The politics of time reveals deep fault lines in the harmony of society
Kapil Komireddi
Sunshine swamps Indias north-east while the rest of the country is sleeping. But the clocks, controlled by New Delhi, repudiate nature. The westernmost and easternmost parts of India are divided by 28 degrees of longitude.
As Indian schoolbooks make clear, 15 degrees of longitudinal distance correspond to an hours time difference. This means that the north-east is almost two hours ahead of western India.
Yet, strangely, Indians in the east are compelled to hold their lives in abeyance in deference to Indians in the west. Several hours of daylight have been lost by the time the north-east officially opens for business in summer, and its dark long before people have left work during winter.
It is hardly surprising that the north-east is mutinying against Indian Standard Time. Assam, the largest in terms of population of the seven contiguous northeastern states, has been the noisiest rebel.
In January 2014, it made a unilateral declaration that it was moving its clocks forward by an hour. Assams tea estates have a long tradition, dating back to the British Raj, of following garden time, which is one hour ahead of IST. Assam sought to turn this into the states official time. Unfortunately for the 30 million people of the state, time happens to fall under the federal governments, not the states, jurisdiction. The state governments decree would only have made a difference if the government of India had approved a new time zone. It did not.
A few months later, India went to the polls, the Congress Party lost power in New Delhi, and the incoming Bharatiya Janata Party administration mothballed the matter.
But the demand for the grant of a new time zone for Assam and, by implication, the rest of the north-east is far from dead. Earlier this year, a petition was filed with Assams state high court urging it to direct the government of India to approve a separate time zone for the north-east. The government, in its response, admitted that the eastern states in the country do face certain disadvantages as a result of IST. Nonetheless, citing the recommendations of a special committee constituted in 2003 to study the feasibility of different time zones in India, it argued that a uniform standard across the country was preferable to multiple time zones.
The government contrived to offer a compromise by giving the governments and state bureaucracies of the north-east the option to advance their work timings by an hour. But what are work timings? Do they apply to schools, hospitals and public transport linking the region to the rest of India? And what about the private sector?
Asked to create a new official time zone for the north-east, the government of India offered the region the chance to create an new informal time zone for itself. All the burdens and disadvantages from synchronising schedules with the rest of India to bringing multiple sectors into alignment would have to be borne by the north-east.
The Indian governments solution was no solution at all. Yet the high court, satisfied by the governments response, dismissed the petition. Some in the north-east have turned to online petitioning in the hope of generating enough clamour to force the government to act, but the response so far has been lacklustre.
Why wont India introduce a new time zone? Officially, administrative challenges are cited. But in reality there are powerful psychological reasons behind Indias reluctance to divide the country into different time zones. The north-east is a vast chunk of territory surrounded by China, Myanmar and Bangladesh, and connected to the mainland by a narrow strip of land that runs through Bengal.
The writer is an Indian journalist
