Nation-building or state-making? India's North-East Frontier and the ambiguities of Nehruvian developmentalism, 1950–1959

Abstract

Few Indian regions evoke political, economic, and cultural marginalisation as much as North-East India. Solutions to its political instability often assume that, provided the vicious circle of under-development and violence can be broken, the region will eventually build a stable relationship with the Indian nation-state. This understanding in turns rests on a long intellectual genealogy that associates development with the state and the nation. By examining development schemes in the North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA, today's Arunachal Pradesh) in the 1950–1960s, a hitherto scarcely administered region where these were the primary mode of state-building, this article cautions against the tendency to see the Indian state's developmental ambitions as an instrument of nation-building. Instead it argues that, in North-East India at least, state-making and nation-building have not historically gone together, and that developmentalism played an important part in this rupture. On the ground, tribal development did little for NEFA's integration into the Indian nation. In fact, state-making processes resulted in the disintegration of the links that had tied NEFA with its regional hinterland in India. In the process, some of the seeds of tensions plaguing today's North-East India were planted.