Why is the north east so liberal

Among the most detrimental impacts of the present Citizenship Amendment Act CAB is the perpetuation of the feeling of alienation in the region. News and images coming from Assam submit a picture that unrest is yet again lurking at the doors after two decades of peace and stability. Economic backwardness, coupled with substantial racial profiling of the people, has never really helped integration of the region within the nation. What the CAB does. Taking note of the protests, the revised version of the amendment has exempted certain areas in the region.

While these exemptions have calmed down other areas of the northeast, massive protests are going on in Assam, particularly in the Brahmaputra valley and in Tripura. This enables Indian citizenship to lakhs of immigrants, who identify themselves with any of the given religions. Also, any immigrant from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh who belongs to the mentioned communities will not be deported or imprisoned even if they do not possess valid documents for their residency in India.

The amended bill has reduced it to five years. This means that immigrants from the three countries and from the mentioned religions, who have entered India before December 31, , would not be treated as illegal immigrants. CAB is essentially meant for the entire country; but why has the northeast, particularly Assam flared up and not the rest? CAB exempts certain areas in the northeast India from this provision.

It would not apply to a few areas of Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram, and Tripura, which are included under the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution a provision that grants a certain degree of autonomy to tribal councils and the area covered under the Inner Line Permit IPL, a document that Indian citizens from other states require to enter Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram and most of Nagaland. This effectively means that Assam, which has only a few districts where the Sixth Schedule is in place and is not an ILP state, becomes the only state in the northeast where illegal Hindu migrants could potentially be settled.

The issue of illegal immigrants is neither new nor trivial in Assam. The British colonial administration actively fostered immigration to sparsely populated Assam from other parts of India; English educated Bengalis to take up government jobs, and another set of immigrants mainly from Central India for working as labourers in the newly established tea industry.

Later, when modern education spread among the local youth, it ensued a challenge to the Bengali babus as they, too, vied for the same clerical jobs. And even this understates the centrality of racial resentment to Republican Party primaries in the Northeast. The South, unlike the Northeast, contains lots of churchgoing white evangelicals with deeply felt conservative ideology — Ted Cruz voters, in other words.

And the Northeast, unlike the South, contains lots of highly ideological white liberals who deeply despise the Republican Party — Bernie Sanders voters, in other words. This leaves Northeastern Republican Parties full of not-super-ideological people who just really don't like the Democratic Party because they don't think it stands for people like them. That's perfect Trump terrain.

Southern niche candidates have emerged in GOP primaries before and lost — think Mike Huckabee in We've even had in Rick Santorum's campaign a non-Southern evangelical Christian who did well in the South and also expanded his appeal a bit into the Rust Belt. But in both of those races, the establishment favorite was ultimately powered to victory in part thanks to strength in the Northeast.

The Northeast's less-ideological Republicans didn't care about the past heterodoxies of John McCain or Mitt Romney and helped power more electable, more mainstream choices to the fore. Trump, by foregrounding racial resentment in a way no candidate has done since George Wallace, is blowing that calculation up — and the Republican Party with it. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding.

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By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. Why Donald Trump dominates the Northeast. Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. Northeastern politics is about group conflict There are two fundamental ways to look at politics.

To some people, politics is ideological — it's about big ideas, big issues, and big principles. That's Trump. All else being equal, enough rich New York commuters might vote for the party promising them lower taxes to make Connecticut Republican once again. Turns out, rich liberals have values too. This phenomenon has gone into overdrive with Trump, who looks set to be the first Republican in decades not to win a plurality of white graduate voters, but is gaining votes among working-class whites without degrees.

Education is not the same as wealth, of course — would that it were — but the two are linked. Trump is losing the votes of relatively rich white voters, and gaining those of relatively poor ones, even while he offers lower taxes — because those voters also care about other things, too.

I said a few paragraphs back that the US electoral map was weird to a Brit because it was like Surrey voting Labour and Sunderland voting Tory. Photo By Wikimedia Commons.