Abstract
In this chapter, the author looks at the recent spate of wilful violence against people from the north-east in Delhi, the national capital. As he points out, there is only one way of describing these assaults and the grass roots reaction they elicit: they are racist. It is crucial to note that capitalist development is not necessarily antithetical to cultural racism. The argument can be further extended to indicate that it is in the very nature of capitalist development to produce its well-demarcated racial categories before primitive accumulation can begin. With the emergence of global finance capital, the modes of reconstituting and redeploying races/ethnicities have morphed in significantly new ways. The author argues that racism in India is not an atavistic survival, but the pith and marrow of the contemporary economic exigencies. But, in what ways does global capital reconstitute and redeploy races/ethnicities? The chapter demonstrates this through a study of the Indian north-east where the emergence of the neoliberal market–state complex has given rise to autonomy movements. Most of these movements make political and economic claims in the name of race or ethnic identities. The very mark of their newly imagined minority identity or subject position is actively utilized to make claims for integration into the majoritarian logic, be it global economic or national statist. While the deployment of these ‘new’ race identities gives groups in the north-east extra teeth in terms of claims-making, it also opens up these groups to racist attacks elsewhere in the country through economic and cultural revisibilization.
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Notes
- 1.
To get an idea of the money and projects involved, see the official site of DoNER: http://mdoner.gov.in/.
- 2.
The North Eastern Council (NEC) is the nodal agency for the economic and social development of the north-eastern region which consists of the eight states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura and Sikkim (The North-Eastern Council (Amendment) Act, 2002, inter alia, added Sikkim as the eighth member–State of the Council). The NEC was constituted in 1971 by an Act of Parliament. The official NEC site has the following to say by the way of publicity: “Over the last 35 years, NEC has been instrumental in setting in motion a new economic endeavour aimed at removing the basic handicaps that stood in the way of normal development of the region and has ushered in an era of new hope in this backward area full of great potentialities.” http://necouncil.nic.in. Accessed on 25 October 2013.
- 3.
- 4.
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- 6.
- 7.
Also find the text of the Act at http://indiankanoon.org/doc/318384/. Accessed 25 October 2013.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
A similar argument for Ecuador has been made by Colloredo-Mansfeld (2002, pp. 173–195).
- 11.
See the entire ‘Ei Muhurte’ (This Moment) page of Ei Samay (Bangla edition of The Times of India), 27 October 2013 and especially the article on the same page by Sarkar (2013). The Gorkhaland Territorial Administration is a semi-autonomous administrative body of the Nepali-speaking Gorkha ethnic group of the Darjeeling hills that was created in 2011.
- 12.
Again to get a non-Indian perspective, see Collier (1994, pp. 1–44).
- 13.
Speaking about displaced women, Paula Banerjee writes, ‘displaced women are often doubly marginalized since state policies are weighted against them both because they are women and also because often they are members of minority ethnic, religious and linguistic groups’ (Banerjee 2005, p. 305). This argument neatly fits the case of women in conflict too. More relevant to our present context is the following statement she makes: ‘In situations where the state is not an actor, the majority group imitates state behaviour thereby victimizing women as in the massacres by Bodo militants’ (ibid).
- 14.
For the activism around the Bill, see The Morung Express (2012).
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Ghosh, A. (2017). The Postcolony and ‘Racy’ Histories of Accumulation. In: Mitra, I., Samaddar, R., Sen, S. (eds) Accumulation in Post-Colonial Capitalism. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1037-8_12
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