Rites of Passage is an effort to give migration a human face, merging narratives and analysis. It is based on my own background as a reporter for the New York Times and other publications, my travels, especially over the past eighteen years, and the research material I developed and gathered from Assam, Bangladesh and other parts of the world. I have been engaged in this process of dialogue and policy development through my columns and lectures, seminars and workshops over the past several years, as well as through my work with the National Security Advisory Board, the newly-formed Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research and the National Commission for the Review of the Working of the Constitution. In the present work I have sought to stitch together this body of work, built up over the years.

People are on the move and their movement tells the story of a changing world.2

For migration, forced and unforced, is our history. The latter encompasses those who move, voluntarily, across state borders in search of livelihoods and cultural compacts. The former are those who have been pushed out by governments or political and social groups hostile to their very existence. They leave because they fear for their lives.

Bangladesh is an extraordinary example of a nation that has seen both trends. The best known was the 1970-71 outflow of more than nine million refugees who fled a brutal Pakistani crackdown on pro-liberation East Pakistan in 1970-71 before Indian army troops and Bangla guerrillas brought freedom to that land. But preceding and consequent to that tragic chapter in the life of the subcontinent, the movement of people for economic and environmental reasons was (and continues to be) a factor in the Brahmaputra, and Barak valleys, in tiny Tripura, not to speak of West Bengal and even across India. Visibly reshaping and transforming the demographic, ethnic, linguistic and religious profile of large parts of the population in these areas, it stirred a potent brew of hatred, suspicion and fear.