A Vision of our ancestors, that has brought us this far. The people vision together, with changing times the Vision adapts, resist, modify, but it remains with the people. It leads them to future but is never devoid of the past but progresses from them. They are sacred and life in itself, and sustains through the forces that impinges on to them. It is collective and the people moves with it.

But in our time, our vision is being written and directed, not by the people themselves but people from outside, those powerful forces that have been haunting us all these while. It is for all of us to ask, should we leave our future to be envisioned to a few authors who are not even known to us. Has the life force that dwelt within us disappeared beyond recall?

The first thing that will strike any reader of this Vision 2020 document is the list of authorial figures looming (and rather lurking) large all over. These are 6 authors with an additional 6 research associates. Out of 6 authors only one seem to be from Assam, while the rest from outside the region.

All the 6 research associates are too from outside the region. This is an insult, and is clearly reflected in the introduction where they mentioned that the region (and hence its people) are backward and hence cannot think or vision for themselves. This is an insult to our ancestors, our traditional institutions, our revolutionaries, our academics and the people as a whole.

NEC and MDONER needs to explain to the people of NE why our Vision has been handed to a few people from outside the region. A Vision - if at all, needs to be laid down in writing - has to be written and agreed by all communities inhabiting the region. Few consultants or authors have no right whatsoever to write a Vision for the peoples of North East.

Since the British and then with India, the peoples of NE have suffered. Our ‘borders’ were nationalized, our decades of relation with our own people now across the border are de-linked, the cultural and economic ties were cut off. Our political institutions were not even respected.

What kind of vision are we now supposed to adopt? The Vision document never ever mentions what has been destroyed and the process of its destruction? Never ever makes an effort to truly talk about the aspirations, the struggles, sacrifices and the visions that accompany them.

Not only that document is also historically wrong in saying that it was India’s partition, it is also not historically or politically correct to fully blame the partition as the reason for the situation in North East. While traditional trade routes might have been closed with Bangladesh there are more borders with Tibet, Bhutan and Burma where close linkages were also closed that suffocates the NE.

In other words, partition was not the prime cause of what killed NE but more primarily the annexation of NE that has resulted in suffocating the region. It is important for a document of such importance to acknowledge what actually happened and is happening or else this document has no value whatsoever.

In the preface, it is mentioned that the NE is surrounded by an ‘intimidating and unsympathetic environment’. We take this as a problematic and insensitive statement. Is it not possible to reverse the gaze of the dominant and ask whether Delhi or Punjab is surrounded by the same kind of environment?

And does it also mean that India is a great benevolent country and that the rest are ‘intimidating and unsympathetic environment’. And if they are ‘intimidating and unsympathetic environment’ to India, the question is why did it so happen? Has it got nothing to do with the way India behaves with its own “people” and neighbors in the region?

The document keeps harping on the region as ‘backward’. Backward to whom and what is never mentioned? What is the yardstick of Backwardness? And who defines it?

This has been the key argument from the past used to justify building roads and other infrastructure and bring private investments, and here too the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, is still stuck in this very logic which has no basis whatsoever. It seem that this Institute lacks the Indigenous Peoples visions that is now well recognized as capable of not only conversing and protecting the forest, the water and the land, but even revitalizing and regenerating.

The document is clear on what it intends to do. Push it down through our throat in the names of so called consultations and drown our region under ‘development’ defined in their terms. The time is ripe to tell them – enough, you cannot do this anymore, hands off our land.

Signed/-
Aram Pamei
Co-Chair - CCDD
Website: www.ccddne.net