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professionals from neighbouring Bengal and traders from Rajasthan
who enjoyed patronage of the colonial overlord.
Land, Language and Leadership 81
After a brief period of cooperation with the British, the local middle
class in Assam assumed the leadership of the nationalist movement
in the state. Their agitation against the British rule was reinforced
by the antipathy towards the migrant middle class that was seen as
an appendage of colonial rule and a competitor for a share of jobs
and professions. The British partly appeased the Assamese middle
class by replacing Bengali with Assamese as the official language of
the province but immediately thereafter upset them by adding Sylhet
and Cachar (then covering the whole of Barak Valley) to Assam.
The  Sylhetis could boast of a vibrant and enterprising middle class
that was more than a match for the nascent Assamese middle class
in the competition for political office, administrative positions and
the professions.
Thus, the conflict of interests between the Bengali and the
Assamese middle classes became one of the recurring features of
middle-class competition in Assam and it infl uenced the nature of
social and political leadership that emerged in the province. After
independence, with Sylhet gone to East Pakistan, the Bengali middle
class lost the territory and the resources that supported it and, weak-
ened by the religious divide, its influence slowly became limited to
the Barak Valley districts of southern Assam. In Tripura, however,
the Bengali middle class became more dominant after the princely
state merged with the Indian Union. The end of the princely order
led to the withering away of the tribal feudal elite, the palace-based
Kartas and the tribal chiefs heading the dafas. Their preponderant
position in political and administrative decision-making was taken
over by the incoming Bengali middle class from East Pakistan until
a neo-literate tribal middle class emerged in the late 1960s to chal-
lenge the Bengali domination.
In Manipur, a class of officials owing allegiance to the kings had
provided social and political leadership until the state became part of
India. Like the Ahom elite, they gave free service to the maharaja for
10 in every 40 days under the Lalup system. After independence, a
middle class emerged in both the hills and the plains through the
avenues of modern education and new political and administrative
opportunities. The Meitei middle class in the plains, like the Bengali
middle class in the nineteenth century, emerged as the most creative
in the North East, leaving its imprint on the arts, literature, music,
theatre and sports. But it remained disgruntled with India because
82 Troubled Periphery
of the lack of opportunities. It failed to gain the benefits of reserva-
tion that were available to the tribal middle classes in Nagaland,
Mizoram, Meghalaya and Arunachal Pradesh or the resources and
the locational advantage available to the Assamese middle class.
The new middle class in northeast India has come to consist of
(a) indigenous tea planters, merchants, agent-proprietors, contract-
ors, food-grain dealers and retail shop-owners; (b) salaried em-
ployees of government and private companies; (c) self-employed
professionals like doctors, accountants and lawyers; (d) civil servants
serving all-India services and state services; (e) teachers and creative
intellectuals and (f) professional politicians. Over the last few years,
a new element has been added to the middle class in the region
the agitator and the rebel. Radical students, youths, insurgent lead-
ers and activists have been co-opted into the system through the
process of reconciliation initiated by the state and the federal gov-
ernment. Their class origins are mostly rooted in the urban or rural
lower middle class or peasantry and the subsequent prominence
secured by them is indicative of the fl uidity and socio-economic
mobility in the process of middle-class formation in the region.
One of the significant achievements of the political leadership (in North-
east India) in the initial years of their management of the polity was in
the establishment of new centres of education to train local youths for
jobs in administration as well as in such professions as medicine, engin-
eering and architecture. Actuated by a strong desire to subserve the
interests of the expanding indigenous middle class, the political leader-
ship was expected to give preference to local talent as far as employ-
ment was concerned. As a result, the various middle class elements of
the region concentrated on wresting the control of district and state
administrative organs from their earlier dominant groups, mostly
outsiders. The migrant middle class however continued to retain as
well as expand its control over agencies and also had a major say in the
utilization of development funds.33
Over the last two decades, the migrant middle class has lost out
in the competition for all-India services. Newly educated tribals,
with the benefit of missionary education, have taken advantage of
reservations and found ever more places in the all-India services.
No longer are Assamese or Bengali officers from Assam the only
ones to be mentioned in the headlines. More often than not, it is a
Land, Language and Leadership 83
J.M. Lyngdoh (former India s chief election commissioner, who
hails from Meghalaya) or a Sangliana (Karnataka police official
responsible for hunting down notorious sandalwood smuggler
Veerappan, who hails from Mizoram) or a Donald Ingti (one of the
finest customs officers from the North East) who are in the limelight.
The tribal middle class has also wrested total control over state
services and other jobs and professions in the states of Nagaland,
Mizoram, Meghalaya and Arunachal Pradesh. They have limited
control over trade and business, but they are beginning to compete
with traditional Indian business communities, such as the Marwaris,
whose presence in the  North East is considerable. In Manipur and
Tripura, the tribal middle class has also emerged and they have
found themselves in acute conflict with the Meitei or the Bengali
middle class because their aspirations, political style and cultural
mores differ sharply.
It would be wrong, however, to assume that the new middle class
completely replaced the traditional elite in the North East. In every
state of the region, when the traditional elite lost political power,
they turned to modern education. Their progeny returned to posi-
tions of social and political leadership within a few years, sharing
power with the new elites. The Sailos in Mizoram, the Ahom aris-
tocracy in Assam and the Syiems in Meghalaya all had lost power
and found a fresh share of it within a generation by exploiting the
opportunities of modern education and reservations in higher edu-
cation and jobs. There has been  a convergence between the interests
of the middle class and the traditional ruling elites or bourgeoisie in
the North East. By and large, this combined group has felt confident
enough to control the levers of power through the instrumentality
of universal suffrage .34
The conflict of interests between the indigenous and the migrant
middle class has been a recurrent theme in the evolution of the
leadership in northeast India. The indigenous middle class has also
suffered fragmentation along ethnic lines, preventing the growth
of regional consciousness and leadership. Since the growth of the
new indigenous middle class has been largely shaped by the politics [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]