|
Umesh:
Now that you are in Washington DC, you
could have probably atteneded the presentation if you would have known before
and could have given a first hand report!!
Could you try to get whatever we can get
from Brookings Institute (Mr Stephen Cohen) about the proceedings of the
Workshop.
Any other related information on any of
the referenced individuals or any other relevent for Assam, if you can dig up,
will be usefull and greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Rajenda
.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, November 08, 2005 12:40
PM
Subject: Re: [Assam] Sanjoy Hazarika:
Making Sense of the NE in Washington DC
Rajen-da,
This seems like a good development. Hopefully more people will take up
the matter at World Bank - which is also in DC and at UN which is nearby at
New York. Partha Gogoi's and Sanjoy Hazarika's comments together give a good
picture. Just wish we had transcript of what they said since -- we could also
be enlightened like the folks at Brookings.
Chandan:
We must try to see the event in right
perspective. If you do that, we (guys from Assam or NE) will not be looking
at the presentation to find anything new (in fact there is nothing new for
us to know about NE), but to find that Assam and the NE has been preented at
all, ever, in an International NGO Research platform like Brookings
Institute. in Washington, DC.
The problem, or the root of the
proble, of Assam and the NE has been complete ignorance,
mis-representation and confusion about the region from all quarters,
within and outside India. Only
people who can change the situation are the people of Assam & NE. As
such this has been an opportunity let others know what is
happening in Assam and the NE.
From that angle, this
presentation was very important. Brookings Institute has organized
and invited these three individuals from India to talk about Assam
and NE. We are proud that Sanjoy Hazarika happens to be one of the speakers.
(We don't have to know what exactly what he spoke here, because we know what
he will speak to prsent the right picture).
(For those who donot know much
about Sanjoy Hazarika, I can summarize his achievements in the
following sentence: He is a hard working Assamese journalist of high
caliber, who, among other things, visited and dined
with Phizo; who wrote such classic books as 'The Strangers in the
Mist', "The Rites of Passage" etc giving the complete no-nonsense
story of the insurgencies and the immigration problems in NE; who
recently won the an award from the World Bank for designing the 'Ship of
Hope', a unique but simple boat for the Flood Victims in Assam and
who produced the documentary "Brahmaputra", and who I found to be
a dedicated hard working young Assamese who is presently engaged for
the welfare on the entire people of NE without any prejudice. See more of
Sanjoy Hazarika in www.c-nes.com).
Partha Gogoi from Washington DC who
attended the presentation wrote about the workshop thus,"On the
workshop, there was no presentation in the form of a slide-show as such. The
three key-note speakers were asked to talk for at least 15 minutes about
their views on the North East. There were several heavyweights in the crowd
- Salman Haider (India's previous Foreign Secy - was basically India's top
diplomat), Swaminathan Aiyer (writes Swaminomics in Times of India and based
out of DC), Amnesty International Director, Stephen Cohen who's an expert on
South Asian affairs and several interested Americans who seemed to know
about Phizo and the Naga insurgency."
What we need is to find
what the other two key note speakers, namely Lieutenant-General VK
Raghavan, former DG Military Operations of the Indian Army, and Samir K Das
of Calcutta University spoke about. As a community from Assam,
what we can and should do, in my opinion, is to find out more about the
Brookings Institute and other such organizations where we can present the
correct picture about Assam and the North East. Sanjoy Hazarika has
just opened the door for us. He mentioned that the discussion was
co-hosted by Stephen Cohen, a friend of India, who is at Brookings, and
Mutthiah Alagappa of the East-West Centre; We need to explore more about
these individuals for future. May be we can explore to see if we can make it
possible to bring Sanjoy Hazarika for more presentation in such other
international platforms or by any other for that matter.
Rajen .
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, November 08, 2005 8:28
AM
Subject: Re: [Assam] Sanjoy Hazarika:
Making Sense of the NE in Washington DC
Thanks for forwarding it Rajen.
I looked up the Statesman site. I know SH is very knowledgeable about
NE issues, and was thus looking forward to seeing something informative to
be updated with.
But aside from the name-dropping I learned precious little more. Did
I miss something?
c
At 11:30 PM -0600 11/7/05, Barua25 wrote:
Making Sense of the NE in
Washington DC
Sanjoy Hazarika
writes:
Dear
Barua:
We had an excellent discussion at
Brookings, the first
such public event on the NE in decades
(perhaps ever
in DC) and we could press a few home truths
and
outline concerns and issues. You may looknat
my
column on the event at www.thestatesman.net (link
is
NE page and my column, North by North East). The
nE
Page appears every Saturday ion the Statesman and
is
the only rpt only platform for the NE that is read
the
same day in Delhi, Kolkata, Bhuvaneswar and
Siliguri
and on the net, unlike other papers which publish
NE
supplemnts for circulation in the NE only
Sanjoy Hazarika:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
You may see
more of his activities by visiting his web page www.c-nes.org (Center for NE
Studies)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From the NE Page of the
Statesman
North by North East:
Sanjoy Hazarika: Making sense of the N-E in
Washington
At 3-30 pm on Thursday evening,
Washington hosted its first public event on the North-East (at least I
do not recall, in 23 years of travelling to the US capital, of a similar
event) and I was privileged to be among those who made presentations
on the situation in the region.
The others included
Lieutenant-General VK Raghavan, former DG Military Operations of the
Indian Army, and Samir K Das of Calcutta University. The discussions
were held at the Brookings institute and drew a range of academics,
serving and former officials from the US administration, journalists and
human rights activists.
We covered the Naga imbroglio and Ulfa as
well as the role of the military, the region and its neighbours, the
Look East Policy, economics, ethnicity and migration. It was a fairly
comprehensive list and participants asked good, sharp questions on
several issues, including the earlier CPI-M support to migration from
Bangladesh, which it has since discontinued.
Whenever we cover the
North-east to a new and especially Western audience, one is concerned
that we may end up confusing the audience instead of clarifying the
situation, of such complexities is our region.
The discussion was
co-hosted by Stephen Cohen, a friend of India, who is at Brookings, and
Mutthiah Alagappa of the East-West Centre; the latter had just concluded
an exhausting four-day workshop elsewhere in the capital on armed
conflicts in Asia.
In the past days, one has talked with persons from
other countries who are going through similar if not worse crisis than
what the North-east is struggling with: Nepal and Sri Lanka, Thailand
and Myanmar (Burma).
In each of these nations, the peripheral borders
cause the maximum trouble to the states. One was struck by the
difficulties faced by ordinary researchers in gathering information; a
Thai professor even went so far as to say that it would be unsafe for a
Thai researcher to work in a Muslim-dominated belt in non-Thai areas in
southern Thailand where vigilante groups and political and religious
pressures dominate.
In the North-east, the threats to ordinary
citizens and professionals as well as media still exist. We have seen
reference to this, and take encouragement from the position of the
Manipur media which recently passed a resolution saying it would not be
browbeaten by the underground.
---------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
assam
mailing
list
[email protected]
http://assamnet.org/mailman/listinfo/assam_assamnet.org
_______________________________________________
assam
mailing
list
[email protected]
http://assamnet.org/mailman/listinfo/assam_assamnet.org
To help you stay safe and secure online, we've
developed the all new Yahoo!
Security Centre.
|
