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Letters

Rohingyas and Others
The best measure will be to identify all Rohingya refugees—legal or illegal, detain them and locate them in one or more refugee camps in Dandakaranya or some other vacant region in central India, providing basic facilities and by phases shift them to camps in Bangladesh and then render adequate financial aid to these refugees in Bangladesh in alliance with other countries. Or if Pakistan is willing to take them, they can be sent there too. This process should be completed within utmost 6 months. But in no case they should be allowed to stay for any indefinite period in our country. In no case they be permitted to reside in J&K (now reports are that some thousands such illegal Rohingyas are in Jammu) and all the Rohingya residents in J&K be rounded up and shifted to Central India within one month.

As I repeatedly stated, Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants have also to be identified, declared as temporary refugees and deported from our country, at least those residing from the cut off year 1991 (if not 1971 as demanded by AASU and other Assamese movement bodies and at that time in principle agreed to by the Central Government of the day). This process should be completed within one year from now. Otherwise our country will go to the dogs.
I Mallikarjuna Sharma,
Advocate and Editor,
Law Animated World mksharma55@gmail.com

Nomenclature of Naxalbari
Though peasants of different communities staged the movement 50 years back in the village of Naxalbari, Lepchas demanded that the area of Naxalbari once was the habitat of the Lepcha tribal race and the name Naxalbari is derived from the Raong (Lepcha language). According to them, the name Naxalbari moans the area where huts and houses of the Lepchas were entirely demolished by the other inhabitants of the area. And the original name of the village is completely different from the present one, which is 'Naok Syaol'. Pasang Tshering Lepcha in his book 'Lepcha Nomenclatures in Maayel Lyaang' writes that the name 'Naxalbari' is derived from the Lepcha word 'Naok - Syaol'. Naok Syaol means the area where small Lepcha huts, houses were totally damaged and destroyed by other communities of the plains people, thus the name of the village Naok (to push and demolish) Syaol (dismantle), but today it is erroneously pronounced as Naxal.

There would be other probable meanings of Naxalbari, if people could not accept this Lepcha-originated name. The tribes used to make unskillful artistic paint and design on the wall of mud-built houses with different colours. Those caricature and unskillful art (nakxha—aal) have been painted on the wall of all the tribal houses (Bari) in the village and that's why the name of the village became Naxalbari.

Outlets (nikashi) like drains, canals etc are used to go out excess waters from the water-logged situation of the agricultural lands and setting up a ridge of earth (aal) around an agricultural land to mark the boundary of one's land. As a result, waters get stopped of coming out from the agricultural land and this is another provable meaning of the village-name Naxalbari. Whatever it might be the nomenclatures for Naxabari existing in the past or present, the Naxal movement supporters were working with great zeal, where 'zeal is the fire of love, active for duty—burning as it flies', but 'zeal without knowledge is like expedition to a man in the dark'.
Gautam Kumar Das, Kolkata

Frontier
Vol. 50, No.20, Nov 19 - 25, 2017