[Assam] Forcing unilateral choice-The Sentinel Editorial

[uttam borthakur]

Santanu,

Great to hear from you in this forum. I am very impressed the way you have put your analysis across.Thanks.
 
Uttam Kumar Borthakur




________________________________
From: "Roy, Santanu" <sroy at mail.smu.edu>
To: "assam at assamnet.org" <assam at assamnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, 22 March, 2009 5:48:54 PM
Subject: Re: [Assam] Forcing unilateral choice-The Sentinel Editorial

The editorial fails to inform us how "autonomy" (or more correctly, greater devolution of political and economic power from the Indian centre to the state of Assam) is going to be detrimental to the interests of the people of Assam.



Why would they be worse off? And if they are not worse off, why would they be opposed to it?

To be fair, there are hints of the thinking behind it in the editorial piece.



It consists of two arguments:

(a) The folks spearheading the demand for autonomy are proven monsters that will use the post-autonomy political environment to expand their political and economic clout (possibly extra-legal) to expropriate the honest commoners and entrepreneurs.



(b) People of Assam are so corrupt and incompetent that any greater "share of the decision making cake" devolved to the state will be preyed on and wasted.

There may be other arguments - but I could not see them in the piece.

First, consider (a).
The extra-legal clout exercised by any group, the amount of money it can extract by force, the way they can influence decisions - are they really dependent on whether the initial resource allocation and other government decisions are made in Delhi or Dispur? Is there any evidence, for example, that nefarious groups have been more effective in gathering monies from activities in Assam that pertain to the "state list" and less intensively in activities that pertain to the "central list" i.e., funded and approved by the central government and officials of the central government? If there is any such evidence that central agencies and centrally funded projoects have been better at fending off corrupt monsters, we would really like to know.

More importantly, even if this is the case, isn't there a self-correcting process here? Why would the people of Assam not eventually vote out a government that feeds such extra-legal clout by any group?



The answer is probably related to (b).



There is something intrinsically inferior about the public morale of the citizens of the state. Therefore, the greater the share of economic decisions and political power kept safely vested in the centre, the better it would be for the people of the state. Just repeat this sentence for a moment in your mind and see if you find it convincing. At least you will know that this was the famous argument for British rule in India and all colonial rule by white people elsewhere. The natives are inferior.



And nobody, not even someone compulsively argumentative as I, can argue against such an article of faith.



Regards,



Santanu.







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From: assam-bounces at assamnet.org [assam-bounces at assamnet.org] On Behalf Of assam-request at assamnet.org [assam-request at assamnet.org]
Sent: Sunday, March 22, 2009 1:30 AM
To: assam at assamnet.org
Subject: assam Digest, Vol 44, Issue 34

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