Ethnic Confrontations

An experienced bureaucrat and field administrator with impeccable academic qualifications and scholarly inclinations, B.P. Singh, a Nehru Fellow and an IAS officer, has produced a book which ought to be compulsory reading for anyone interested in the North East—be he an administrator, a historian, a journalist, or just the disinterested administrator. Not for him any of the contemptible bonhomie that the burra sahib of yore used to write of so affectionately in his memoirs. For his book is the result of deep studies and garnering of relevant and quite comprehensive data on the region’s ethnicity, religions, the middle classes, the political parties and their work environment, the institutional framework of its administrative philosophy, its demography, culture, and economic development.