HarperCollins India announces NO LAND’S PEOPLE:THE UNTOLD STORY OF ASSAM’S NRC CRISIS by ABHISHEK SAHA

About the book:

The preparation of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam was an unprecedented exercise that sought to establish Indian citizenship of the state’s 33 million residents. The process intersected with the already existing parallel mechanisms of citizenship determination in the state. The final list, published on 31 August 2019, left out around 1.9 million applicants who risk being rendered stateless after their appeals are heard by the state’s Foreigners’ Tribunals.

The NRC’s narrative is expansive and complex — a blend of history, politics, law, human rights, and administrative red tape. No Land’s People documents the unfolding humanitarian crisis in Assam’s citizenship tangle, juxtaposes it with the complications of the NRC process while exploring technical, social and legal aspects of the exercise.

 

“This book is about people trying to prove they are Indians in Assam. It explores questions of statelessness and disenfranchisement that the NRC has brought to the fore, while documenting the plight of those lodged for years as ‘illegal foreigners’ in detention centres. Over two years of my reportage for The Indian Express has gone into this book. The book comes at a time when India has already witnessed massive protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and the possibility of a nation-wide NRC. Political rhetoric on expelling infiltrators dominates the political discourse in Assam and elsewhere in the country.” – Abhishek Saha, Author

 ‘“No Land’s People combines solid, on-the-ground reportage with a sense of the bigger questions that Assam’s NRC updation process has thrown up – those related to identity, ethnicity, nationality and nationalism, and above all, Indianness. In a world grappling with refugee crises, this book shines a spotlight on Assam’s stateless population – its ‘No Land’s People’ – and examines how and why they became so, and what the path ahead for them, the state and the nation is. An important book that anticipates some key issues of the 2021 state elections both in Assam and in West Bengal.”’- Swati Chopra, Executive Editor, HarperCollins

 About the Author:

Abhishek Saha is a journalist covering Northeast India for the Indian Express. He is based in Guwahati, Assam. During 2015-2018, he was the Kashmir correspondent for the Hindustan Times. He won the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award for his coverage of Kashmir’s summer unrest of 2016.

Born and brought up in Guwahati, Saha graduated in civil engineering from Birla Institute of Technology in Mesra, Jharkhand, before switching over to journalism. He studied print journalism at the Asian College of Journalism in Chennai.

 

About HarperCollins Publishers India:

HarperCollins Publishers India is a subsidiary of HarperCollins Publishers. HarperCollins India publishes some of the finest writers from the Indian Subcontinent and around the world, publishing approximately 200 new books every year, with a print and digital catalogue of more than 2,000 titles across 10 imprints. Its authors have won almost every major literary award including the Man Booker Prize, JCB Prize, DSC Prize, New India Foundation Award, Atta Galatta Prize, Shakti Bhatt Prize, Gourmand Cookbook Award, Publishing Next Award, Tata Literature Live Award, Gaja Capital Business Book Prize, BICW Award, Sushila Devi Award, Prabha Khaitan Woman’s Voice Award, Sahitya Akademi Award and the Crossword Book Award. HarperCollins India has been awarded the Publisher of the Year Award three times: at Publishing Next in 2015, and at Tata Literature Live! in 2016 and 2018.

HarperCollins India also represents some of the finest publishers in the world including Egmont, Oneworld, Harvard University Press, Bonnier Zaffre, Usborne, Dover and Lonely Planet.

Pre-Order Link: https://amzn.to/39uGpmt

For more information please write to

jaseya.fazili@harpercollins.co.in