Home & Conflict
Posted on December 16, 2017
The idyllic nature filled region of Garo Hills in India, masks the the brutal ethnic conflict that lurks in the area
The Northeastern region of India is characterized by immense ethnocultural diversity with around 475 ethnic groups and sub-groups speaking over 400 languages/dialects [1]. Resisting straightforward connections between people and place, the region has been the site of protracted ethnonational conflict, much of which takes the form of armed insurgencies [2]. The hegemony of ethnic identity politics in the region had its origin in British colonialism, which was subsequently reinforced by the postcolonizing Indian state through the formulation of ethnocentric policies [3]. Situated along the easternmost borders of the country, Northeast India represents a strategic location from the vantage point of national security. As a consequence, the Indian government relies on security-driven approaches to respond to ethnonational conflicts in the region, notably through extensive deployment of military and paramilitary forces. Both public and scholarly discourses adopt a crisis-based approach, focusing primarily on armed insurgency and counter-insurgency. Crisis-based politics view conflict situations as unstable and as a break from routine processes [4]. Such a perspective fails to account for the predicament of ordinary citizens who are caught at the crossroads between armed insurgencies, State military and paramilitary forces, and endemic ethnic violence that function as givens in people’s everyday lives. While there is a small body of work that resist national security lenses to foreground the perspectives of local communities, empirical questions of how diverse ethnic groups experience, witness, perpetuate, and resist ethnic conflict remain largely unexamined.
Massive street military presence is a norm in the region
This is where I grew up. In the context of the Garo Hills region, non-tribal minorities constitute the ethnic others. And in the ethnic other, was where I found my identity. Like intractable conflict in different parts of the world, conflict-supporting narratives play an important role in the reproducing conflict dynamics and resultant violence [5]. Of particular significance are master narratives or dominant discourses of conflict. These are cultural scripts that pervade various ecological levels and serve to maintain ethnic conflict . There operates a divisive master narrative that positions non-tribal communities in opposition to Garo tribals. Non-tribals are viewed as outsiders who usurp local resources and are viewed as the repository of all problems faced by local communities. This divisive narrative is implicated in armed insurgency with numerous separatist groups fighting for an ethnically exclusive homeland based on expulsion of those considered ethnic others. The master narrative also powerfully shapes how issues of belonging and exclusion are navigated in daily life. It is implicated in routine acts of harassment, humiliation, extortions, and bodily harm that mark the lives of non-tribal communities in Garo Hill; their ways of being in the world mediated by the imperative to evade harassment and physical harm. This everyday violence is inextricably intertwined in the social fabric and constitutes what Martín-Baró (1994) called “normal abnormality”. The constant threat of violence creates a repressive environment mediating against collective resistance.
The numerical majority of the Garos however does not inoculate them against experiences of marginality and exclusion. As one of the tribal communities living on the peripheries of the nation state, Garos constitute the racialized other in relation to mainland India. Although groups from Northeast India use the term tribal to assert their ethnic and political identity, the term is an exercise in coloniality with connotations of self-contained and primitive social formations [6]. Both popular and public policy discourses frame tribals from Northeast India as culturally and developmentally inferior, resulting in widespread negative stereotypes and discrimination against tribals groups from the region. Thus, both tribal and non-tribal youth struggle with experiences of marginality and exclusion. However each group view their victimhood through a zero-sum lens that renders intergroup differences irreconcilable. The critical role of polarizing narratives in the production and maintenance of ethnopolitical conflicts is well documented (e.g., Bekerman & Zembylas, 2009; Hammack, 2006, 2009; Ron & Maoz, 2013; Rouhana & Bar-Tal, 1998). The social reproduction of conflict involves indoctrination of particular narratives that exclude the ideological legitimacy of groups considered ethnic others. Interrogating such narratives is necessary to develop more nuanced and discursively complex understandings of ethnic violence. Ethnonational conflict in Garo Hills include conflicts over vital tangible resources as well as basic needs such as identity, belonging, and security. The reliance on counterinsurgency strategies fail to take into account the enmeshed systems of violence and inequalities that mediate the everyday lives of tribal and non-tribal communities in Garo Hills. Reframing violence as everyday phenomena is thus critical to intervening in contexts such as Garo Hills, where violence is no longer an outcome or aberration, but actively shapes the social landscape [7].
Traditional Garo harvest dance
After a semester of attempting to design a variety of interventions into such complex spaces, design, I feel, can play a key role in diffusing the tension at these sites of protracted ethnic conflict. Design as a tool, has the powerful ability to create narratives that can subvert pre-existing master narratives and open up possibilities for a better understanding of the other. I hadn’t thought about the complexity of ethnic conflict where I grew up in years. But in the wake of this semester, I find myself wondering how the new tools I’ve acquired might be useful in changing the balance of conflict there. While the maintenance of ethnic conflict often relies on the reproduction of divisive identity narratives, narratives can also become a resource for empowerment and social transformation. Through altering old stories and creating new ones, it is possible to transform dominant understandings and dismantle structural inequities underlying protracted ethnic conflict. Narrative approaches to intergroup reconciliation are predicated upon the transformation of polarized group narratives into more inclusive ones. Thus, redefining the cultural narratives of individuals and communities has important implications for reformulation of social identities and possibilities for conflict transformation. Narrative-based intergroup interventions utilize intergroup contact situations to construct more humanized conceptions of the other through exposure to multiple stories. The social and geopolitical realities of young people in Garo Hills compel them to cohabit social spaces, yet divisive ethnic identity politics render unequal the terms of occupying and participating across these spaces. It is not only the actual physical violence but also the ubiquitous threat of violence that forecloses any critical dialogue around ethnic conflict. This poses a challenge to interventions based on intergroup contact. Although there is overwhelming evidence that points to the effectiveness of the contact hypothesis in reducing prejudice , questions have been raised about its implications for interventions in contexts of acute asymmetrical conflict; as is the case in Garo Hills. Asymmetric nature of conflict is associated with significant intergroup anxiety, namely, feelings of discomfort and nervousness that arise in actual intergroup encounters or in anticipation of such encounters, thus limiting the impact of intergroup contact.
References
[1] Troubled Periphery: Crisis of India’s North East, Bhaumik, 2009
[2] The Long Way Home: The Vicissitudes of Belonging and Otherness in Northeast India, Dutta, 2015
[3] Durable Disorder: Understanding the Politics of Northeast India, Baruah, 2005
[4] War Is Not Just an Event: Reflections on the Significance of Everyday Violence, Cuomo, 1996
[5] Construction of the Israeli-Jewish conflict-supportive narrative and the struggle over its dominance, Oren, N., Nets-Zehngut, R., and Bar-Tal, 2015
[6] Contributions to Indian Sociology
[7] Dead Certainty: Ethnic violence in the era of globalization, Appadurai, 1998