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Politics of Boundary
Maintenance: Inclusion-Exclusion Dynamics in North East India
Politics of Boundary Maintenance:
Inclusion-Exclusion Dynamics in North East India
The emergence of Hindu Right, Ethnic Dominance,
Territorial Ownership and other such examples of exclusionary
politics in contemporary India marks a shift from liberal-democratic
temperament to is has led to identitarian solipsism. This
has led the country to an increased claim and contestation
over primordial markers of identity in order to recover from
the perceived loss of self-identity and its distinct claims
of rights. The proposed conference shall ask the question,
does such politics of ‘construction’ of identities
within the bounds of narrowly defined markers such as ‘belonging
to a localized territory, culture and community’ constitute
inevitable fallout of the larger democratic politics of representation?
Probably one needs to interrogate the notion of ‘politics
of representation’ and evaluate its impact on markers
of identity within the larger framework of a democratic polity.
Politics of representation in terms of ethno nationalism,
religious fundamentalism, majoritarianism on the one hand
and minority-ism on the other poses an irresolvable dilemma
before any conceptualization of democratic politics. The dilemma
leads us to a conceptual maze of either privileging specific
rights over the universality of right or by essential zing
certain categories of identity as an inevitable outcome of
history. How does one use a space clearing device to identify
liberating moments of structuring identities that produce
a dialogic polysemy within and beyond our conceptual frames?
This dilemma is carried over in the inherent
fuzziness of categories such as borders and boundaries. Such
fuzzy markers applied in concepts of identity, rights and
citizenship produces an immense difficulty in settling for
an idea of ‘good’ and ‘right’. One
can call it a conflict between phronetic markers
of identity and normative markers of identity. As such fuzzy
markers are a strange output of modernity, it is always possible
to shift such fuzzy markers by their necessary overlaps in
out self-definitions and hence it is a task of critical theory
to examine the possibility of ‘boundary crossing’.
The conference can examine the narratives of such boundary
crossings, attempts to transcend borders and arrive at a more
humanely fascinating tryst with our destinies at the national
and international levels.
Such an interrogation obviously has to take
into account theories of ‘boundary maintenance’
for cultural/religious and other such reasons. Such reasons
separate communities from each other on the basis of existing
differences and practices. For example, family-based, function-based,
ethnicity or religion based groups often attempt to affirm
a distinct self-identity in the realm of governance, polity
and politics. Such an assertion of identity stands on a sense
of difference to Others, who are either living in proximity
or at a distance. The politics of boundary maintenance can
be classified into two kinds: one that draws a line
between the self and the proximate other and the other that
draws a line between the self and the dominant other located
at a relative distance. The conference can take up cases of
such boundary maintenance in proximity and in distance in
order to understand (a) how such a practice is determined
and affected by situation of a group and (b) how
the nature of contestation that affects its self-construction
and affirmation of identity. The question that can be posed
here is, does identity politics construct a necessary
other over and against whose background its draws up a discourse
to articulate itself? Looked from a theoretical vantage
such as Laclau and Mouffe’s (2000) Political Identities
requires us to locate a process of sublimating lived
experiences in an ‘identifiable’ discourse of
difference. This calls for locating boundaries within the
discourse/politics of difference articulated by identities
that participate in identity politics. Looked from the perspective
of identity politics, all forms of political articulation
and expression can be generalized as a discursive production
of boundaries, but such a perspective ignores the liberal
alternatives of multi-ethnicity, pluralism and other such
secular notions of citizenship. What needs to be examined
here is, how non-ascriptive categories such as citizenship,
rights, ‘community’ in a liberal-communitarian
sense and ‘class’ in a socialist sense give
rise to a different politics of identification with a necessary
Other? How does a politics of boundary maintenance speak
to and dialogue with the other? What is the ideological, cultural
and political economy content of the specturm of positions
on this mode of othering, as drawn by different shades
of political opinions in India? Why our national politics
attempts to sublimate politics of difference in an un-nuanced
subjective notion of integration that annuls the call of identity?
Don’t political subjectivities matter in construction
of legal, constitutional boundaries that delimit the sovereign
space of the nation? Can politics of accommodation,
inclusion and coalition building sufficiently contain
the separatists, isolationist and extremist politics embedded
in the construction of boundary? Can there be a contextually
defined alternative notion of boundary that allows trespassing?
Contextualization of these questions in India
would require an understanding of the multiple modes of political
identities and their struggles for recognition and redistribution.
Based on a larger notion of solidarity, some of these identities
assume the shape of construction based on received doctrines
and ideas from both local and trans-national contexts. The
supposed construction of a Jihadi identity or Pan-Hindutva
solidarity is an example of a homogenizing inclusion and an
imagined nationality that operates at the local as well as
in the trans-national space. Contrastingly, there are locality
based, regionalized, ethnic and community based solidarities
driven by a confessional politics that act on a contentious
strategy of othering. The conference shall explore how such
contentious political articulations/ solidarities draw lines
of persecution and reconciliation in Indian context. Examples
of casteist politics, Dalit assertions, tribalism, ethnic
recalcitrance and other such solidarity based political tendencies
can be examined and theorized taking into account a variety
of locations across India.
Taking the specific context of India’s
Northeast, homeland claims and claims for affirmative action
based on territorial, tribal, linguistic and religious identities
need to address the strategies of maintaining explicit and
implicit boundaries between communities-linguistic, ethnic
and tribal. Many a time distinct markers of a bounded
identity conflate distinctive ascriptions in order to strengthen
claims to authenticity and territoriality. Such conflation-ary
politics of identity construction aims at achieving grater
share of power and resources. So, it defines rights and entitlements
differently by arbitrarily changing the criterion of distributive
justice and establishing niches over land, employment and
economy. This throws up a larger question of fixing the criterion
of a just and fair distribution of resources and power between
different competing groups and settling for their rights.
This leads us to critique the basis of democratically determined
rights and entitlements, which is based on equity and equal
access to institutions. The conference shall explore the possibility
of finding out alternative bases for democratic rights and
entitlements that can be justified on the basis of accepted
Constitutional values. Further the conference can explore
the possibility of inter-cultural, Inter-religious and Inter-Community
dialogues that can re-establish an acceptable criterion of
justice with an inclusive and ‘fair to all’ objectives.
The moot question before politics of boundary
maintenance is , does it generate power to be able to construct
a discursive formation, or it gives rise to a power-struggle
between formations. The project of maintenance of boundary
arises from an essential sense of being existentially insecure
and this leads to a struggle of identification, of obtaining
a full/complete/positive/essential identity. It is an impossible
project, but nevertheless a project that political discourses
must undertake. How political discourse accomplishes it in
a so called globalized reality needs to be mapped out. This
is exactly what privileges the antagonistic relationship in
theories of boundary maintenance, because it constructs the
antagonistic relationship as the moment of individuation,
as constitutive of the discursive formation. The conference
can investigate how this moment of individuation can be transcended
in a democratic discourse of inclusion and transcendence.
It can ask the question, does democratic politics wither
away the processes of boundary making or it strengthens such
a process?
Keeping this perspective in mind the Seminar can deal
with the following issues:
- Theories and Critiques of Boundary Maintenance- Liberal,
Marxist, Post-Modernists etc.
- Politics of Representation and its impact on Boundary
Maintenance
- Dialectic of Self and Other- maintenance of boundaries
between insider and outsider, native and immigrant etc.
- Right claims and Counter-claims
- Social Movements, Class Struggles and Political and
Cultural Boundaries
- Ethnic, Cultural, Linguistic and Religious Boundaries
and their Limits in a Democratic Polity
- Policy Imperative for a Governance based on Constitutional
Rights vis-à-vis Boundaries
- Alternative Policy Formulations for Normalizing Bounded
Identities
- Identity Clashes and Ways of Reconciliation.
- Identity oriented Struggles and their articulations
of rights in Northeast India and Kashmir
- Exploring Alternative Ontologies of Boundary- Narratives
of Displacement, Dispossession and Empowerment
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