LOST IN TRANSITION: Narratives of Non-existence

This talk would focus on a little-known group of stateless people in South Asia, many of whom have already died over more than 50 years, while the remaining seem doomed to meet the same fate. It would trace the predicament of the indigenous Buddhist stateless Chakma refugees from erstwhile East Pakistan, who have been leading a stateless and rightless existence in the north-eastern Indian State of Arunachal Pradesh bordering China. Entrapped in a state of “liminality”, the current “betwixt and between” status of the minority ethnic Buddhist Chakma refugees seems to have clearly become a never-ending feature of their lives. The story of the stateless Chakmas can thus be seen as a textbook example of how an awfully wrongly drawn political boundary could inexorably push a whole community of people into the throes of an unending cycle of painful transition that they seem to have virtually got lost in the…