Abstract
Two narratives regarding Arunachal Pradesh are equally visible in policy and media spaces. One envisions Arunachal as a global trade gateway, which implies open borders, and the other views the region as a securitised frontier whose borders require surveillance and protection. On the surface, these appear to be contradictory visions. In this chapter, however, I argue that Arunachal as a global gateway for trade and Arunachal as a frontier are not incommensurable narratives operating through opposite spatial logics. Both are strategies of border management in which nation-state territoriality is upheld while bypassing the interests of the inhabitants. Arunachal as a security frontier means that even when it is included in development and infrastructure schemes, such as border trade and road construction, national security interests are prioritised over local welfare. For this reason, Arunachal as the gateway and Arunachal as a securitised frontier can co-exist as complicit representations of the space of this border region.
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The list of items that be exported from India to TAR are Agriculture Implements, Blankets, Copper products, Clothes, Cycles, Coffee, Tea, Barley, Rice, Flour, Dry Fruits, Dry and Fresh Vegetables, Vegetable oil, Gur and Misri, Tobacco, Snuff, Spices, Shoes, Kerosene oil, Stationary, Utensils, Wheat, Liquor, MilkProcessed Product, Canned Food, Cigarettes, Local Herb, Palm oil, and Hardware. The items that can be exported from TAR to Sikkim are Goat Skin, Sheep Skin, Wool, Raw Silk, Yak tail, Butter, China clay, Borax, Seabelyipe, Goat Kashmiri, Common salt, Yak hair, Horse, Goat, and Sheep (Hasija, 2012).
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For Lefebvre (1991), space exists at three levels; the first, he terms, spatial practice, which is connected to production and reproduction of spatial forms. A room in an apartment, marketplace, or street corner evokes a particular description, or use, which corresponds to the spatial practice. These are the experienced or perceived material spatial practices that constitute the daily regularities (Harvey 1989). The second level corresponds to representations of space, the signs, codes, and knowledge that allow material practices to be talked about, and include academic disciplines of geography, architecture, and urban planning (Harvey 1989). These are the conceived spaces, and also the official or dominant spaces. The last corresponds to representational spaces, which are the lived spaces, and “hence the space of the ‘inhabitants’ and the ‘users’, but also of some artists, and …writers and philosophers, who describe” (Lefebvre, 1991: 39).
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Gohain, S. (2024). Arunachal as Gateway and Arunachal as Frontier. In: Chakrabarti, A., Chakraborty, G., Chakraborty, A.S. (eds) Indigeneity, Development and Sustainability. Demographic Transformation and Socio-Economic Development, vol 18. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-1436-0_8
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