Sanjoy Hazarika
Strangers of the Mist
Tales of War and Peace from Indias Northeast
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
PENGUIN BOOKS
STRANGERS OF THE MIST
Sanjoy Hazarika was born in Shillong, the then capital of Assam, in 1954. One of the best-known faces and articulate voices of the Northeast, he studied at St. Edmunds College and later studied journalism and printing in London. In a career in journalism that has spanned over thirty years, he has worked with the New York Times , the Associated Press, edited the Northeast page of the Statesman and written columns and essays for a range of newspapers and journals. He has won several media awards; in 2010 he was awarded the Dr Jean Meyer Global Citizenship Award by Tufts University for his work for the marginalized and vulnerable in South Asia. Hazarika has held fellowships at Harvard University, the University of Kentucky and at Tufts. He has been selected for a Residency Fellowship at the Rockefeller Centre at Bellagio, Italy. His books include Bhopal : The Lessons of a Tragedy (listed by the Observer as among the ten best science books of 1988), Rites of Passage : Border Crossings , Imagined Homelands , India s East and Bangladesh and Writing on the Wall : Reflections on India s North-east . Currently, he is the Saifuddin Kitchlew Chair at Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi where he is also setting up a Centre for North East Studies. Since 2000, he has run the Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research in the Northeast with a focus on health (the well-known boat clinics programme), education, environment and governance.
Sanjoy Hazarika divides his time between New Delhi, other parts of India and his beloved home region. He has a daughter, Meghna; his wife, Minal, passed away in 2009.
For my father and mother
And for Minal, for all our journeys
and a life together
Our traditions are being destroyed. Soon, we will be the nowhere people, without a past or a future. I tell the young men, Do not throw away your traditions. Not all of them were bad.
In the ways of the new government, the new rulers, there is no love, there is no care. India has not done anything for us except after the Chinese aggression of 1962: it needed a shock to do something for the Northeast. Now at least, people are clothed, they are learning personal hygiene, they are getting educated, there are some health services. It may not be bad that some traditions are going. But we have to ask ourselves: where are we headed?
The new officers, they sign files, they come to work for some time and go away without touching the lives or hearts of ordinary folk. These big officers and politicians, they have no knowledge of what is going on: they step in and out of big offices, cars, airplanes. Our boys are following their example. People have stopped doing things for the common good. Nowadays, the first thing that they want to know is what is in it for themselves.
Village elder at Thankip village , Arunachal Pradesh .
Note from the Author
This Introduction, as well as a new book on the region that is in the works, is long overdue and I have to thank the patience of my editors at Penguin who have understood the difficulties I have faced in writing themnot because of being too busy but because of a terrible personal loss in Minals departure, after a relationship of thirty-seven years of which we were married for thirty-one, which I am still coping with, with the support, counsel, love and kindness of Meghna, my daughter, and close friends. This work and much of what I have been able to do in this life would not have been possible without Minal, whose commitment to her family always over-rode her interests and involvement in issues and concerns. These ranged from media mobilization and analysis (of Hindi and Gujarati TV serials, news programmes and advertising, looking at content on gender bias from the viewers perspective), working with mentally challenged children, the worlds of finance and investment (which I still do not understand), engineering (her training), travel (one of her great loves) and time with friends and her larger family.
I have not met a more frank or courageous person. The months of her illness are a rushed blank and remain the most painful and difficult days of my life, when Meghna and I, her sisters and relatives and friends went through hell, preserving our sanity but barely, knowing that she would not have us weaken. I cannot identify those months of her in the hospital bed with the energetic person all of us knew. She was fifty-six; there were still worlds to see, share and explore. I know I will have to traverse the rest of this journey without her. Yet, our minds are restless and wander...
New Delhi
28 January 2011
Sanjoy Hazarika
Introduction
As the sun rises in the Northeast, much of India sleeps. To paraphrase Jawaharlal Nehrus memorable moving remarks when the sun set on the British Empire in 1947: At the stroke of midnight when the world sleeps, India awakes to life and freedom. Indeed, as the early morning light washes across the Northeast of India, darkness prevails over the rest of the country.
As a result, since Independence, instead of following the natural cycle and that of the sun, India and its eastern periphery have been trapped in a time zone that makes neither common sense nor social and economic sense. The relentless cycle of reports of how the region is lagging behind the rest of the country by as much as 35 to 50 per cent are a grim reminder of how power brokers and politicians, bureaucrats and the national security lobby have made an unmitigated mess of conditions for all these years and impoverished an area that has been enduringly rich in its natural resources, natural beauty and the striking diversity and beauty of its people.
Time is a very basic issue that lies at the foundation of how we measure our days, our productivity and the structure of our lives and the Indian Standard Time formula is part of the one size fits all, of what I describe as the CPWD (Central Public Works Department) Syndrome which ensures that applications and supposed solutions which are totally irrelevant to the Northeastor any other part of the country for that matterare imposed on us. Of course, one of the results is that BAU or Business As Usual thrives, benefiting the political babu securityinsurgency/militancy lobbies. The IST paradigm is harmful not just for the North Eastern Region (NER) but for all of India which should at the least, have three time zones.
To emphasize this point, let me given an example: when it is 5 a.m. in the eastern borders, say in the Patkai Hill range that straddles Myanmar and the Northeast, the actual time difference between that point and the western most point of Kutch in Gujarat is about 126 minutes, say two hours and six minutes. How is this calculated?
Simple: Indias Mean Longitude which the Government of India has taken as the basis to calculate Indian Standard Time is 85.2 degrees East of Greenwich Mean Time in London, which is the foundation of all international time zones. But the Patkai range is 97.3 degrees East and Kutch is 65.6 degrees West, i.e. a gap of 31.7 degrees. Now, according to the way international time zones are calculated, four minutes is what a degree of longitude measures in actual time. That means that we are looking at 31.7 degrees multiplied by 4, which equals to 126.8 minutes, which gives us the figure in the previous paragraph.
