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| Tuesday, 23 November 2004 |
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Strong fillip to center-periphery unity by Lynn Ockersz Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit to a number of India's insurgency-hit North-Eastern states is of more than just symbolic significance. He carries pledges of substantial development assistance from the Indian centre to these states which have been traditionally viewed as the country's 'periphery'.
Singh's visits to Manipur and Assam come close on the heels of a visit by him to conflict-torn Jammu and Kashmir, where he reportedly offered 5.3 billion dollars as development assistance to the State and announced the end of a ban on recruitment of personnel from the State to government service. Underscoring the importance of this initiative, an official was quoted as saying that: "In Kashmir, the absence of infrastructure prompted the Prime Minister to focus on investments in the power, transport, highways and tourism sectors but the Northeast's worst curse is unemployment." There is an object lesson here for those States in the South Asian region - Sri Lanka in particular - which are reeling under periphery centred insurgencies, fuelled largely by socio-economic grievances experienced by disaffected groups, such as ethnic minorities. It could be argued that the Lankan State has never lost sight of the North-East of the country, through some 25 years of war and bloodshed, on account of successive Lankan governments' continued commitment to minimum welfare measures for the people of the North-East. It was felt in some Southern circles sometime back, that the Sri Lankan State was the only such entity in the world which helped fuel armed resistance to itself because the belief was that most of the welfare assistance which was being siphoned to the North-East public was ending up in LTTE hands. Be that as it may, except on a couple of occasions - and that too after the current ceasefire agreement came into force - no prominent Sri Lankan State leader has visited the North-East of the island. In contrast, the Indian Premier has not only personally visited India's separatist insurgency-hit States but in no uncertain terms pledged the Indian central government's continued succour and assistance for the development of these States. What could have a more powerful uniting effect than these timely measures by the Indian centre to spur development in this conflict-infested region of the Indian Union? In what better manner could a central government manifest its care and concern for a secession-inclined periphery than for the head of the central government to show-up personally in the affected region? This amounts to a central government 'walking its talk' about national unity. Rather than merely pay lip-service to a continued commitment to equity and concern for discontented regions of his country attempting to break away from the Indian Union, the Indian Premier has chosen to demonstrate this concern in no unmistakable, concrete terms by personally visiting these regions and giving clear proof of the Indian centre's aim of developing them. Needless to say, statesman like gestures such as these would take the wind out of the sails of insurgencies and keep the Indian Union together. Separatist insurgency-hit states in South Asia would need to take a leaf from India if they are to strengthen national unity within their own States and foster unbreakable centre-region solidarity. |
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