In recent years there has been a significant reorientation in India's policy towards its Northeast region. Yet, Indian policy thinking has been insulated from the virtual intellectual revolution in the last one decade that studies armed civil conflicts and ways to manage, resolve, and transform
them. This volume emphasizes the term 'rethinking', and offers new ways of understanding the conflicts and of ways to resolve them.
The essays discuss wide-ranging issues which include the multilayered nature of the conflict in the Northeast, and how democratic politics and the world of
armed rebellions intersect in complex ways in this region. An analysis of the Naga war and its nation-building project is discussed. How the Northeast figures in postcolonial India's national imagination; how Assamese society engages with the term 'terrorist'; and how state-society conflicts are
muted in Mizoram have also been interrogated. The role of ideas in conflict transformation, and an alternative vision of development in Arunachal Pradesh are also discussed.
List of Photographs and Tables
1. Sanjib Baruah: Introduction
Part I: Stalemated Conflicts: What Cost?
2. Ananya Vajpeyi: Resenting the Indian State: For a New Political Practice in the Northeast
3. Bodhisattva Kar: When was the Postcolonial? A History of Policing
Impossible Lines
Part II: Nation and Its Discontents
4. Dolly Kikon: From Loincloth, Suits, to Battle Greens: Politics of Clothing the 'Naked' Nagas
5. Rakhee Kalita: Writing Terror: Men of Rebellion and Contemporary Assamese Literature
6. Nandana Dutta: Narrative Agency and
Thinking about Conflicts
Part III: Discourses of Inclusion and Exclusion
7. Pradip Phanjoubam: Northeast Problems as a Subject and Object
8. Bhagat Oinam: Preparing for a Cohesive Northeast: Problems of Discourse
9. Makiko Kimura: Agency of Rioters: A Study of Decision-making
in the Nellie Massacre, Assam, 1983
Part IV: Making Peace, Making War: India's Peace Policy
10. M. Sajjad Hassan: The Mizo Exception: State-Society Cohesion and Institutional Capability
11. Samir Kumar Das: Peace sans Democracy? A Study of Ethnic Peace Accords in Northeast
India
12. H. Kham Khan Suan: Hills-Valley Divide as a Site of Conflict: Emerging Dialogic Space in Manipur
Part V: Breaking the Impasse
13. Subir Bhaumik: Just Development: A Strategy for Ethnic Reconciliation in Tripura
14. Betsy Taylor: Grounds for Democratic Hope in
Arunachal Pradesh: Emerging Civic Geographies and the Reinvention of Gender and Tribal Identities
15. Bethany Lacina: Rethinking Delhi's Northeast India Policy: Why neither Counter-insurgency nor Winning Hearts and Minds is the Way Forward
References
Notes on Contributors
Index
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Sanjib Baruah is Professor of Political Studies, Bard College, New York, and Honorary Professor at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.
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