Northeast India: Development, Communalism, and Insurgency represents a pioneer effort in understanding the linkage among the phenomena of development, communalism, and insurgency. Heretofore insurgency has been viewed as breakdown of law and order and a challenge to the legitimate centralized political authority. The present book argues against this partisan view and underlines the fact that to treat it as a problem of law and order is to tum a blind eye to the causes which, when ignored for long, lead to political violence and insurgency. The cause of insurgency lies in the frustrated aspirations by tardy development; this paves the way for the politicization of traditional socio-cultural referents of identity-formation; this, in tum, paves the way for intense political agitation which eventually graduates into political violence and insurgency if the smoulderning discontent is but pacified. The root of insurgency lies in unsatisfied political demands that are considered by the agitators as legitimate. This is the causal path that development, Communalism and Insurgency traces in the Northeast, although the theoretical paradigm development in this study has universal applicability. While developing this theoretical paradigm, the book also focuses on some important aspects of political life and relations in Assam and meghalaya, the two foci of this study, and probes into the subjective world of the people in these two states. The combination of these dimensions, the theoretical and the pragmatic has made this study a landmark in the study of the linkage among development, communalism, and insurgency.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ramashray Roy
Prof. Ramashray Roy is an eminent political philosopher who has, through his numerous writing, opened new vistas not only in different areas of social sciences but also in Vedic studies. Prof. Roy worked as a Senior Fellow as well as Director of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, Director of the Indian Council of Social Science Research, New Delhi as well as its National Fellow and Fellow of the Indian Institute of Advance Study, Shimla. He is currently the Fellow of the Indian Council of Historical Research, New Delhi. He has published more than two dozen books and over fifty articles in Journals in India and outside. His publications include Dalit, Development and Democracy; Politics and Society; Politics and Beyond; Sanskaras in India Tradition and Culture (SHIPRA).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Sandhya Goswami
Sandhya Goswami is a professor and chairperson in the Department of Policial science, Guwahati University, Guwahati, Assam. She did her M.A. and M.Phil degrees from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and PH.D. from Gauhati University. She has authored Language Politics in Assam; she has also published several research papers in prominent journals and edited books.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Sujata Miri
Sujata Miri (b. 1942), is a Professor of Philosophy and at present she is the Dean of the School of Humanities and Education of North-Eastern Hill University. Throughout her long career as a teacher and researcher she has developed a deep interest in the understanding of cultures other than one’s own, particularly tribal cultures. Her interests range from philosophy to anthropology and history of the tribal people of the north-eastern region. Her published books include: Suffering, Religion and Society: North-East India (Ed); The Khasi World View: A Conceptual Exploration; Langmai Nagas: Legends and Stories; Communalism in Assam: A Civilisation Approach.
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