Blisters on their Feet
Tales of Internally Displaced Persons in India's North East
- Samir Kumar Das - Vice-Chancellor, University of North Bengal
Social & Cultural Anthropology
Blisters on their Feet: Tales of Internally Displaced Persons in India's North East provides contrasting perspectives on what is often considered a simple answer to displacement, and views the phenomenon as a logical culmination of a package of policies initiated and undertaken in the region, particularly in the age of globalization. The case studies display rare insight, human rights sensitivity and commitment, sans any theoretical pretensions.
The book serves as a useful key in placing the North East in the newly emergent discourse on displacement and brings it to the forefront of the public agenda. It offers important insights for policy makers and analysts, research scholars, human rights activists, lawyers, developmental specialists, students and socially concerned citizens.
"This book is an important addition to the growing critical scholarship on postcolonial North East India. Based on a series of workshops organized by the Indian Council of Social Science Research-North Eastern Regional Center, it examines the disjunctures in global, national and local policy frameworks and categories that determine the lives andstatus of internally displaced poeple in North East India."
The volume succeeds in conveying the severity and complexity of the problem of internal displacement in the region, which is often overlooked in the obsession with ‘security concerns’ or the ‘underdevelopment-insurgency nexus’ in discussions on the North-East. The fairly detailed factual accounts, which provide considerable insights into the problems of the region, can sensitize policy-makers to the implications of displacement for peace and development interventions.
This book gives snapshots and detailed case studies of the tales of internally displaced peoples in the North East of India… [The book is] distinct from previous studies due to the emphasis placed on a ‘rights based’ approach to displacement, where communities, irrespective of their ethnic, religious or linguistic identity, should be considered as the collective disenfranchised and displaced communities…. The book is a valuable contribution to the study of the topic in the region.