By Jayant Muralidharan
The recent exodus of 35,000 Northeastern citizens from Bangalore alone, besides other cities like Pune, Hyderabad and Mumbai between August 15 and 19 highlights the existence of major fault lines in our national identity. Evidently it proves that national identity may be an ephemeral concept, but an ethnic identity is a reality.
This ethnic identity flows from the Mongoloid features of the Northeastern people, which distinguishes them physically from “mainland” Indians. Clearly the Northeasterners were not socially and culturally integrated with the mainland inhabitants. Does such an exodus of a people with a collective identity amount to a form of “ethnic cleansing”?
The Northeastern community in other cities largely comprises three categories of people: economic migrants, students pursuing higher studies and white collar workers and a handful of high-ranking bureaucrats. The economic migrants are in low-end jobs like security guards, restaurant waiters, hospitality industry, beauticians, and shop and mall assistants. Otherwise a large chunk of Northeasterners in the IT, IT-enabled services, BPOs and multinational companies did not really panic and flee. The difference between them and the others — i.e. the lesser-educated lot of Northeasterners who fled the cities — was their more rational wait-and-watch approach to the crisis.
Migrants in any metropolis comprise diverse communities. In the case of the techno-polis of Bangalore there are three broad categories of migrants — namely northerners and southerners, besides expatriates or foreigners. The first wave of the Northerners/migrants, pre-dominantly Punjabis, arrived post-Partition in 1947 from what is now Pakistan. The subsequent migrants came from all over the country owing to their Central government jobs in public sector undertakings, armed forces, defence science organisations, and other state-owned institutions. Apart from these migrants, these cities also boast of a sizeable Marwari community that came here at different points in time. The southerners tend to integrate more easily than their northern counterparts owing to common cultural orientation like festivals and cuisines.
This partially explains the cosmopolitan composition of these metropolises, where migrants over multiple generations from other states comprise 60-70 per cent of the population.
Given the frequent migration of people from states like UP, Bihar, Odisha, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh, besides the Northeastern region to these cities, the issue assumes importance. To what extent are these migrants able to adapt and integrate culturally to the state? Foremost, does their ability to speak the local language enhance their acceptability? But in the case of Northeastern people residing in these cities, their efforts to merge culturally are neutralised owing to their physical features. Another community that stands out in these cities are the Sikhs.
But what binds us and makes us people of one nation despite myriad similarities and dissimilarities? Historian Ramachandra Guha says in his book India after Gandhi that India was never meant to be a country in the present socio-political form and cynics doubted its ability to remain together. He points out that the binding factors that keep us together are: Cricket, Bollywood and English language.
The fact, in particular that Bangalore is not only the IT capital, but also the aeronautical, biotech, science research, defence science research, machine tools and public sector capital, makes it an engine of economic growth. Therefore the southern city of Bangalore, now transformed into a techno-polis, generates enormous employment opportunities and people. This attracts migrants from within and outside the country too.
As part of the national building exercise in post-colonial countries it becomes imperative to emphasise national over ethnic identity.
In this context, Prof. Jakes Townsend of the University of Southern California observes that a well-defined national identity strengthens the fabric of a society and reinforces the notion that the true power of country is fundamentally linked to the strength of its citizens’ belief in the metaphoric constructs that give order to their collective national identity. Our national identities remind us of who we are, and who we aspire to be. INAV