communities.
The ILP issue hits the public consciousness sporadically, giving way to a chorus of identity rhetoric and demand for stronger enforcement.
While the apprehension of the indigenous populace surrounding identity seems well founded, the process should not come at the cost of alienation, and leaving a legacy of rancour.
Every individual, every community feels unique, but human dynamics and the need for cooperation demands an accommodative spirit ensuring room for co-existence.
The writer is a Principal Correspondent at The Morung Express. Comments can be sent to imkongwalls@gmail.com
