courtesy The Hindu “Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are,” said a nationalist demagogue in Michael Dibdin’s novel, Dead Lagoon . Elaborating on that view, Samuel P. Huntington said in his book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order , “For people seeking identity and reinventing ethnicity, enemies are essential.” I lived in Meghalaya for a decade and a half. As an enemy in the sense Huntington means. Dkhar was one of the first Khasi words I learnt. It is a pejorative term for the ‘outsider’. I was a dkhar in Shillong just like thousands of others there who hailed from ethnically different backgrounds. In the latter half of 1980s I witnessed people of Nepali origin being hunted and driven out of Shillong. I lived in a part of Shillong where people of Nepali origin abounded. I witnessed people being beaten up brutally. I saw people being loaded into trucks and driven away. My landlord, a Khasi gentleman who smelled of wh
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