Reality on the Indo–Myanmar border

Contemporary South Asia, 2019

The implementation of the Look East Policy (LEP) ─ now the Act East Policy ─ in the 1990s signaled a marked shift in India's economic policy aimed at transforming its northeastern region from a peripheral frontier to an economic corridor. The regional focus of the policy commonly appears in references to the northeast region as a whole and the policy suggestions are centered on ending the region's isolation and underdevelopment. This paper looks at how the inhabitants of a borderland village on the Mizoram-Myanmar border maneuvered themselves in response to the economic drive for the border opening intertwined with the extension of state rule and control. The paper shows how the agenda of the state and the local communities, rather than being in opposition, often converged with local community interests when it came to enhancing trade and liberalizing movement. These factors further served to re-shape ways of identification and belonging as well as everyday trade, commercial transactions, and nationhood. Against this backdrop, the paper engages with everyday borderland lives to examine how change through the policy was mediated upon the interface of competing state and nonstate agents as well as local communities. draws our attention to how borderland communities contest state rule and assert the idea of belonging, and demonstrates how central state initiatives such as the AEP, whether intendedly or unintendedly, provide opportunities to local communities to advance claims for space, belonging, and territory. In the case of the northeastern borderland, numerous other studies have also moved away from what Baud and van Schendel (1997) have termed as the 'state-centered approaches' that view borders as fixed and static lines. The result is a shift of attention to the everyday realities of the region, the nature of relationships (Saikia and Baishya 2017) and fluid attachments (Vandenhelsken and Karlsson 2016). All of these have further challenged the notion that the region is 'remote' and 'isolated' (Pachuau and van Schendel 2016). India's northeast also falls within what is now widely referred to as 'Zomia' 3 (van Schendel 2002 ); this further offers a wider regional and analytical frame to study the region beyond national borders.

Mizo Studies , 2024

Borders, regarded as the indisputable demarcation between nation-states, have emerged as faulty over the years. When viewed from the standpoint of the ‘transborder people,’ upon whom the borders were imposed through the hegemony of colonial and post-colonial states, the violence is unmissable. The Indo-Myanmar borderlands embody a kind of cartographic violence and absurdity, with implications for the identity, culture, worldview, emotional bonds, and livelihood of the people there.

Journal of Borderlands Studies , 2022

Border studies in general and the historiography of nation-making process in South Asia with its exclusive focus on Partition Studies have overlooked indigenous people voice and experience. This also implies that certain border regions received far more emphasis whereas certain regions are accorded a marginal status. In this paper, we situate indigenous people's experience of border-making in Indo-Myanmar borderlands. In doing so, we note that borderlands are not homogenous spaces, with the experience and functions of the border being interpreted differently by various social actors. Taking indigenous Mizos of the Indo-Myanmar borderland as a case study, the paper examines how indigenous communities' understanding of their history, memory, place, politics, and nationhood are entangled with the border. Using a multiperspectival study of borders, we take an approach that considers the Indo-Myanmar border "beyond the line" by highlighting the border's dynamism and exploring alternative social and political imaginaries that inform lives in the borderland.

India Quarterly: A Journal of International Affairs, 2011

The identity of the people in the Indo-Myanmar border in Northeast India is that they belong to the Indo-Mongoloid racial stock and speak languages belonging to the Tibeto-Burman group. Most of these groups trace their origin to some part of Southeast Asia. The historical routes both constrain and empower movements across borders and cultures. But traffic across borders has been controlled by the articulation of homelands or safe spaces assigned to a group of a particular identity. Inspite of political division, the ethnically and culturally similar people inhabiting both sides of the international border have maintained constant cross-border movements. It is a shared landscape divided politically. This people with lives on both sides of the international border often find themselves victimised for crimes against the state. For this people besides the territorial road, there is also an extraterritorial road to the other side of the political border. This is a reality which is the basis of their identity. This article proposes a framework for international trade between 'local border points' in the Indo-Myanmar border, where only the residents in immediately neighbouring provinces/states can cross borders and trade freely. It is a hope that this will negotiate the conversion of a common shared space to a transnational space in this globalised world.

Heslop, Luke, and Galen Murton (eds), Highways and Hierarchies: Ethnographies of Mobility from the Himalaya to the Indian Ocean. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021

Using the case of India's mega-infrastructure build-up, the Kaladan Multimodal Transport Project (KMMTP) in the 'remote' and ethnically contentious borderlands between India and Myanmar, this chapter takes an ethnographic approach to understand the meaning of spectacular connectivity and infrastructure on remote borderlands. Based on months of fieldwork, the chapter explores the voices, visions, spatial and ethnic worlds of border residents who subsequently have to position themselves and their remoteness to absorb the Indian state's spectacular new connective infrastructure. The chapter narratively traverses along this newly constructed road, to the very edge of a hitherto informal border with Myanmar. The chapter introduces the analytic of the 'spectacle' to demonstrate how powerful states and ethnic communities rely on grand infrastructural spectacles (in this case, a cross-border project) often at the expense, erasure, and displacement of those at the edge of borderlands, who have the least stake in shaping such spectacular infrastructures.

SAGE Research Methods Cases. , 2019

This research project focuses on the resurgence of Kuki-Chin ethnic nationalism in the Indo-Myanmar borderlands. The tribe known as Kuki in Manipur is known as Chin in Myanmar—they live on both sides of the Indo-Myanmar border. Their land was annexed by the British in the 19th century and, during decolonization, divided between the new countries of India and Myanmar. The Kukis have a history of anticolonial resistance, and they have launched postcolonial ethnic nationalist movements to claim an autonomous state. In 2009, the Indian and Myanmar governments started investing in a hydropower project named Tamanthi in the borderland districts of Myanmar. There were protests against that project, because construction would have not only caused large-scale displacement but also led to the erasure of the sacred geography of the Kuki-Chin, and these protests led to the cancelation of the project. The specific research case of the movement against Tamanthi in Myanmar discussed here demonstrates a context in which the Kuki-Chin identity was politicized and forged, which not only stalled the project but led to the resurgence of ethno-nationalist demands on both sides of the border. Through this case study, we analyze the dilemmas, ambivalence, and processes of doing research in borderland communities, and demonstrate that these communities cannot be studied through the standard methodologically nationalist and realist paradigm, that is, a cross-country comparison of cases. To appreciate how and why ethno-nationalism and secessionism emerges whenever there is a state intervention for “development,” we need an “ethno-historical,” constructivist, and “emic” understanding of the making of these borderland communities and the liminal spaces they inhabit.

Journal of Borderlands Studies, 2020

The paper presents the perspective of "transborder peoples" who constitute the minority in the states in which they live but have "connected history." It probes how indigenous notions of space, territory, and identity had been displaced, reconfigured and fragmented by colonial map-making, territoriality, and classifications in the Indo-Burma borderlands, a less known "peripheral" area which has for far too long been only seen from the perspective of the colonial and postcolonial states. The paper examines to what extent are the Indo-Burma borderlands a space where one can see decay and revival of relationships among the transborder people. Moving beyond state-centric conceptions of the border as "fixed lines," the paper gives emphasis on the "duality" or "paradoxical character" of the borderlands. It argues that while colonial and postcolonial borders divided indigenous communities thereby creating "difference" or "otherness," it also "unifies" and facilitates revival of relationships among the "transborder peoples" through dialogue, interaction and exchange across the border. It is a case study of the Zo people of the Indo-Burma borderlands. (an extract of the Chorus) Vangkhua lai ah melma Burma-te ci-in, henkol tang ing Laizomte vangkhua lai ah; Lai ah na sa'ng henkol sut ding om lo guallai ah nuihciam hong lel lo aw Pianpih na laizom hi'ng ee.

International Journal of Asian Studies, 2018

Routledge eBooks, 2023