Ethnic peace accords in India

The present exercise is unique in the sense
that it not only brings together the full text
of all the 'peace accords' since 1947,
signed between various struggling ethnic
groups and Governments for the first time,
but also follows up the same with various
important documents such as the Anandpur
Sahib Resolution and various legislative
measures that followed to bring to focus
the Constitutional guarantee accorded to
such 'peace accords'. In the Introduction
the author highlights the text of the Indian
Independence Act of July 18, 1947, the
context of the Objective Resolution moved
by Pandit Nehru in the first session of the
Constituent Assembly, the backdrop of the
States' Reorganisation Commission and the
Seventh Amendment Act of 1956, and then
suggests that though the Seventh Amend-
ment Act could set at some sort of rest the
popular urge for recognition through
redrawal of internal political boundary in
the mainland, the northern, eastern and
north-eastern peripheries of the country
continued to burn from within. The author
also touches upon the relevance of the
available conceptual tools to explain this
continuing reality and proposes that as a
conceptual tool, neither the framework of
regionalism-sub-regionalism nor ethnicity-
ethnocentrism can explain the core of the
issues that are only partially true and
hence ultimately wrong.
The book will be of tremendous historical
value not only to a concerned academician
or administrator but also for an ordinary
citizen who has an urge to understand the
present in the light of the past and to
anticipate the future in the light of the
present.