Elsevier

Political Geography

Volume 61, November 2017, Pages 123-147
Political Geography

Cartographic conflicts within a union: Finding land for Nagaland in India

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2017.06.015Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The multiplicity of conflicting maps of Nagaland is examined.

  • The colonial roots of the cartographic inconsistencies are explored.

  • The multiplicity reflects conflict over units of measurement and appropriate scale.

  • Political-economic interests are being promoted behind political-geographic rhetoric.

  • Resolution of conflict is linked to the clarification of Nagaland's political status.

Abstract

Colonial-era borders continue to be sites of intra- and inter-national territorial conflicts across the Indian Sub-continent. The State of Nagaland in North East India has been witness to one of the oldest armed struggles in the region to redraw colonial borders. The Nagaland government finds itself sandwiched between an irredentist insurgency and the union government. This paper examines the cartographic-statistical fallout of the Nagaland government's balancing act that is reflected in, among other things, the diversity of conflicting maps published by different tiers and wings of the government. The paper suggests that the cartographic/territorial conflicts between Nagaland and its neighbouring states are driven by the use of political-geographic arguments to advance political-economic interests along contested borders. These conflicts are not amenable to a technical resolution as they are rooted in the as yet inconclusive search for a stable basis for Naga identity and the ongoing dispute over Nagaland's place within the Union of India. Nagaland's borders are, in fact, sites of collision of different conceptions of nationhood (Indian and Naga) and understandings of constitutional federalism. The union government tolerates Nagaland's parchment transgressions and occasional physical “encroachments.” Its cartographic laxity is motivated by the need to avoid a strictly legalistic approach that would necessitate the use of force to implement a singular, exclusive solution to protracted territorial disputes involving several states.

Introduction

Nagaland is located in the North East of India, bound by the states of Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, and Manipur on the west, north, and south, respectively, and Myanmar on the east (Map 1). Its terrain is mostly rocky (95 per cent) and forested (87 per cent) (GSI, 2011, p. 2).1 This small (16,579 sq km) yet sparsely populated state is home to fourteen Naga and four non-Naga indigenous tribes recognised by the state government. The indigenous and non-indigenous tribes accounted for about 86 per cent of Nagaland's population in 2011. These tribes are mostly Christian and speak more than twenty mutually unintelligible languages. About one-sixth of the languages with more than 10,000 speakers reported in the 2001 Census of India are indigenous to Nagaland, which accounts for less than 0.2 per cent of India's population.

Nagaland was the first state in independent India that was not created on grounds of linguistic homogeneity. It was carved out of Assam and granted full statehood in 1963 to deal with the nascent stage of what is now India's oldest armed insurgency.2 The Nagaland government is sandwiched between an irredentist insurgency, on the one hand, and its neighbouring states and the union government, on the other. This paper examines the cartographic and statistical implications of the state government's balancing act that is reflected in, among other things, the diversity of maps of Nagaland published by different tiers and branches of the government. For instance, the maps of Nagaland published by the Census (Map 2) and the Nagaland GIS and Remote Sensing Centre (Map 3, Map 4) differ from each other with respect to the border3 between Nagaland and Assam. Similarly, various legislative constituency maps differ from each other (Map 5). Even maps published on the same page could be mutually inconsistent (Map 6).4

Unable to find an authoritative estimate of Nagaland's area, one of us met a senior official in-charge of border affairs (Interview, Kohima, 25.06.13), who first denied the cartographic diversity and then explained it away by arguing that maps could vary with the footprints of departments, e.g., the education department's map of schools differs from the health department's map of dispensaries. However, this can only explain the differences within the borders and not the differences between maps in terms of Nagaland's external borders. The official finally admitted that there might be discrepancies due to border disputes, but expressed an inability to share the official estimate of Nagaland's area as the matter was under judicial consideration (State of Assam vs. Union of India & Ors, Original Suit 2 of 1988) and referred the interviewer to existing estimates available in government publications such as census reports.

This cartographic-statistical confusion might appear as a problem waiting to be resolved through the application of better concepts and tools of measurement. However, we are not faced with an instance of what Monmonier (1991, p. 43) would refer to as ‘cartographic carelessness.’5 Both the number of “incorrect” maps in circulation and the degree of “inaccuracy” in maps have grown after the introduction of the latest technologies.6 The persistent and growing “errors” in maps despite methodological and technological advances suggest that the problem lies elsewhere. Not coincidentally, until recently the errors in Nagaland's population headcounts were also growing due to intra-state political-economic conflicts (Agrawal and Kumar, 2013, Kumar and Agrawal, 2016).

We are faced with an inherent indeterminacy (rather than an inaccuracy) that results from multi-dimensional conflicts between various stakeholders. Three interfaces of these conflicts – centre-state, inter-state, and state-civil society/insurgent organisations – are sites of cartographic mismatches. The cartographic divergence between the state and union governments can be viewed as a constitutional conflict over the distribution of powers. The union government is the sole constitutionally-empowered authority to alter external and internal boundaries (Indian Constitution, Art 2) and form new states or alter the areas, boundaries, or names of existing States (Art 3). So, the Nagaland government's cartographic irredentism is repugnant to the Constitution. Political-economic factors remain in the background of Nagaland's public case that rests on political-geographic justifications (redrawing artificial/unjust colonial borders). Nagaland and its neighbours are caught in what Agnew (1994) calls ‘the territorial trap,’ an obsession with territorially delineated states as fixed mutually exclusive categories, and have failed to devise locally meaningful ways of shared management of agrarian ecological zones arbitrarily split by borders. Finally, the civil society and insurgents use maps as tools of resistance. Their maps can be seen as examples of ‘insurgent informational practices’ (Wyly, 2004, p. 7) or counter-mapping and ethno-cartography (Wood, 2010). Their endeavours represent ‘democratization of mapmaking’ (Wood, 2010, p. 158) that challenges technocratic hubris, which divides the world into expert map-makers and lay users.

This paper examines “anomalies” in the estimates of Nagaland's area and the multiplicity of conflicting maps issued by the government and complements Agrawal and Kumar, 2013, Agrawal and Kumar, 2014, Ankush and Vikas, 2017, who examine the anomalies in censuses and household sample surveys conducted in Nagaland. The paper relates to the literature on map-making and border disputes rooted in colonial history. The studies in the Indian context examine map-making as a scientific enterprise in the construction and legitimisation of the British Empire as a unified entity (Edney, 1997), borders between the Barak Valley and princely hill states (Cederlöf, 2014), the Anglo-Gorkha border (Michael, 2014), the scalar structure of colonial India (Legg, 2009, Legg, 2016), the impact of colonial map-making on the British people (Barrow, 2003), boundary-making in the colonial frontiers (Phanjoubam, 2016), late colonial boundary commissions (Chester, 2008), and the West Bengal-East Pakistan border (Chatterji, 1999). Focusing on post-colonial India, Corbridge (2002) touches upon the idea of “Greater Jharkhand,” which relates to our discussion of “Greater Nagaland” (also see Urla (1993) on Spain and Crampton (1996) on Bosnia). van Schendel, 2002, Jones, 2009b, and Shewly (2013) examine the Indo-Bangladeshi border, while Suykens (2013) focuses on the Assam-Nagaland border. Krishna (1994) examines the basis of the cartographic anxiety of post-colonial India using, among others, the case of the Indo-Bangladeshi border. Further, our discussion of the extension of Naga settlements in the disputed border area relates to discussions of Israel's encroachment of Palestinian lands (Weizman, 2007, Wood, 2010). Unlike most of the literature in the Indian context, however, we also examine discrepancies in estimates of area. Moreover, unlike Suykens (2013), who focusses on the disputed border area as an exceptional space, our discussion of the cartographic impact of post-colonial responses to colonial-era borders examines the disputed area as part of a larger cartographical-statistical problem that engulfs the whole of Nagaland and affects it along both the internal and external margins.

The following discussion is organised into three broad parts. We first examine conflicting area statistics and overlapping maps. We then discuss the colonial origins of the conflicting maps of Nagaland and trace the genesis of “Greater Nagaland.” Finally, we discuss the political economy of contested maps, recast the cartographic conflict as a conflict over the units of measurement, and discuss competitive developmentalism spawned by the cartographic/territorial conflict.

Section snippets

Conflicting area statistics

Census reports from the 1950s and 1960s provide three different estimates of the 1951 area of Nagaland: 16,451.60, 16,487.90, and 16,397.21 sq km (Table 1).7

Overlapping maps

Nagaland exercises administrative control over at least 594.4 sq km of Assam's territory, mostly in Golaghat district adjoining Nagaland's commercial capital Dimapur (Table 1).9

The colonial prelude

The Ahoms ruled over the Brahmaputra Valley of Assam for six centuries until the early 19th century. During this period the hills and the plains were separated by an ecological boundary, which was porous to sociocultural exchange, marital relations, and migration as well as sensitive to the balance of power between the hills and the plains and the degree of forest cover along the foothills. Neither side claimed absolute/exclusive ownership over the grey area along the boundary, while both

“Greater Nagaland”

The Nagas claim that (i) the British encroached upon their territory along the foothills for timber, tea, minerals, and building railways and (ii) first the British and later the Indian and Myanmarese governments partitioned their “traditional” or “historical” territory between India (Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, and Nagaland) and Myanmar. Thus, they believe that modern borders have simultaneously led to what Clifford Geertz calls ‘suffocation’ (living with non-Nagas within a state) and

Political economy of contested maps/borders

The cartographic fuzziness along the Assam-Nagaland border is tolerated, if not encouraged, by the Nagaland government. Encouragement seems to be more likely as the state government is not cooperating with the Survey of India for the authentication of the inter-state border on the ground (The Telegraph, 2014), has rejected the recommendations of several federal commissions that tried to settle the dispute (Bhattacharyya, 1994, Gohain, 2007), and maintains shapefiles that include territory far

Conflict over the units of measurement

The “Greater Nagaland” controversy does not merely contribute to the context within which the politics of maps and statistics unfolds in Nagaland. Rather “Greater Nagaland” is itself an object of spatial-statistical dispute as it represents a spatial unit of measurement different from that adopted by the government. So, the cartographic conflict is also a conflict over the units of measurement, i.e., whether to measure and report statistics exclusively for the existing Nagaland state or include

Competitive developmentalism

Nagaland's expansion into the disputed territories has been associated with the creation of new villages and sub-districts. Between 1971 and 2011, the number of villages in Dimapur district (including the disputed area adjoining Dimapur) grew at the rate of 426 per cent from 43 to 226 (Table 2). The corresponding figures for Nagaland as a whole and Assam's Golaghat district were 49 per cent and 59 per cent, respectively. Assam has also been trying to expand its footprint in the disputed

Conclusion

Imprecise maps and area estimates affect the entire gamut of government statistics, starting with the population that is defined for a given area. The multiplicity of inconsistent maps of Nagaland highlighted in this paper suggest that statistics collected by different departments of the state government are not strictly comparable because they use different maps and, by implication, collect information from different areas. Flawed area statistics also influence policy-making at the national

Conflict of interest

We declare that we have no conflict of interest to disclose.

Acknowledgements

The authors are thankful to Philip Steinberg and three anonymous referees for helpful suggestions, various officers of the Assam and Nagaland governments, village elders of several villages along Golaghat-Dimapur border, Charles Chasie, R.N. Chhipa, Hiren Gohain, Chandan Gowda, Sanjoy Hazarika, S.K. Khemprai, Manlip Konyak, Shingwang Konyak, K. Sreedhar Rao, Thaban Rongmei, Visakono Sakhrie, Biswajit Sarmah, Theja Therieh, Toshi Wungtung, and Lungsang Zeliang for useful discussions and valuable

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