This comprehensive study explores issues pertaining to the stateless status of the ethnic Buddhist Chakma refugees in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, who originally belonged to the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHTs). What sets it apart is its holistic overview of the social history of the Chakmas from the colonial period onwards. While analyzing and emphasizing the current plight of the Chakmas in India as stateless refugees, it raises the concomitant question of what it takes to qualify as citizens of a modern postcolonial state.
Author(s): Deepak K Singh
Edition: First Edition
Year: 2010
Language: English
Pages: 320
Contents......Page 8
List of Maps......Page 10
List of Abbreviations......Page 11
Foreword......Page 13
Preface......Page 16
Acknowledgements......Page 22
1 - Chakma Refugees: Partition Residues and Development Victims......Page 26
2 - CHT and NEFA: From Colonial Outposts to Postcolonial Peripheries......Page 55
3 - Politics of Demographic (Dis)order in Northeast India: The Idiom of Protest......Page 96
4 - Chakma Diaspora in Northeast India: Excluded Communities, Fragmented Identities......Page 135
5 - Official Discourses of the Chakma Issue: Centre versus State......Page 155
6 - Chakmas’ Self-perceptions: Understanding Everyday Lived Experiences of Refugees......Page 176
7 - Arunachalis’ Self-perceptions: Assertion and Reconstruction of Identity and Ethnic Nationalism......Page 205
8 - The Making of Refugees in South Asia: Nation, State and Outsiders......Page 246
9 - Interrogating India’s Refugee Policy......Page 273
References......Page 293
Index......Page 308
About the Author......Page 315
