Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how the returnee refugees reconnect themselves through memory with the network of people lost from their lives as they continue to live in India.

Paper long abstract:

Since the early 1980s the Bangladeshi government had started a Bengali resettlement programme in Chittagong Hill Tracts. This triggered a 'Bengali-Pahari' problem in the form of "majority-minority" discourse and resulted in large scale displacement of the indigenous communities in the CHT. After nearly 10 years of peace talks, the government of Bangladesh and Parbatya Chattagram Jana Samhati Samiti (PCJSS) signed the Chittagong Hill Tracts Accord (also known as 'Peace Accord') on December 2, 1997, which ended two decades of armed conflict. The Task Force on the CHT, formed after signing the Accord, admitted that by the end of 1999, about 128,000 families (approximately 500,000 people) were internally displaced and good number of them were forced to go to India. They used to stay in the six refugee camps in the Tripura province for more than twelve years though the history of being refugee started with the building of the Kaptai Dam in 1950 when nearly 1,00,000 frustrated indigenous people, mostly Chakma, went to Tripura and was staying there as refugee.

This paper aims to explore how the returnee refugees reconnect themselves—through memory—with the network of people lost from their lives as they continue to live in India. It also examines the way of resuming the lost network through everyday forms of communication and artefacts. Finally, the paper underscores the forms of networking based on fictive relationship with disconnected loved ones in foreign lands.