Stranger to the Land

The subtitle of the book promises tales of war and peace from the Northeast of India. Yet, more than 130 irrelevant pages are devoted to Bangladesh and Bhutan. The chapters on Bangladesh—three in the beginning and one at the end—do not have much connection with insurgency in the Northeast. A fetish with lebensraum has led Hazarika to waste many pages on Bangladesh when a couple of paragraphs would have been sufficient.

Despite this prolixity, he is not convincing. Assam being swamped by Bangladeshis may have been the immediate reason for some dissatisfied youths to combine as ULFA, but this was just one of the many experiences that had convinced Assam of the Centre’s indifference. His account about Bhutan is dasho-sided. Even for the dilettante liberal that Sanjoy Hazarika is, his comments on the Lhotshampa´s predicament show lack of sympathy, research and objectivity. Why should people desert the house of their forefathers unless forced to do so? Would anyone voluntarily opt for the squalor of a refugee camp?

Hazarika is gentle towards the insurgents, ignoring their indiscriminate extortions and assaults on innocents, and more than considerate towards the armed forces, commenting generally on their tactless excesses. Only from the safety of the Annexure does he include a litany of their human rights violations. Otherwise, he suffers from amnesia as far as the uniformed forces are concerned. In his anxiety not to offend the powers that were, he has not given a credible explanation for the rise of insurgents in Nagaland, Manipur and Mizoram.