Optimal delivery or mere optics in Bodo peace deal? (Mint)

Context:

• The Bodo peace deal poses tricky questions for India in general and far-eastern India in particular.
• The deal was announced on 27 January in New Delhi in an attempt to bring closure to a conflict in the homelands of the Bodo people—or Boro, as they call themselves—in Assam.
• A formal surrender-and-integrate ceremony is intended for later this week.

Background:

• Four factions of the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB), along with an influential Bodo students’ organization and a Bodo civilian pressure group, signed the peace agreement with the central and Assam governments.
• Among other concessions, the Bodoland Territorial Area Districts, the name given to Kokrajhar, Baksa, Chirang and Udalguri, the four contiguous districts bordering Bhutan and Arunachal Pradesh, will now be known as Bodoland Territorial Region.
• The changed nuance from districts to region is significant as it acknowledges a Bodo homeland within the state of Assam, without separating from Assam.
• This is dialled down from earlier rebel demands for a breakaway state and later suggestions for Union territory status.

Major challenges towards uprotted Bodo rebellion:

• Indeed, it could also affect the ongoing Naga peace process, leading Naga rebels to demand territorial and administrative autonomy in Naga homelands in Manipur, which will trigger a firestorm of politics, and ethnic tension between the Nagas and the Meitei, the largest ethnic group in Manipur whose language, culture and history dominate the state.
• There is already an inherent vulnerability to the Bodo peace deal even without the overhang of ceding territory.
• This is rooted in the birth of the Bodo rebellion, which began in the 1980s not on account of slights from India, but administrative and development apathy of the state of Assam, and a feeling that Bodo, the people, the language, the identity, were subsumed by the Assamese and migrants.
• The initial demand for Bodoland, which grew out of a students’ movement (in much the same way, ironically, as a movement led by students in Assam that later birthed armed rebellion by the United Liberation Front of Asom), came even earlier, in the early 1970s.

Way ahead:

• This vulnerability extends to other parts of Assam and far-eastern India and indeed any geography in India that either has active conflict, or has neutralized conflict with military or policing dominance and now hopes to seed positivity with governance and development.
• How much independence will Bodoland Territorial Council, which is now nominally responsible for administration and development, and which has purse-strings and political-strings tied to Dispur, Assam’s capital, be accorded?
• The Kokrajhar-based council has elections due for its next five-year term. Elections were last held in April 2015.
• The Bodoland People’s Front, the civilian avatar of the Bodoland Liberation Tigers that signed a peace deal in 2003, a deal which led to both the birth of the council and continuing rebellion by factions of NDFB, is in majority in the council.

Conclusion:

• True autonomy, true peace, and true development are always worth more than the paper on which they are promised