Cover

Sanjoy Hazarika

Rites of Passage

Border Crossing, Imagined Homelands, India’s East and Bangladesh

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

RITES OF PASSAGE

Sanjoy Hazarika was born in Shillong, then capital of the undivided state of Assam, in 1954. He studied at Shillong, London and Cambridge, Massachusetts, at Harvard University, and was a correspondent for the New York Times out of South Asia between 1981–1996. Formerly a member of the first National Security Advisory Board, he is now part of the National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution. He has also set up a Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research. A Senior Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, Sanjoy Hazarika is a columnist for several newspapers. He also makes documentaries, especially on the North East, and is completing a film on the Brahmaputra. Sanjoy Hazarika divides his time between the North East and New Delhi where he lives with his wife and daughter.

Dedication

For Myron Weiner, friend, scholar, social historian, well-wisher of India and its North East

Foreword

Over the past years, Sanjoy Hazarika, a former reporter for the New York Times and currently a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, has been engaged in a study on an extremely relevant issue in eastern India which has defied a solution. The question of migration has spread much bitterness and, tension in the North East of India, not to speak of violence, and troubled relations between India and Bangladesh. But many of the substantial issues have been lost in rhetoric and political posturing.

Bangladesh’s official position is that there are no illegal migrants and that India is deliberately pushing out its principal religious minority. India says that Bangladeshis are pouring into its territory. What is the truth? Why do people move? What are their stories, beyond the debris of statistics and sharp rhetoric which obfuscate the real issues?

The phenomenon of illegal migration is not limited to the geographical area of South Asia, or even Asia taken as a whole. It is an international problem that has led to conflicts in different parts of the world and an exacerbation of social, economic and environmental pressures. The Centre for Policy Research has long taken an interest in issues of population and population movements and this book is part of a larger concern in CPR about peace, development and security in the South Asian region.

The reasons behind migration, where people move from and where they are headed, the lack of a comprehensive strategy to tackle the economic and social roots of these difficulties, the use of religious radicals for purposes of ideology and destabilization, and the personal stories of tragedy, despair and hope—these combine to make an extremely readable book, written in a non-academic style that will make it appeal to a wider audience.