By Rajesh Dev
It is not just in Meghalaya, but an argument being made globally, that cultural rights and privileges of indigenous communities must be protected and enshrined in legal instruments. It is argumentation over the appropriate instruments through which such culture preserving privileges could be attained that today has resulted in a Manichaean oppositional confrontation between the government and members of civil society groups in the state. If the government believes that the Inner Line Permit (ILP) is not a reliable instrument for shielding such privileges in a state like Meghalaya; civil society groups insist ILP is “the” most trustworthy instrument through which culture-preserving rights and privileges should be legally entrenched.
Institutions have been fundamental to regulating human behavior and action, and prima facie, the stress on an institutional setting for curbing “illegal migration” that imperils the rights and privileges of an indigenous community is a justified moral claim. However, the overidealised prominence accorded to ILP as a culture-preserving legal instrument may need more committed and fair unpacking given that there are already well entrenched constitutional structures meant to perform similar functions. The intense deliberations undertaken in these columns, excluding some marvelous commentaries, have preferred not to address the issue unswervingly. Most of these commentaries have not proffered justifications that adequately validate the “social appropriateness” or even the regulatory scope of the ILP as a framework categorically distinct from the existing institutions and practices.
This consideration is vital not just because the state, unlike other states that operate within this framework, functions as a passageway for many states of the region and the implementation of the ILP would have legal ramifications for the inter-state movement of peoples and goods. But more importantly because Meghalaya is already burdened by an overabundance of culture-preserving institutions, norms, rules and practices. If the implementation of the ILP is meant to be more than simply a stopple to seal off leakages and inadequacies of the existing institutions and practices, clarifying its worthier culture-preserving properties is a social and legal imperative. While its colonial heritage cannot be an agreeable justification for the non-implementation of the ILP framework it is also not advisable to naturalize its value as a culture-preserving instrument without adequately historicizing the motives that led to the “inner lining” of only specific segments of this frontier by the colonial powers.
Interestingly, some commentators have made meaningful suggestions that the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation of 1873 does contain suitable provisos that enable “contemporary governments to initiate changes within the regulation to suit contemporary needs”. If this is an acceptable caveat, then what prevents us from accepting comparable rationalizations that calls for the remodeling of existing institutions and practices? Some of these have already been proposed by many authors in these columns. Reflection on such proposals is crucial because existing institutions and practices have an established lineage that would assist in making the transition towards a more effective culture-preserving arrangement seamless and systematic. Moreover, a measured deliberation on this aspect would help us avoid the obscurity generated by institutional overload and an ever-more bureaucratization of the culture-preserving organizational field in the state.
Otherwise, the inclusion of a new ILP framework to a plethora of existing institutions and practices would only serve in aggravating the “fragmented, uncoordinated and inefficient sprawl” that is glowingly described as “self-governance” in Meghalaya. We need to analyze if implementing the ILP framework in this dense network of existing arrangements would stimulate institutional vigor and enhance the capacity of institutions to effectively implement already mandated legal obligations for culture preservation and collective rights of indigenous communities? Some thinkers have also shown us that the interactions between individuals and institutions are founded upon “practical reason” that helps individuals work and rework existing institutional templates to develop a specific course of action. Therefore, it would be necessary to consider what makes the ILP framework institutionally more secure that would prevent individuals from seeking a course of action that is not purposive or influenced by their self-interested desire to maximize material well-being?
The proliferation of institutions, structures, norms, networks and practices with overlapping legal and extra-legal authority in Meghalaya raises far more serious concerns for culture-preservation and collective rights of indigenous communities than what a spontaneously implemented ILP framework would be perhaps equipped to address. If the ILP framework is not able to address the existing institutional excess and uncoordinated rule-making activity that flows from existing institutions and practices, it will only prove counterproductive and generate inconsistent outcomes for the state and its peoples.
Besides these institutional concerns, what are more discomforting and ironical in this confrontation are the growing ethnicization of the argument and the integral and normalized use of violence for obtaining an “institutional mechanism” to culture preservation. Violence and ethnic schism have come to once again constitute the routinized practice of politics in the state. The insistent projection of fears and anxieties on ethnic out groups is generating a pathological revulsion that emasculates civic engagement and everyday transactions honorably rebuilt in the last few years of social peace. Perhaps, in this vitiated ambience, I evoke a hollow hope when I suggest that securing culture-preserving rights and privileges need not necessarily be founded on a demonized notion of ethnic others.
(The author teaches Political Science at the University of Delhi).