Experiencing “Ambivalent Infrastructures”

Abstract

<p>This paper examines the unexpected detention and deportation that the author experienced in November 2019, when attending an international conference called “Ambivalent Infrastructures” in Dimapur, the largest city in the state of Nagaland in Northeast India. This trip of being deported opens up new perspective on the idea of “ambivalent infrastructures”, particularly how infrastructures both enable and are the result of the ever-changing dynamic between state and local, central and periphery, and isolation and integration within the specific context of Northeast India. This paper serves as a memoir of the author’s experience described in terms of three aspects, namely the Hornbill Festival, Assam Tea, and the Northeast Frontier Railway. First, the Hornbill Festival, which enabled the author to apply for a tourist visa for a trip to Northeast India in the first place, reveals the friction between the will to promote development projects in the Naga hills and the unresolved tension between Naga culture and Nagaland statehood. Second, the Inner Line and affiliated Protected Area Permit (PAP) regulations that led to the author’s deportation from Nagaland are rooted in the plain-hill dichotomy formed since the mid-19^th century that served the colonial objective of expanding tea production in the Brahmaputra Valley. Lastly, the Northeast Frontier Railway that transported the author from Dimapur in Nagaland to Guwahati in Assam is being rapidly expanded under India’s Look East policy in competition with China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Within the context of political tensions between Nagaland and India as well as India and China that followed the revocation of Article 370, the article which used to grant the state of Jammu and Kashmir a special autonomous status within the Indian union, it is possible that the Nagaland government intentionally promised invalid PAP exemption to Chinese conference attendees in order to coerce the central government into negotiating over the issue of political autonomy.</p>