Welcome to the Northeast, a part of the country you and I call our own, yet a region remote from our consciousness. This remoteness leads to inattention or to a strange kind of attention. We like to handle remote objects with shorthand descriptions. Hence the usual stereotypes of politics in the Northeast: ethnic politics of various tribes, anti-national insurgencies, terrorism, corruption and instability. Or the romantic stereotypes of innocent tribals, victims of the nation-state and development.

Perhaps the starting point of making sense of politics in the Northeast is to recognise its internal diversity. Just as you cannot lump together Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh to produce an animal called South Indian politics, you cannot put together Meghalaya, Tripura and Nagaland and talk meaningfully about Northeastern politics.

Nagaland represents one extreme of the spectrum, where over-ground electoral politics plays second fiddle to its underground counterpart. Routine issues of governance take a back seat here to the larger question of peace in a state where a significant proportion of the Naga population has neither reconciled to being Indian nor to the boundaries of Nagaland within the Indian Union.

Elections are no longer as much of a farce as they used to be in Nagaland, especially after the defeat of the Congress in the assembly elections in 2003 and the formation of a non-Congress government as a result of a marriage of convenience between a regional party, the NPF, and the BJP. The NPF, a moderate Naga nationalist formation, is a serious contender again, with a partial understanding and many ‘friendly contests’ with the BJP, hoping to garner sympathy from the dismissal of its government recently. The Congress is hoping to come back to power by combining genuine popular support with the usual Congress-style tricks. This election is not a referendum on the peace process, but a fair election would help convince younger Nagas that democratic politics is worth a try.

Meghalaya, a state that has never experienced any serious insurgency movement, represents the other end of the spectrum of political integration. If anything, the state is over-integrated into the routine ills of electoral politics in any small state: fragmented verdicts, horse-trading, corruption and instability have marked the state since its formation in 1972. Except the very first election, no party has won a majority of seats in the assembly. The Congress has usually emerged the largest party and has leveraged its Delhi connections to form usually unstable governments. The state’s once-powerful regional parties have fragmented in the last decade.

This time the Congress, that ran a minority government for the last five years with the help of smaller regional parties, is again the main contender. Up against it are its own regional allies like the UDP and MDP, accusing their partner of running a ‘corrupt government’! A more spirited challenge comes from the Congress’ national ally, the NCP – for all practical purposes a regional political outfit controlled by P.A. Sangma and now his two sons.

No one talks about political instability in Tripura, where the Left Front has ruled since 1977 with just one exception of a disastrous Congress-led government during 1988-93. The deep divide in this state that shares porous boundaries with Bangladesh on three sides is that of the drowning of the local population by the immigrant Bengalis. In the 20th century, the share of the indigenous Borok tribes in the state’s population came down from close to 90 per cent to just about 30 per cent, leading to dispossession, disempowerment and resentment among the tribal population.

The Left Front, mainly the CPM, enjoys an unwavering support not only among majority Bengalis but also among a significant section of the tribal population, a legacy of Nripen Chakraborty and Dasharath Deb. The Congress has again tied up with INPT, a tribal political outfit including some ex-insurgents and can enthuse the tribal voters but could frighten the Bengalis, and is hoping to cause a major upset this time with the help of a very strict Election Commission. But dislodging an entrenched CPM that has combined the image of a visibly clean leadership, organisational strength and electoral machine with a subtle ethnic appeal for the majority community, is not going to be easy.

What is common to these three faces of politics in the Northeast, except a coincidence of geography and timing of electoral cycle? Or the curse of shared neglect from the ‘motherland’? Perhaps it is best not to expect any commonality. We begin to understand the Northeast when we begin to look at it as just another part of India. When we begin to recognise ‘us’ inside the ‘other’ we also begin to notice the presence of the ‘other‘ within ‘us’.

The writer is senior fellow, CSDS, Delhi