Counter-Gaze Media, Migrants, Minorities assesses the situation of migrant minorities not just in Third World colonised countries in South Asia but also in the Western societies in Europe which hitherto had not been subjected to any meaningful analysis. Under the Eurasia-Net programme, scholars, minority and human rights activists, researchers, and journalists from South Asia visited European countries while their counterparts from Europe came to South Asia to evaluate the conditions of the minorities in each of these regions accessing language rights, political participation, representation in public media and institutions, and arrangements for protection of their rights under a majority-centric domination. The result is the present study that throws up some critical questions on how migrants have come to form minority communities, how their claims to citizenship, rights and justice have occupied space in the politics of the nation and supra-national bodies. The collection of essays here highlight how the protection arrangements always fall short of their goal, where protection becomes one more tool in the hands of the government to sustain the majority-minority divide and how it refuses to accept the claims of minorities to equality and people-hood. A successful minority is one where the minority group withers away and the protection regime in turn becomes redundant. This research programme examined the European experience of minority issues as well as the South Asian laws and practices. There is an increasing familiarity between the two sets of experiences and so the book is not so much about counter gaze but about the anticipated and resultant familiarity in human rights struggles. About the Author Subir Bhaumik is the BBCs Eastern India Correspondent based at Kolkata, India. He has worked for Time and Reuters, and prior to that for the Press Trust of India and the Kolkata-based Ananda Bazar Patrika. Widely travelled Subir worked on research projects of many universities and institutes like the East-West Center, Washington; he has covered Indias troubled North East and written extensively on various aspects including political crises in Burma, Bhutan and Bangladesh. A Queen Elizabeth House Fellow at the University of Oxford (1989-90), Subirs publications include: Troubled Periphery: Crisis of Indias North East (Sage, 2009) and Insurgent Crossfire: North- East India (Spantech & Lancer, 1996). Ranabir Samaddar is the Director of the Calcutta Research Group. He has worked extensively on the contemporary issues of justice, human rights, forms of autonomy, forced displacement, partitions, trans-border migration, refugee care and protection, and minority rights and popular democracy in the context of post-colonial nationalism with special reference to South Asia. He is also the editor-in-chief of the South Asia Peace Studies Series. His current work is on theories and practices of dialogue, a question crucial to the politics of justice and reconciliation. His last publication is the critically acclaimed two-volume work, titled, The Materiality of Politics (2007). Table of Contents Sumon K Chakrabarti: The Media in France and the Politics of Integration Stephen Wright: Visible Minorities, Invisible Citizens: Minority Representation in the French Media Subir Bhaumik: Integration, Multiculturalism and Glolocalization: Migrant-Minorities and the German Media Sanjay Barbora : Media and Minorities in the United Kingdom Rita Manchanda: Media, Terrorism and Suspect Communities: Towards A Malign Paradigm of Globalization Part II: Migrant Worlds Sumaiya Khair: Migration and Minority Formation - The Interplay of Economics, Politics and Conflict Samir Kumar Das: Migrants, Minorities, Autonomy: The South Tyrol Model Sabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhuri: Britains Multiculturalism Revisited Part III: Minority Reflections Sanam Roohi: Minority within Minorities: Muslim Women in Kolkata A S Narang: Nation-Building and Minority Alienation in India Thomas Benedikter: Dialects, Languages And Government Policy: The Protection Of Linguistic Rights In India Part IV: Interface " A Dialogue on Minority Rights Index Bibliography
