Beyond Counter-Insurgency

Description

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.

About the author

Sanjib Baruah is Professor of Political Studies, Bard College, New York, and Honorary Professor, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

Table of contents

List of Photographs and Tables
1:Introduction (Sanjib Baruah)
Part I: Stalemated Conflicts: What Cost?
2:Resenting the Indian State: For a New Political Practice in the Northeast (Ananya Vajpeyi)
3:When was the Postcolonial? A History of Policing Impossible Lines (Bodhisattva Kar)
Part II: Nation and Its Discontents
4:From Loincloth, Suits, to Battle Greens: Politics of Clothing the 'Naked' Nagas (Dolly Kikon)
5:Writing Terror: Men of Rebellion and Contemporary Assamese Literature (Rakhee Kalita)
6:Narrative Agency and Thinking about Conflicts (Nandana Dutta)
Part III: Discourses of Inclusion and Exclusion
7:Northeast Problems as a Subject and Object (Pradip Phanjoubam)
8:Preparing for a Cohesive Northeast: Problems of Discourse (Bhagat Oinam)
9:Agency of Rioters: A Study of Decision-making in the Nellie Massacre, Assam, 1983 (Makiko Kimura)
Part IV: Making Peace, Making War: India's Peace Policy
10:The Mizo Exception: State-Society Cohesion and Institutional Capability (M. Sajjad Hassan)
11:Peace sans Democracy? A Study of Ethnic Peace Accords in Northeast India (Samir Kumar Das)
12:Hills-Valley Divide as a Site of Conflict: Emerging Dialogic Space in Manipur (H. Kham Khan Suan)
Part V: Breaking the Impasse
13:Just Development: A Strategy for Ethnic Reconciliation in Tripura (Subir Bhaumik)
14:Grounds for Democratic Hope in Arunachal Pradesh: Emerging Civic Geographies and the Reinvention of Gender and Tribal Identities (Betsy Taylor)
15:Rethinking Delhi's Northeast India Policy: Why neither Counter-insurgency nor Winning Hearts and Minds is the Way Forward (Bethany Lacina)
References
Notes on Contributors
Index