Teaching–Learning Politics in India Framing the North-East in Indian Politics: Beyond the Integration Framework Kham Khan Suan Hausing 1 In this note, I make an inventory of how political realities in India’s north-east are studied to understand how and why it continues to be marginal to national imaginary and to mainstream political science debates in India. A quick overview of extant literature on north-east India shows that the academic canvass of study broadly encompasses nation building, ethnicity, development, conflict and insurgency. To this author’s notice, no major Indian political scientist has drawn his/her major insights from north-east India’s experience 2 or vice versa. Notably also, there is a very negligible number of political scientists who have done comparative study of state politics in the region. 3 This is surprising given the increasing importance that states have received since 1989 in light of the liberalization of Indian economy and emergence of coalition governments. Even as varieties of comparative state politics emerge, among others, on: (a) how state-level politics either continue to influence electoral calculations at the national level or remain autonomous from the national politics; and (b) how states outside the North-East compete with each other for investment and development, north-eastern states remain laggards and they do not figure in any major study of India’s changing political economy (Jenkins, 1999; Kailash, 2011; Sinha, 2005; Yadav & Palshikar 2008). No wonder, for most Indians, the North-East is ‘on the map’ but ‘off the mind’, as the evocative title of Tehelka’s ‘Summit of the Powerless’ in 2006 aptly put it (Rehman, 2006). 1 Department of Political Science, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad. 2 An exception to this could be Bhargava’s (2010) recent illuminating piece on the Nagas, yet it must be qualified that Bhargava’s major contribution is on secularism in India. In this list, we may include Weiner’s (1978) work on migration and the politics of nativism; Kohli’s (1997) work on self-determination; Chandhoke’s (2006) work on state creation and federalism; Stepan, Linz and Yadav’s (2011) work on crafting state-nations; Menon and Nigam’s (2013) work on power and contestations; Chenoy and Chenoy’s (2010) work on armed conflicts; and Bhattacharya’s (2014) work on linking security and development in North-East’s neighbourhood, among others, which produced an article/chapter on state(s) in north-east India in a comparative perspective. 3 Apart from Hassan’s (2008) comparative study of state–society relations in Manipur and Mizoram and Sanjib Baruah’s (2005) stellar work on ‘durable disorder’ in north-east India, no political scientist in the North-East has done a comparative study of state politics in the region. Studies in Indian Politics 3(2) 277–283 © 2015 Lokniti, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies SAGE Publications sagepub.in/home.nav DOI: 10.1177/2321023015601747 http://inp.sagepub.com Corresponding author: Kham Khan Suan Hausing, Department of Political Science, University of Hyderabad, PO Central University, Gachibowli, Hyderabad 500046, India. E-mail: kksuanh@gmail.com at UNIVERSITY OF HYDERABAD on December 3, 2015 inp.sagepub.com Downloaded from