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Contemporary South Asia

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Stateless in South Asia: the Chakmas between India and Bangladesh

Graham P. Chapman
a a

University of Lancaster and the Open University, UK

Available online: 19 Sep 2011

To cite this article: Graham P. Chapman (2011): Stateless in South Asia: the Chakmas between India and Bangladesh, Contemporary South Asia, 19:3, 345-347 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2011.594288

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between realism and liberalism within Nehrus thinking is highlighted and the fact that he very quickly came to regard himself as the undisputed expert on foreign policy issues. Some clues are provided of Raghavans analytical prism. For instance, when he writes that a core task of political leaders is to demonstrate the links between policies, interests, and values (p. 21). Unfortunately, the linkage between these three components is not overtly explored. Subsequent chapters are highly detailed and intricate in their observations about how Nehru viewed and responded to critical crises. The cases of Junagadh, Hyderabad and Jammu and Kashmir are used to reveal the complications that arose from the issue of accession to the Indian Union in 19471948. The refugee inux and instability within Pakistan provoked numerous occasions of tension and the need for urgent, rm and delicate diplomacy. Chapters seven and eight are devoted to yet another scale of crisis: the boundary dispute with China and the run-up to the SinoIndian war of OctoberNovember 1962. Here perhaps there could have been more analysis of the 1954 Panchasheel Agreement between India and China, the contents and its implications. War and peace in modern India is a polished historical study, making extensive and thorough use of archival material in India and the United Kingdom, drawing upon both private papers and open sources such as newspapers and periodicals from the time. It is also an unusual work, in that the author claims as a main goal the need to uncover patterns and options of strategic behaviour which emerged during this crucial phase and which continue to be relevant for contemporary India. This dimension of the book is particularly important given on-going discussions about Nehrus legacy and the controversies this generates. However, here is where the book suers slightly, for one misses a clear hypothesis relating to policy-making (the processes involved, the importance of individuals versus structures and institutions) that could have provided an organizing framework to the dense empirical chapters. Perhaps because of this the concluding chapter is rather brief. Nevertheless, Raghavans coverage of early foreign policy crises will be of great use to teachers and students of Indian foreign policy, especially as not so much is available on the Junagadh and Hyderabad issues of accession and particularly not linking the various responses to crises. The 1950s in Indias political development remains a wellspring of information and insight into the dynamics of institution building and the learning process that leaders were going through during phases of crisis-management. Jivanta Schottli University of Heidelberg, Germany Email: schottli@yahoo.com 2011, Jivanta Schottli

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Stateless in South Asia: the Chakmas between India and Bangladesh, by Deepak K. Singh, New Delhi, Sage, 2010, xx 289 pp., ISBN 978-81-321-0236-6 In 2000 India was ocially home to some 290,000 international refugees, including refugees from Tibet, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Nepal. Not

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Book reviews

included in this count were Chakmas, a tribal people from the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) on the border between Bangladesh and India. However, 60,000 Chakmas who were eectively expelled from East Pakistans CHT in the late 1960s (many as a result of the Kaptai dam ooding their lands), were resettled in eastern Arunachal Pradesh (then the Northeast Frontier Agency (NEFA)) with ocial Indian support. The citizenship of these people became a complex local, national and international issue, both legally and politically. It is a problem that is routinely side-stepped, but cannot be completely ignored as violence periodically ares between indigenous tribal groups in Arunachal and these newcomers. They have not given up the ght for Indian citizenship, and in 2004 1497 Chakmas had their names included in the electoral list. Village committees celebrated, and organized themselves to ensure these lucky few could vote. But it was a Pyrrhic victory. Every candidate, of every party for which the enfranchised could vote, had a policy of expelling the Chakmas from Arunachal. Deepak Singh lls out the tortuous historical background to the problem, elaborating on the current status of the refugees, and examining Indias response to international resolutions on refugee and other basic human rights. The work has its origins in the authors PhD thesis, which involved extensive eld interviews with the Chakmas, to create an oral history of their physical and emotional journey and their current self-image and aspirations. This material is included in chapters six and seven of the book. Chapters one to ve, and eight and nine, are largely based on documentary and secondary sources, for example, critiquing the Nehru-Elwin analyses and prescriptions for slow and protected change in NEFA. The complexity of developments in the Northeast has worsened the plight of the Chakmas. Chapter three discusses the Khudiram Chakma court case led against the Union Territory of Arunachal Pradesh. The case was an attempt to establish the citizenship of the Chakmas. Prior to independence, what was to become NEFA had been designated the Backward Tracts of Assam, beyond the sphere of the Assamese Assembly and directly under the aegis of the Governor of Assam. After independence, NEFA was specically a responsibility of the President of India, but vested in the Governor of Assam. NEFA had, and Arunachal Pradesh (which moved from being a Union Territory to statehood in 1987) has, a constitutional clause that continues a prohibition of any but indigenous tribes owning land in the state. The Chakmas left a country, East Pakistan, which no longer exists. Bangladesh will take no responsibility for Pakistans actions. The Chakmas were given land by an agency arguably operating beyond its competence, but under the authority of the Governor of Assam. The Indian Citizenship Act of 1985 confers citizenship on persons who came to Assam before 1st January 1966, but denes Assam as constituted in 1985 that is, after the separation of the Union Territory of Arunachal, and before statehood. Khudiram Chakmas case was rejected because the Chakmas were in a bit of Assam that no longer was. Along with his hopes went those of thousands of others for yet more decades. This kind of quagmire is repeated when it comes to the interpretation of human rights and refugee status of the Chakmas. This book is written in elegant and engaging prose. I do not think that the structure adequately separates the various issues, and in many sections there is a mixture of broad historical material with more detailed data and observations. The result is a degree of repetition, with the same subject (and on one occasion the same quotation) appearing in dierent contexts. This is a minor complaint to make, given

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the range and wealth of material given to us by the author. The book is a substantial contribution to understanding Indias complex Northeast. Graham P. Chapman University of Lancaster and the Open University, UK Email:grahampchapman@googlemail.com 2011, Graham P. Chapman

Pirate modernity: Delhis media urbanism, by Ravi Sundaram, Abingdon, Routledge, 2010, 228 pp., ISBN 978-81-89643-07-2 In the preface of the book, Ravi Sundaram writes, . . . rather than media analysis, it is the sensate properties of the material world that I am drawn to in this book (x). This explanatory note is necessary, for the title of this book is somewhat misleading. While the book is centrally concerned with piracy and with the proliferation of media forms in urban Delhi, it does much more than that. Sundaram succeeds in writing an unprecedented Delhi book a tactile, sensate history of the contemporary city. Charting a path between the impassioned polemic of Mike Davis and the cool aerial theorizing of Rem Koolhaas, and informed by insights from philosophy, anthropology, social theory and architecture, in both its form and its contents the book poses an old question anew how does one write of the city? This is a particularly pertinent question for those who work and write on Delhi. The dominant themes in all writings on Delhi academic, literary and popular have been death, catastrophe and trauma. This is not surprising, for as Sundaram writes, More than most Indian cities, Delhi owes an unredeemed debt to its dead (179). The traumatic massacres after the crushing of the rebellion in 1857, partition violence in 1947, and the anti-Sikh pogroms in 1984 all cast a long, dark shadow on scholars and litterateurs writing on the city, while simultaneously being almost completely absent from popular memory and everyday discourse. While acknowledging the unredeemed dead of the city, Sundaram is concerned with a dierent problematic what does it mean to live in the city? While a common sense view of the Emergency of 19751977 sees the demolitions and dislocations of that period only as tragedy, Sundaram also shows us how the Emergency planners released new spirits of urban expansion and proliferation (77), new possibilities for the urban. He plunges us into the everyday narcotic disorientation of the senses (112) made possible by the decentralized proliferation of piracy and media technology and into the world of sensory shock, of death and the accident that characterizes the uncanny experience of road-travel in Delhi. The writing is sensory, tactile and anecdotal, while also being theoretically and historically informed; giving the book an unusual, challenging and sometimes delightful form. For example, in the 30-odd pages of chapter three, The pirate kingdom, Sundaram moves from the philosophical genealogies of the valuation of the original over the copy from Plato to Delueze, to the hurly-burly of eye-witnessing an anti-piracy enforcement raid in the underground market of Palika Bazar, to a personal account of the epistemic murk in which the exhausted anti-piracy enforcer operates, as unable as anyone else to maintain the distinctions between original and copy, legal and illegal.

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