Chakma refugees: partition residues and development victims -- CHT and NEFA: from colonial outposts to postcolonial peripheries -- Politics of demographic (dis)order in Northeast India: the idiom of protest -- Chakma diaspora in Northeast India: excluded communities, fragmented identities -- Official discourses of the Chakma issue: centre versus state -- Chakmas' self-perceptions: understanding everyday lived experiences of refugees -- Arunachalis' self-perceptions: assertion and reconstruction of identity and ethnic nationalism -- The making of refugees in South Asia: nation, state and outsiders -- Interrogating India's refugee policy
Summary
What does it mean to be 'stateless' in the modern postcolonial context? This fascinating study addresses this complex question through the case of the Chakma refugees in Arunachal Pradesh. The largely neglected social history of the ethnic Buddhist Chakmas, whose homeland is the Chittagong Hill Tracts (in the present day Bangladesh), carries the multiple imprints of partition, dominant development paradigm and religious persecution. As refugees in the strategically sensitive and disputed territory of Arunachal Pradesh in India's Northeast, they are locked in an intractable conflict over land a
