Developmentalism as Strategy: Interrogating Post-colonial Narratives on India’s North East

Developmentalism as Strategy: Interrogating Post-colonial Narratives on India’s North East critically examines the post-colonial developmental trajectory of the Indian State at its northeastern periphery. Due to its unique historical geography, India’s North East has been systematically marginalized and was imagined as ‘underdeveloped’. The dominant narrative of India’s economic nationalism has largely acted as a strategy within the North East in the context of resource appropriation and national security, and producing new arrangements of knowledge, power and practices. Adopting a methodological approach of interdisciplinarity, this book attempts to understand the exceptions to India’s dominant development policy as applied in the North East. In the changing dynamics of political economy of development in the region, the book further examines the subsequent transformation of the narrative of the North East from a ‘geographic marginality’ to a ‘natural gateway’, and explores the alternative to such mainstream development approach by raising debates in India’s North East.

Rakhee Bhattacharya is Associate Professor and teaches Development Economics at the Special Centre for the Study of North East India, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Some of her earlier professional associations were with Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies, Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, New Delhi, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, Kolkata, and National Council for Applied Economic Research, New Delhi. She has worked on several national and international research projects, including with United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). She has done both policy and academic research in various issues of political economy, development economics and security studies. She was an Endeavour Post-Doctoral Fellow at the School of International Studies, University of South Australia, Adelaide. Her areas of research interests are political economy, development economics, regional economy, transnational economy and geoeconomics, poverty and inequality, geopolitics and security, India’s North East and its neighbourhood. She has a number of publications to her credit in both national and international journals. She is also a regular columnist in the Statesman. Some of her edited and co-edited books are Regional Development and Public Policy Challenges in India (2015), A Journey through the Stilwell Road (2011, with B. K Mishra), Perilous Journey: Debates on Security and Development in Assam (2011, with S. Pulipaka), Tradition and Modernity in Arunachal Pradesh (2012, with S. Pulipaka and Sarit Chaudhuri) and Sikkim’s Tryst with Nathu La: What Awaits India’s East and Northeast? (2009, with J. K. Ray and K. Bandyopadhyay). She has authored Development Disparities in Northeast India (2011) and Northeastern India and its Neighbours: Negotiating Security and Development (2014).