ABSTRACT
Modernist state reconstruction and social development in India were shaped by a discourse of marginality, creating new power centres, modes of governance, and new peripheries. Political development models were combined with ‘federal sensitivity and the dignity of cultural space’ (Dasgupta, 2001). Mushrooming of hybrid institutions and multilayered designs of governance especially in the neoliberal phase created localised spaces of belonging, power, and contestation in the margins. Centre–periphery relations were rearticulated. Intensely politicised identities and regional forces were released while contributing to a much more complicated federal landscape, particularly in India’s Northeast margins in the late 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. Having said, what contributed to the processes of transformation of the federal landscape in India during this period? How do we examine these transformations in the context of marginality on the fringes of India’s Northeast? The aim of this chapter is to address these questions by examining the multilayered governance and policy processes unleashed in the forms of (a) internal carvation of territory and formation of ethnoregional parties as power managers and power brokers, and (b) rise of collective forces aimed at countering the grand national narratives and positionality of the margins.
