Sanjoy Hazarika is the international director of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative. Earlier, he was Director of the Centre for Northeast Studies and Policy Research at Jamia Millia Islamia. is the international director of the HOPE He is an award-winning journalist, formerly with the New York Times. His books include Strangers No More: New Narratives from India’s Northeast, Bhopal: The Lessons of a Tragedy, and Strangers of the Mist: Tales of War and Peace from India’s Northeast. As a columnist and specialist commentator on the Northeast and its neighboring regions, Hazarika has written and published extensively on the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, the Eastern Himalaya, and freedom fighters from the Northeast. He is the founder and managing trustee of C-NES, which has pioneered the work of boat clinics on the Brahmaputra River.
Sanjoy is an honorary research professor at CPR and holds the Dr. Saifuddin Kitchlew Chair at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, where he also directs the Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research. He has been a member of various academic organizations and official committees, including the Justice Jeevan Reddy Committee to Review AFSPA, the Society of Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla, and the North East India Studies Programme at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Hazarika has also worked as a newspaper correspondent, columnist, and documentary filmmaker.
I first met Sanjoy when he was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. He combined a distinguished career in academia, journalism, and political activism in the field of human rights, and Indian civil-military affairs. We called one another “co-conspirators” and I was honored to award him and Institute’s Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizen award.
Sanjoy has been a friend for decades. He is one of the most perceptive and thoughtful people that I know, whose career has transcended many disciplines and activism. He introduced me to Professor Myron Weiner at MIT, a foremost expert in the field of Comparative Politics, which I have a deep respect for, and has unfortunately been sidelined to great negative consequences in the field of policy, particularly when regional expertise is needed desperately to inform decision-makers. This is something I learned early on as a student when I realized at my university Johns Hopkins that Owen Lattimore had been exiled from even faculty dining rooms, during the red scare. Lattimore’s knowledge of Vietnam was ignored, resulting in catastrophic intervention, which we saw again in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Sanjoy and I had many co-conversations about this, and he participated in numerous EPIIC and Institute Programs. Two noteworthy examples that spoke to the unusual nature of what he had to offer were taking our students to work on hospital ships in the upper reaches of the Brahmaputra River, and hosting my Chinese students with his Indian students in Dehli.
Sanjoy most recently lectured for me at Sai University and advises my students.