Assam- The Accord, The Discord

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With attention to detail and dogged determination to get at the facts and to the heart of issues that have long troubled Assam (and India), Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty has provided us with a book that challenges assumptions and lays out the realities. Her work in Assam: The Accord, the Discord reflects conditions not just at Ground Zero but also brings to the fore the machinations of power-broking, decision-making and unmasks the protagonists who have long dominated the headlines and the political stage of the state. The way t these conditions have meshed and conflicted, grows in nuance and bluntness, page after page, layer by layer, person by person, party by party, community by community.

There are detailed chapters going over the issue of the Assam insurgency, ethnic risings and the growth of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) across the Brahmaputra Valley, as well as the internal schisms within the powerful student organization All Assam Students' Union (AASU). The way the Assamese Muslim leaders of AASU parted ways with the traditional leadership is also known but she has extracted telling details. These are stories told with compelling force.

The kernel of this book lies in an urge to step back in time, locate some of my childhood memories of Assam and contextualize them to events of history.

The blood that spilled on the streets during the six-year-long, anti-foreigner agitation, or Assam Movement of 1979-1985, had not quite dried up when army boots arrived at our doors in the early 1990s. Even then, justice eluded the dead. The Assam Accord signed between the Government of India and the leaders of the Assam Movement in 1985 didn't bring permanent peace to the state and seemed to have delivered only discord and divisions. It polluted the politics of the state. It spawned insurgency. The common people were caught in a bind; they didn't know who was the enemy, who a friend-the state or non-state actors?

Amidst such hostilities, several from my generation, including me, left Assam for Delhi in the early 1990s, forced to choose between home and a future that the state could not promise us at that time. I have had this urge for a while to go back in time and try and pick up the pieces from three decades ago, hold them up to see what was lost, what was gained, if anything, and what of it was mine.

**Contents and Sample Pages**