[Assam] for info: Sanjib Baruah's lecture

[utpal borpujari]

The Hienrich Boll Foundation, India Habitat Centre, Max Mueller Bhavan and Zubaan are pleased to invite you to the first lecture in the series Partition: The Long Shadow
 
at Gulmohar, India Habitat Centre, Vardhaman Marg, New Delhi 
 
at 6.30 pm on 17 August 2007 
 
  
THE CONTRADICTIONS OF NATIONAL SPACE
 
Contested Legality and Citizenship Practices in Post-Partition Northeast India 
 
by Dr Sanjib Baruah
 
The shadow of the Partition of 1947 looms large on the contemporary life of Northeast India in one distinctive way.  On the one hand, the new international border dividing India and East Pakistan/Bangladesh is seen as inviolable. On the other hand, the partition could not change the position that the region acquired in colonial times as a frontier. The flow of people from one of the subcontinent’s most densely populated areas, to a relatively sparsely populated region open to new settlements, could not suddenly be turned off.   The border remains extremely porous till this day, and there is an extensive blurring between citizens and non-citizens.  Viewed through the lenses of actual practice of citizenship, rather than legal fictions, what we have in many parts of Northeast India arguably, is a flexible citizenship regime -- a flexible approach to voting where people can vote despite indeterminate citizenship status. Focusing on Assam, the paper will examine the politics of
 how this regime has come about. While the discourse of illegal immigration dominates headlines, given the routines of illicit trans-border activity, the political aesthetics of everydayness has framed competing perceptions. Despite obvious tensions in this regime, it points to the reality of an actually existing transnational space that the trope of inviolable borders cannot handle. The region’s future political stability in the long run, I argue, will depend on an ability to develop institutions and practices that are in line with this reality, rather than policies that seek to unilaterally enforce border control. 
 
Sanjib Baruah is Professor of Political Studies, Bard College, New York. He holds concurrent professorial appointments at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi and the Indian Institute of Technology, Guahati.  He is the author of Postfrontier Blues: Toward a New Policy Framework for Northeast India (Washington D.C.: East-West Center, 2007), Durable Disorder: Understanding the Politics of Northeast India (Oxford University Press, 2005), and India Against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality (Oxford University Press, 1999).

       
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