Re: [Assam] Sanjoy Hazarika: Making Sense of the NE in Washington DC

Tue, 08 Nov 2005 10:41:11 -0800

Rajen-da,
 
This seems like a good development. Hopefully more people will take up the matter at World Bank - which is also in DC and at UN which is nearby at New York. Partha Gogoi's and Sanjoy Hazarika's comments together give a good picture. Just wish we had transcript of what they said since -- we could also be enlightened like the folks at Brookings.
 
Umesh

Rajen Barua <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Chandan:
We must try to see the event in right perspective. If you do that, we (guys from Assam or NE) will not be looking at the presentation to find anything new (in fact there is nothing new for us to know about NE), but to find that Assam and the NE has been preented at all, ever, in an International NGO Research platform like Brookings Institute. in Washington, DC.
The problem, or the root of the proble, of Assam and the NE has been complete ignorance, mis-representation and confusion about the region from all quarters, within and outside India.  Only people who can change the situation are the people of Assam & NE. As such this has been an opportunity let others know what is happening in Assam and the NE.
 
From that angle, this presentation was very important. Brookings Institute has organized and invited these three individuals from India to talk about Assam and NE. We are proud that Sanjoy Hazarika happens to be one of the speakers. (We don't have to know what exactly what he spoke here, because we know what he will speak to prsent the right picture).
 
(For those who donot know much about Sanjoy Hazarika, I can summarize his achievements in the following sentence: He is a hard working Assamese journalist of high caliber, who, among other things, visited and dined with Phizo; who wrote such classic books as 'The Strangers in the Mist', "The Rites of Passage" etc giving the complete no-nonsense story of the insurgencies and the immigration problems in NE; who recently won the an award from the World Bank for designing the 'Ship of Hope', a unique but simple boat for the Flood Victims in Assam and who produced the documentary "Brahmaputra", and who I found to be a dedicated hard working young Assamese who is presently engaged for the welfare on the entire people of NE without any prejudice. See more of Sanjoy Hazarika in www.c-nes.com).
 
Partha Gogoi from Washington DC who attended the presentation wrote about the workshop thus,"On the workshop, there was no presentation in the form of a slide-show as such. The three key-note speakers were asked to talk for at least 15 minutes about their views on the North East. There were several heavyweights in the crowd - Salman Haider (India's previous Foreign Secy - was basically India's top diplomat), Swaminathan Aiyer (writes Swaminomics in Times of India and based out of DC), Amnesty International Director, Stephen Cohen who's an expert on South Asian affairs and several interested Americans who seemed to know about Phizo and the Naga insurgency."
 
What we need is to find what the other two key note speakers, namely Lieutenant-General VK Raghavan, former DG Military Operations of the Indian Army, and Samir K Das of Calcutta University spoke about. As a community from Assam, what we can and should do, in my opinion, is to find out more about the Brookings Institute and other such organizations where we can present the correct picture about Assam and the North East. Sanjoy Hazarika has just opened the door for us. He mentioned that the  discussion was co-hosted by Stephen Cohen, a friend of India, who is at Brookings, and Mutthiah Alagappa of the East-West Centre; We need to explore more about these individuals for future. May be we can explore to see if we can make it possible to bring Sanjoy Hazarika for more presentation in such other international platforms or by any other for that matter.
 
Rajen .
 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, November 08, 2005 8:28 AM
Subject: Re: [Assam] Sanjoy Hazarika: Making Sense of the NE in Washington DC

Thanks for forwarding it Rajen.


I looked up the Statesman site. I know SH is very knowledgeable about NE issues, and was thus looking forward to seeing something informative to be updated with.

But aside from the name-dropping I learned precious little more. Did I miss something?
 
c

At 11:30 PM -0600 11/7/05, Barua25 wrote:
Making Sense of the NE in Washington DC
 
Sanjoy Hazarika writes:
 
Dear Barua:
 
We had an excellent discussion at Brookings, the first
 such public event on the NE in decades (perhaps ever
 in DC) and we could press a few home truths and
 outline concerns and issues.  You may looknat my
 column on the event at www.thestatesman.net (link is
 NE page and my column, North by North East). The nE
 Page appears every Saturday ion the Statesman and is
 the only rpt only platform for the NE that is read the
 same day in Delhi, Kolkata, Bhuvaneswar and Siliguri
 and on the net, unlike other papers which publish NE
 supplemnts for circulation in the NE only
Sanjoy Hazarika:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
You may see more of his activities by visiting his web page www.c-nes.org (Center for NE Studies)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From the NE Page of the Statesman
North by North East: Sanjoy Hazarika: Making sense of the N-E in Washington
At 3-30 pm on Thursday evening, Washington hosted its first public event on the North-East (at least I do not recall, in 23 years of travelling to the US capital, of a similar event) – and I was privileged to be among those who made presentations on the situation in the region.
The others included Lieutenant-General VK Raghavan, former DG Military Operations of the Indian Army, and Samir K Das of Calcutta University. The discussions were held at the Brookings institute and drew a range of academics, serving and former officials from the US administration, journalists and human rights activists.
We covered the Naga imbroglio and Ulfa as well as the role of the military, the region and its neighbours, the Look East Policy, economics, ethnicity and migration. It was a fairly comprehensive list and participants asked good, sharp questions on several issues, including the earlier CPI-M support to migration from Bangladesh, which it has since discontinued.
Whenever we cover the North-east to a new and especially Western audience, one is concerned that we may end up confusing the audience instead of clarifying the situation, of such complexities is our region.
The discussion was co-hosted by Stephen Cohen, a friend of India, who is at Brookings, and Mutthiah Alagappa of the East-West Centre; the latter had just concluded an exhausting four-day workshop elsewhere in the capital on armed conflicts in Asia.
In the past days, one has talked with persons from other countries who are going through similar if not worse crisis than what the North-east is struggling with: Nepal and Sri Lanka, Thailand and Myanmar (Burma).
In each of these nations, the peripheral borders cause the “maximum trouble” to the states. One was struck by the difficulties faced by ordinary researchers in gathering information; a Thai professor even went so far as to say that it would be unsafe for a Thai researcher to work in a Muslim-dominated belt in non-Thai areas in southern Thailand where vigilante groups and political and religious pressures dominate.
In the North-east, the threats to ordinary citizens and professionals as well as media still exist. We have seen reference to this, and take encouragement from the position of the Manipur media which recently passed a resolution saying it would not be browbeaten by the underground.
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