ETHNICITY, STATE AND IDENTITY: FROM CONFRONTATION TO CO-EXISTENCE.

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India's nation-building project that sought to create a pan-Indian identity has gone awry. It would be wrong to bring unity of the state by asking the ethnic communities to think in terms of citizenship and forget their cultural root. This is indeed a difficult proposition. In multi-ethnic state like Assam and other North-eastern states of India, we have no way out but to develop a multicultural policy that recognizes the distinctiveness of each and every community at the same by giving sufficient choices to develop a sense of unity. Further splinterisation of these states can be prevented only by allowing each and every community to develop culturally, socially, politically and above all economically. Going beyond the contractors, politician and the elites, development process must reach the common people doesn’t matter whether he is a Bodo, immigrant Muslim or caste Hindu resident of the state.  Cultural diversity is here to stay—and to grow. States and the society need to find ways of forging national unity amid this diversity. The world, ever more interdependent economically, cannot function unless people respect diversity and build unity through common bonds of humanity.

Ethnic based identity is bound to be there in North-east (NE) India and they are likely to proliferate. Rather than looking at these issues as ‘problems’ approach should be to look at the structural issues and address them accordingly. Thus we must realize such ethnic ‘unrest’ is bound to be there especially when politics is based on ‘first past the post system’ and politics is essentially ‘who gets what when and how’. The identification of the political parties with the interest of the majorities by appealing to the categories such as ‘ethnic’, linguistic’-or a combination of some or all of them is problematic. Such a situation not only puts pressure on the less powerful communities to organize its separate identity, but also ‘deepens the hatred between the well defined communities or nationalities, particularly when the nation-building is organized and measured in terms of the will of the majority’ which exercises state power.

Ethnic upsurge is not always bad—it gives hitherto unrepresented groups a chance to be heard and listened to. A look at the present coalitional politics in Assam shows how it generates a feeling of competitiveness among the power holders for performance. The constituent of present ruling coalition –the Bodo leaders want to deliver—other wise people will also reject them –the way  they had done with the once powerful ABSU.

IDENTITY IS NOT STATIC: IT IS MULTI-LAYERED.
Here in NE India, we urge for respecting diversity and building more inclusive societies by adopting policies that explicitly recognize cultural differences. Individuals can and do have multiple identities that are complementary—ethnicity, language, religion and race as well as citizenship. Nor is identity a zero sum game. There is no inevitable need to choose between state unity and recognition of cultural differences.

A sense of identity and belonging to a group with shared values and other bonds of culture is important for individuals. But each individual can identify with many different groups. Individuals have identity of citizenship (for example, being Indian), gender (being a woman), race (being of Tibeto-Burman origin), language (being fluent in Bodo, Assamese and Hindi), politics (having left-wing views or regionalism) and religion (being Hindu or Muslim).Identity also has an element of choice: within these memberships individuals can choose what priority to give to one membership over another in different contexts. Sociologists tell us that people have boundaries of identity that separate “us” from “them”, but these boundaries shift and blur to incorporate broader groups of people.

“Nation building” has been a dominant objective of the 20th century, and most states have aimed to build culturally homogeneous states with singular identities. Sometimes they succeeded but at the cost of repression and persecution. If the history of the 20th century showed anything, it is that the attempt either to exterminate cultural groups or to wish them away elicits a stubborn resilience. By contrast, recognizing cultural identities has resolved never-ending tensions. For both practical and moral reasons, then, it is far better to accommodate cultural groups than to try to eliminate them or to pretend that they do not exist as some writers would make us believe. Countries do not have to choose between national unity and cultural diversity. Surveys show that the two can and often do coexist.