I recommend it strongly. Just finished reading
Baruah's Post Frontier Blues. His analysis is
thoughtful, cognizant of realities both historic
and present and his recommendations make
eminent sense.
For all those who are agonizing over the issue of
B'deshis in Assam and the contiguous region, and
are looking for a humane and realizable solution,
ought to attend. It will be very informative.
But to those who are mired in Hinduttwa-badi
rhetoric and are unable or unwilling to recognize
reality, it might be disappointing.
cm
At 11:02 AM +0100 8/10/07, utpal borpujari wrote:
The Hienrich Boll Foundation, India Habitat
Centre, Max Mueller Bhavan and Zubaan are
pleased to invite you to the first lecture in
the series Partition: The Long Shadow
at Gulmohar, India Habitat Centre, Vardhaman Marg, New Delhi
at 6.30 pm on 17 August 2007
THE CONTRADICTIONS OF NATIONAL SPACE
Contested Legality and Citizenship Practices in Post-Partition Northeast India
by Dr Sanjib Baruah
The shadow of the Partition of 1947 looms large
on the contemporary life of Northeast India in
one distinctive way. On the one hand, the new
international border dividing India and East
Pakistan/Bangladesh is seen as inviolable. On
the other hand, the partition could not change
the position that the region acquired in
colonial times as a frontier. The flow of people
from one of the subcontinentÂ’s most densely
populated areas, to a relatively sparsely
populated region open to new settlements, could
not suddenly be turned off. The border remains
extremely porous till this day, and there is an
extensive blurring between citizens and
non-citizens. Viewed through the lenses of
actual practice of citizenship, rather than
legal fictions, what we have in many parts of
Northeast India arguably, is a flexible
citizenship regime -- a flexible approach to
voting where people can vote despite
indeterminate citizenship status. Focusing on
Assam, the paper will examine the politics of
how this regime has come about. While the
discourse of illegal immigration dominates
headlines, given the routines of illicit
trans-border activity, the political aesthetics
of everydayness has framed competing
perceptions. Despite obvious tensions in this
regime, it points to the reality of an actually
existing transnational space that the trope of
inviolable borders cannot handle. The regionÂ’s
future political stability in the long run, I
argue, will depend on an ability to develop
institutions and practices that are in line with
this reality, rather than policies that seek to
unilaterally enforce border control.
Sanjib Baruah is Professor of Political Studies,
Bard College, New York. He holds concurrent
professorial appointments at the Centre for
Policy Research, New Delhi and the Indian
Institute of Technology, Guahati. He is the
author of Postfrontier Blues: Toward a New
Policy Framework for Northeast India (Washington
D.C.: East-West Center, 2007), Durable Disorder:
Understanding the Politics of Northeast India
(Oxford University Press, 2005), and India
Against Itself: Assam and the Politics of
Nationality (Oxford University Press, 1999).
Yahoo! Answers - Get better answers from someone
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