The struggles — old and new — of the Northeast, the changes that have taken place in the region and if its people are still “different” to the rest of India and whether they are destined to remain so — these are some of the issues that a new book examines.
Two decades after he wrote the much-acclaimed Strangers of the Mist , writer-journalist Sanjoy Hazarika presents the case for the region in Strangers No More: New Narratives from India’s Northeast , published by Aleph Book Company.
Armed with more stories, interviews and research, and after extensive travels through the region, he explains how and where things stand today in the Northeast.
“This is a deeply personal book, for it reflects what I regard as the core issues facing the eight northeastern states of India: politics, policy, law and disorder, violent uprisings and painful reconciliations, offence and defence, conservation and oppression, history and the contemporary reality, stereotyping and breaking out of the mould, hope and despair,” Hazarika says in the book.
He spends a fair amount of time looking at how new frontlines are emerging, of the new battlegrounds of discrimination and communalism, of the dangers of Islamic radicalism born out of prejudice as much as mobilisation in the nearly-400 pages book.
“There is too the relentless and ruthless exploitation of natural resources in the name of ‘development’ and ‘management’, profiting a handful and pauperising the vulnerable,” he says, adding, “In this, I have focused on the struggle between political and commercial lobbies on one side and environmentalists, human rights campaigners, social scientists, researchers and writers on the other.”
The book among other things also examines the imposition of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) in the Northeast — a triangular shape of land wedged between Myanmar, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Tibet — which has longer borders with its neighbours than it has with India.
“Strangers No More” presents a study of what Hazarika describes in the book as the Centre’s “pusillanimous failure” to follow up on the Justice Jeevan Reddy Committee’s report reviewing the AFSPA.
“That incapacity and official inchoateness has democratic incontinence stamped all over it. These are studied in detail, with personal narratives, official texts and a range of responses and documentation,” he says.
“AFSPA is a brief yet ponderous and powerful law, widely reviled as draconian. It has survived the wrath of Supreme Court judges who have virtually shredded the official position in powerful judgments. Yet its removal remains implacably blocked because the Centre hasn’t shown the guts, vision or trust that’s needed for its revocation,” Hazarika says.