Author: Sanjoy Hazarika
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 1995
Language: English
Pages: 388
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0140240527
Description
Of the many associated with this book, there are some who can be named but there are others, by force of their professions and requests for anonymity, who asked not to be identified. There are many more whose names may not figure but who have had a generic role in it; school friends, family associates, relatives, contacts in officialdom and politics and other who I have interviews or met just once during reporting assignment to the area over more than twenty years but whose strength of conviction has remained a constant memory. This list, spanning all my life and the entire region from Nepal to Nagaland, Dhaka to Arunachal Pradesh and Bhutan, is far too lengthy to contemplate publishing.
This book would have been completed earlier but for events that disrupted millions of lives across India, including those of journalists: the demolition of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya, by a Hindu mob o 6 December 1992 and the communal riots that followed across the country. In January 1993, the selective massacres of Muslims at Bombay an the devastating revenge bomb blasts there two months later led to extensive traveling and reporting for the New York Times. In addition, there was normal reporting: the Punjab, environmental, economic and political issues such as the billion dollar scam in the Bombay stock market, corruption charges and infighting that brought prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao’s government almost to its knees.
A powerful and well-researched account of India’s troubled Northeast.
Strangers of the Mist…is a sincere and warm understanding of the problem of North East. We tend to neglect the people and that region. It actually shows how we are losing our people to violence and drugs.
-The Pioneer
Sanjoy Hazarika discusses with a wealth of circumstantial detail problems of not only his part of India but also Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan. Most important, he ventures to suggest solutions…His style is simple, fee from verbiage making this book perhaps the best written so far on the north-east.
-The Statesman
Strangers of the Mist is an epic story, one of neglect, apathy, subversiveness and change and the social inequilibrium that came with these.
-The Telegraph
What makes Sanjoy Hazarika’s documented and heart-felt study stand out is its journalistic liveliness.
-The Hindustan Times
What sets (Hazarika’s) work apart is his deep understanding of the region and its people and his obvious empathy with their concerns, hopes and aspirations.
-The Sentinel
Contents
ACKNOWLDEGEMNTSS
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
SECTION ONE
The Bangladesh Syndrome
From Dhaka To Delhi
Neighbours and Disasters
A Frontier State And Nationalism
The Gandhi Card
Nagaland: 1000 Years In A Lifetime
The Hills Revolt
SECTIN TWO
The New Rebellions
The Boys In Business
The Rise and Fall Of ULFA
The NSCN Takes Wings
A Stepmother In Delhi
Neighbours, Secret Affairs
SECTION THREE
A Search For Solutions
A Security Doctrine For The East
SECTION FOUR
Appendices
Select Bibliography
Index