Looking Back into the Future: Identity and Insurgency in Northeast India 9780415501644, 9781003157298

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
Contents
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Prologue
Section I: The Word and the Idea
1. The Politics of a Script: Demand for the Acceptance of the Roman Script for the Bodo Language
2. Rightful Place for the Assamese Language: Scholarly Labours of Missionaries
3. Census in Assam: The Question of the Mother Tongue
4. Shaping the Sound and Scripting a Solution
5. Speech, Script and Pronunciation: The Sound and the Word of Assam and Asom
Section II: Ethnicity and Identity
6. Strident Tribal Nationalism
7. Tribal Ferment in Assam
8. Assam’s Search for Identity
9. More Than Just a Nomenclature
10. Chasing a Mirage
11. Reinventing Identities
12. Massacres Unbound: Outrage Selective
13. Manufacturing Identities?
14. In the Name of Tribal Identities
15. Behind the Adivasi Unrest in Assam
16. Identity Politics: Where it is Leading
17. To Divide is to Multiply
18. The Bodoland Territorial Council: Promises and Problems
Section III: Issues of Culture and Belief
19. Commitment to Identity: Cultural Dimensions of Ethnic Agitations
20. Process of Consolidation: Assam’s Inherent Problems
21. A Natural Process of Transformation
Section IV: Discontent and Revolt
22. Serviceable Memory and Persistence of the Past
23. The Search for ‘Permanent Solutions’
24. The Fallacy of Internally Coherent Homelands
25. Squeeze in Bhutan: Consequences in Assam
26. ULFA: Talking about Talks
27. The ‘War’ against the Indian State: Real Victims and Outcome
28. Prospects for Peace in Assam
Section V: Homeland Politics
29. Land, Source of all Trouble
30. Bodoland Territorial Council: Going Round in Circles?
Section VI: From the Borders of a Borderland
31. Who Owns History?
32. Manipur: Burdens of the Past
33. Naga Talks: Territory First, Sovereignty Later
34. Insurgencies in Manipur: Politics and Ideology
35. Going Around the Mulberry Bush
Section VII: Theoretical Underpinnings
36. Varieties of Separatism
37. Separatist Movements in the North-East: Rhetoric and Reality
38. Agenda for Recolonization?
Epilogue
Select Bibliography
About the Author
Index

Citation preview

Looking Back into the Future

Looking Back into the Future Identity & Insurgency in Northeast India

M.S. Prabhakara

LONDON NEW YORK NEW DELHI

First published 2012 in India by Routledge 912 Tolstoy House, 15–17 Tolstoy Marg, Connaught Place, New Delhi 110 001

Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2012 M.S. Prabhakara

Typeset by Star Compugraphics Private Limited 5, CSC, Near City Apartments Vasundhara Enclave Delhi 110 096

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-415-50164-4

For Bageshree, Bhanutej and Gautami with esteem and affection

Contents List of Abbreviations Acknowledgements Introduction Prologue

xi xv xix 1

Section I: The Word and the Idea 1. The Politics of a Script: Demand for the Acceptance of the Roman Script for the Bodo Language

11

2. Rightful Place for the Assamese Language: Scholarly Labours of Missionaries

25

3. Census in Assam: The Question of the Mother Tongue

31

4. Shaping the Sound and Scripting a Solution

39

5. Speech, Script and Pronunciation: The Sound and the Word of Assam and Asom

42

Section II: Ethnicity and Identity 6. Strident Tribal Nationalism

51

7. Tribal Ferment in Assam

57

8. Assam’s Search for Identity

65

9. More Than Just a Nomenclature

70

10. Chasing a Mirage

75

11. Reinventing Identities

84

12. Massacres Unbound: Outrage Selective

94

13. Manufacturing Identities?

103

14. In the Name of Tribal Identities

111

viii Looking Back into the Future 15. Behind the Adivasi Unrest in Assam

123

16. Identity Politics: Where it is Leading

127

17. To Divide is to Multiply

131

18. The Bodoland Territorial Council: Promises and Problems

135

Section III: Issues of Culture and Belief 19. Commitment to Identity: Cultural Dimensions of Ethnic Agitations

147

20. Process of Consolidation: Assam’s Inherent Problems

152

21. A Natural Process of Transformation

157

Section IV: Discontent and Revolt 22. Serviceable Memory and Persistence of the Past

165

23. The Search for ‘Permanent Solutions’

172

24. The Fallacy of Internally Coherent Homelands

177

25. Squeeze in Bhutan: Consequences in Assam

182

26. ULFA: Talking about Talks

191

27. The ‘War’ against the Indian State: Real Victims and Outcome

199

28. Prospects for Peace in Assam

203

Section V: Homeland Politics 29. Land, Source of all Trouble

211

30. Bodoland Territorial Council: Going Round in Circles?

215

Section VI: From the Borders of a Borderland 31. Who Owns History?

223

Contents ix

32. Manipur: Burdens of the Past

228

33. Naga Talks: Territory First, Sovereignty Later

237

34. Insurgencies in Manipur: Politics and Ideology

242

35. Going Around the Mulberry Bush

246

Section VII: Theoretical Underpinnings 36. Varieties of Separatism

253

37. Separatist Movements in the North-East: Rhetoric and Reality 38. Agenda for Recolonization?

259 267

Epilogue

272

Select Bibliography About the Author Index

278 281 282

List of Abbreviations AAGSP AAMSU AASU AATSU ABSU APHLC AFSPA AGP AJYCP ASDC BJP BAC BTAD BTC BLT BPAC CBI CRPF CPI DHAS DHD GNLF GPRN IM (DT) ICSSR IRB DHD-J KAS

All-Assam Gana Sangram Parishad All-Assam Minority Students’ Union All-Assam Students’ Union All-Assam Tribal Students’ Union All-Bodo Students’ Union All-Party Hill Leaders’ Conference Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 Asom Gana Parishad Assam Jatiyatabadi Yuva Chhatra Parishad Autonomous State Demand Committee Bharatiya Janata Party Bodoland Autonomous Council Bodoland Territorial Autonomous District Bodoland Territorial Council Bodo Liberation Tigers Bodo People’s Action Committee Central Bureau of Investigation Central Reserve Police Force Communist Party of India Department of Historical and Antiquarian Studies Dima Halam Daogah Gorkha National Liberation Front Government of the People’s Republic of Nagaland Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunal) Act Indian Council of Social Science Research Indian Reserve Battalion Jewel Gorlosa faction of the Dima Halam Daogah Kamarupa Anusandhana Samiti

xii Looking Back into the Future KLO KCP KANCHASDCOM KLNLF KNA MASS MoS MOBC NHTA NNC NSF NDA NDFB NSCN (I-M) NSCN NGOs NEFA NFR OKD PNSD PTCA PCG PLA PREPAK POTA RJD RBA SJSS SC ST SULFA TKAC

Kamatapur Liberation Organization Kangleipak Communist Party Karbi Anglong and North Cachar Hills Autonomous State Demand Committee Karbi Anglong North Cachar Hills Liberation Front Kuki National Assembly Manav Adhikar Sangram Samiti Memorandum of Settlement More Other Backward Castes Naga Hills and Tuensang Area Naga National Council Naga Students’ Federation National Democratic Alliance National Democratic Front of Bodoland National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Isak-Muivah) National Socialist Council of Nagaland, later Nagalim Non-Governmental Organizations North-East Frontier Agency Northeast Frontier Railway Omeo Kumar Das Institute of Social Change and Development Parliamentarians for National Self-Determination Plains Tribal Council of Assam People’s Consultative Group People’s Liberation Army People’s Revolutionary Party of Kangleipak Prevention of Terrorism Act Rashtriya Janata Dal Royal Bhutan Army Sanmilita Janagosthiya Sangram Samithi scheduled caste scheduled tribe Surrendered ULFA Thengal (also spelt Thangal) Kachari Autonomous Council

List of Abbreviations xiii

TAC ULFA UNLF UPDS UTNLF VHP

Tiwa Autonomous Council United Liberation Front of Asom United National Liberation Front United Peoples Democratic Solidarity United Tribal Nationalist Liberation Front Vishwa Hindu Parishad

Acknowledgements During the many years over which these essays or articles were

written, as well as while preparing this selection for publication, I have accumulated many intellectual, moral and emotional debts, not to speak of debts of a more tangible kind. Some, perhaps many, of those to whom I feel indebted may rightly feel embarrassed at this association with a collection of journalistic writings; but for better or worse, the writer has the last word in such matters. My first debt is to the two persons who mentored me in the profession: Samar Sen, poet and writer who at the height of his fame and achievement as a poet abandoned writing verse and took to political journalism; and Krishna Raj who spent all his working life with The Economic Weekly and its successor, Economic and Political Weekly. They are both gone; yet, years after their death, I cannot think of my association with them without emotion. They were truly my guides, especially Krishna Raj with whom I shared a working relationship for nearly eight years — it lasted the whole working day and often spilled over into late nights during the latter part of the week, while we saw the weekly issue through the press. I also shared many convivial evenings, drinking and talking with both of them. My friendship with Samarbabu opened several doors for me, doors that even now remain open, like that of the distinguished economist and writer Ashok Mitra. I owe much to Mr G. Kasturi, Mr N. Ram and Mr N. Ravi, who were at the helm of The Hindu and Frontline when I worked fulltime for the publications. All the three have been keenly interested in the developments in Assam and the NE region; they gave me time to meet them whenever I visited The Hindu office on work. Even after Mr Kasturi retired, no visit to Chennai was complete without my spending a morning at his house, sharing an early lunch at his table and responding to his keen inquiries. It was due to Mr Ram’s initiative and personal interest that I have continued to be associated with the organization as an ‘editorial consultant’ over eight years after I formally retired, with a most generous monthly

xvi Looking Back into the Future retainer. There have been other interactions with Mr Ram, going beyond the editor–employee relationship, which I cherish. I am equally grateful to the news editors and other colleagues in the office, who actually handled my copy, for treating it with care and consideration. Some of these people became friends outside the office, indeed even after they left the organization. I remember with pleasure the consideration and companionship I have received from K. Narayanan, long-time news editor, Vijaya Sankar of Frontline, Parvathi Menon, now chief of bureau, The Hindu, at Bangalore, Asha Krishnakumar, formerly of Frontline, and her family, associate editor Jacob and photographer D. Krishnan, who accompanied me on a month-long journey to Nagaland in the winter of 1984. There are many others, but adding each name would make a long and perhaps, even tedious list. My intellectual debts to friends, colleagues and former students in Guwahati and other places in the region are many. I have often acknowledged the insights I have received from three colleagues and friends at Guwahati University: Anil Roychoudhury, who used to work in the University’s administrative office, Annadacharana Bhagabati of the Department of Anthropology and Mohammed Taher of the Department of Geography. It was entirely due to the initiative taken by Dr Taher that I was able to live for two months in the summer of 1971 in an Assamese village five miles south of North Lakhimpur where I had no choice but to speak Assamese and thus became conversant with the language. I am deeply conscious of the debts I owe to the writings of scholars like Suryyakumar Bhuyan, Maheswar Neog, Herambakanta Borpujari, Amalendu Guha and a whole lot of others, a veritable roll-call of eminent historians of Assam whose classics of twentiethcentury Assamese historical scholarship are cited in every book on Assam. Equally, I owe a lot to many official reports, like the Mills Report on Assam, the periodic Census Reports, in particular, the 1891 Census Report on Assam prepared by E. A. Gait, and the Assam Land Revenue Manual. The Bibliography, which initially I was reluctant to include since I felt it could appear intolerably pretentious in what is after all a collection of journalistic essays, is only a partial listing of my disorganized and, admittedly, eclectic reading. I have learnt much from the works and insights of other scholars, colleagues and students. I have equally gained from con-versations with them as well as others who have not written

Acknowledgements xvii

books. The names that follow, randomly recalled, constitute only a partial list of such persons: Moana Bhagabati, Dhrubajyoti Bora, Nagen Bujarbaruah, Rosy D’Sousa, Indumohan Das, Mridul Dutt, Uddipan Dutta, Hiren Gohain, Rakhee Kalita, Robin Kalita, Kashinath Hazarika, Gangmumei Kamei, Iboyaima Laithangbam, Aparna Mahanta, Parama Mahanta, Tilottoma Misra, Udayon Misra, Pradip Phanjoubam, Kabin Phukan, Sarodi Saikia, Purna Sharma, Sugata Srinivasaraju, M. A. Sundaram, Sushanta Talukdar, Jitu Trivedi, Sanamani Yambem and many others whose names I cannot recall. Sharing food, wine and conversations with Sanjib Baruah of Bard College, New York, when he visited India, with Dolly Kikon and Xanjoy Borbora who stayed across my flat in Guwahati, and with Nagari Babaiah in Bangalore, was always an invigorating and stimulating experience, challenging my ‘rusty political orthodoxy’. Conversations with the late Upendranath Brahma challenged a different kind of orthodoxy. Dhruba and Sarodi took care of me whenever I fell ill. Anuradha Kumar of Delhi, who I have never met, has provided moral support through her letters and com-ments on my writing. Sanjib Baruah and Sukanya Sharma of the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, went beyond the call of friendship by reading and commenting on the essays and helping to organize the material. These and many other friends in Guwahati and other cities and villages in the region have sustained me during my travels. I am sorry I cannot recall many of them, for my travelling days in the region ended long ago in June 1994. I am grateful to Kailash Burman and his fellow workers who fed me and cared for me when I fell ill during my stay at the OKD Institute while I was working on this selection. I thank Professors Indranee Dutta and Bhupen Sarmah and their colleagues for getting me to the Institute and enabling me to put these articles together. I owe much to my two surviving siblings, older and more decrepit than me. Kotiganahalli Ramaiah and Adima Balaga of Shivagange on the Kolara Hills (Betta) have provided me a second home in Kolara. Sri G. Muniyappa of Kolara has unfailingly taken care of me when I have been unwell, which was often the case. I am particularly attached to my niece Girija and her husband Venkateshmurthy, who have sustained me with the kind of food I like whenever I have dropped by at their home, my second home as it were, when I travel through Bangalore.

xviii Looking Back into the Future My deepest and most indefinable debts are, however, to a young family in Bangalore I have befriended in the last two years: Bageshree Subbanna, special correspondent, The Hindu, in Bangalore; her husband Bhanutej, chief of bureau, The Week, in Bangalore; and their daughter Gautami. I have more or less enrolled myself as a member of this family, making myself as one of their own. I consider myself uniquely fortunate that I have received a measure of acceptance from them. I am offering them this selection of my writing as an inadequate acknowledgement of their kindness and generosity of spirit. The usual disclaimers apply. M.S. Prabhakara Guwahati 6 September 2010

Introduction T

his book consists of a selection of essays, edit-page articles and reports from a much larger body of writing, broadly on the social and political issues relating to Assam and its neighbourhood in the North-East (NE) region over a period of about 50 years (1962–2010). They belong to the genre of journalism, not academic scholarship. During this period, I was a teacher of English at Guwahati University (February 1962–December 1975), a member of the editorial staff of Economic and Political Weekly (December 1975–June 1983) and a working journalist reporting for The Hindu and Frontline (July 1983–April 2002) from the NE region and from South Africa, when I formally retired. Many of these articles were written in the last eight years since I returned from Cape Town in April 2002 and settled into a retired life in Guwahati. I moved in March 2010 to my ancestral house in Kolara, Karnataka. I continue to write, though less frequently. An explanation about how these writings came to be resurrected would be in order. I have for long wanted to write a book on nationality formation in Assam, but realized about five years ago, when at the age of 70 I fell seriously ill, that such an endeavour, even of a journalistic kind, was beyond me. Since then my primary interest has been to re-learn and resume writing in Kannada, my first language, in which I had written some stories when I was young. This process of gently fading away was jolted slightly when Professor Bhupen Sarmah of the Omeo Kumar Das Institute of Social Change and Development (OKD), Guwahati, contacted me in March this year, proposing a visit to Kolara to collect copies of my writings on Assam and the NE region for the Institute’s Documentation Centre. Flattered beyond belief that these ancient journalistic writings were still seen to be of use, and that too by an academic institute, I happily consented. Dr Sarmah duly came to Kolara and went back with photocopies of virtually all that I had written and published in EPW up to December 1975, and in The Hindu until the middle of 1994.

xx Looking Back into the Future About three months later, there was an invitation from Professor Indranee Dutta, the director of OKD, to be a ‘visitor’ under the ‘scholar-in-residence’ programme of the Institute sponsored by the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), New Delhi, mainly to assist in putting together a selection of these essays in book form, which the Institute would arrange to get published. Thus, on 31 July, I was back in Guwahati, which I had left six months earlier with the conviction that it was to be a permanent goodbye. Before letting the selection speak for itself, a word about my writings in Frontline, the fortnightly journal published by Kasturi and Sons, for which I wrote fairly regularly from its inaugural issue (October 1984). Since the journal provided more space than a daily newspaper, I was able to combine detailed spot reporting with some analysis, supplementing both with photographs, which I was encouraged to take. However, since my copies of the journal are in bound volumes, and the original typescripts are in disorganized and scattered files, Professor Sarmah could carry back nothing I wrote in the journal between 1984 and 1997. The journal’s archives are available on the Internet from the beginning of 1997. The earliest of my articles from Frontline is from the issue dated 12–25 October 2002. Perhaps a brief account of the social and political developments that profoundly affected Assam and its neighbourhood during this period would be in order. When I landed in Guwahati (then Gauhati) on the very cold midnight of 4–5 February 1962, the political map of Assam included the whole NE region, except Manipur and Tripura, with the status of the North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA), later to become Arunachal Pradesh, a matter of contention between the state government, and the union home and external affairs ministries. The Brahmaputra river was not yet bridged so I made two steamer journeys to cross the Ganga and the Brahmaputra. When I left for Bombay (Mumbai) in December 1975, at the height of the Emergency, Assam’s political map had changed dramatically, with two new states, Nagaland (1963) and Meghalaya (1970–72), and two union territories, Arunachal Pradesh (1972) and Mizoram (1972), having been carved out of Assam. Manipur and Tripura, which were union territories when I arrived, had become full-fledged states in 1972.

Introduction xxi

Further, Assam had recently gone though widespread civil unrest over the issue of the state’s official language. When the states of the Indian union were re-organized on a linguistic basis in 1956, there were bilingual states like Bombay which was subsequently, after violent protests, bifurcated into Gujarat and Maharashtra. The status of the Assamese language in Assam, though seemingly closely linked to the language represented by its name was, however, fraught with ambiguities because of the historical circumstances and the political and administrative process by which the territory became part of political India relatively late through colonial conquest. Inherent in that accretion of territory to political India was a disconnect between the people inhabiting that territory and their ‘language and culture’. Such a disconnect is not unique, neither among Indians nor among any other people. The constitution of the Naga Hills and Tuensang Area (NHTA) into a separate state in December 1963 and the further reorganization of Assam in the early 1970s only partly addressed this disconnect, the creation of Nagaland as a separate state indeed exacerbating the problem of Naga insurgency. The circumstances in which this diminution of Assam took place, and the processes involved, was an important aspect of the political discourse in the state during my first stint in Guwahati. Living in the relatively sheltered comfort zone of the university campus, I barely understood the underlying issues that were central to this incremental diminution of the state’s territory. Instead, I uncritically accepted the prevailing orthodoxy that saw Assam as the victim of malevolent forces inside and outside the state, which had always been hostile to Assam’s interests, a perspective that vulgarized and diminished the legitimate historical factors that undoubtedly hampered the consolidation of the Assamese people as a nationality, similar to but also different from other Indian nationalities. The terms used were different, but the underlying sentiment was the same. Put simply, in this worldview, a kind of minimalist Ur-AASU perspective well before the All-Assam Students’ Union became a structure identifiable state-wide in the latter part of the 1970s, the Brahmaputra valley, comprising the six earlier districts of Assam (a description with which professional geographers would probably disagree) was the homeland of the ‘Assamese people’ or the ‘people of Assam’ who were indistinguishable from the

xxii Looking Back into the Future ‘Assamese-speaking people’. The realization that the contradictions and dichotomies between these terms, seemingly at the level of ‘culture and language’, had deep historical roots, much less that these have been a constant in Assam’s political discourse, came much later. Once upon a time, a stray judgemental throwaway remark of an ill-informed eccentric that Assamese is only a ‘vulgar patois of Bengali’ caused endless resentment. Now few would make such thoughtless remarks — and fewer would care if such remarks are made. Half a century later, the anxieties are not so much over the recognition and acknowledgement of the legitimacy of the language by neighbouring speakers of a cognate and more ‘advanced’ language (assuming that such value-loaded comparisons could be made between and among languages); rather, it is about the appropriation of the ownership of the language by people who were once serviceable instruments in other ancient controversies around the same issue. Put simply, there are apprehensions that the allies of yesterday are becoming adversaries inasmuch as adversaries of yesterday could become allies, both relationships being more of convenience than of conviction. Other major developments that I was a witness to were the border clashes with China that had a direct impact on the people of the state and, more immediately, on the university community; the reorganization of Assam, leading to the shift of the capital from Shillong to a supposedly ‘makeshift’ capital on the outskirts of Guwahati; the agitation over the demand for the use of Assamese as the medium of instruction; the agitation for the adoption of the Roman script for the Bodo language which, till then, had been written in the Assamese script; the 1974 nationwide railway strike; and the midnight declaration of the national Emergency on 25 June 1975. These, taken separately, appear as isolates; but in retrospect one can discern connections, one leading inexorably to the other, in particular between the last two, the most natural culmination of the nationwide railway strike being the declaration of the Emergency (many of the anti-democratic actions by the government during the Emergency were prefigured in the measures taken to suppress the national railway strike). At a personal level, during this period, I completed the writing of my doctoral thesis, made the first of my journeys abroad, lost my elder brother and mother, took the first tentative steps into

Introduction xxiii

journalism, fell in love, learnt to speak and haltingly read Assamese, published two books in Kannada and completed the writing of another Kannada book. I had also realized, even before the declaration of the Emergency, that I could not for the rest of my life remain an English teacher. Thus, I left Guwahati five days before the Emergency was declared (its advent was blindingly obvious) and travelled for four months, during which I visited Bombay and met Krishna Raj, editor of EPW, with whom I had corresponded as an occasional contributor to EPW; and accepted his invitation to join the EPW team. I returned to Guwahati in October and left it, for good as I thought, on 10 December 1975. The above account, while perhaps an over-simplification, is an attempt to delineate my frame of mind and the broad understanding of the social and political reality of Assam I had acquired during my years as a teacher at Guwahati University. The interventions I made based on this understanding were necessarily immature, superficial and fundamentally flawed. If memory serves me right, I wrote and published, on the average, one article or comment a month between 1969 and 1974 in Now, Frontier and EPW. About a fourth of them were unsigned. The reasons for their weakness are, in retrospect, evident; they were written without doing any ‘field work’, with no understanding of the ground reality acquired through interaction with persons informed about the issues on which I was pontificating — the crucial difference between a working journalist, in which capacity I returned to Guwahati in June 1983, and a superficially well-informed academic. I do not want to sound ungrateful. The liberal environment of Guwahati University then did allow me the freedom to stray into matters not directly related to my academic discipline. Well before I began writing on matters relating to Assam I started travelling into the rural parts of the state during the long summer vacation, finding a friendly official who allowed me to spend a few weeks in the inspection bungalows. On one of my earliest such outings (in late 1966), I spent three weeks in Shillong, then Assam’s capital, studying the newspaper files relating to the 1960 official language agitation in the legislative assembly library. I had the curiosity and the thirst to learn about things I did not know, but it was all amateurish and dilettantish. The article on the agitation under the aegis of the Bodo Sahitya Sabha for the adoption of the Roman script for the Bodo language,

xxiv Looking Back into the Future the earliest of my writings included in this selection, was written after spending five days travelling in Kokrajhar district, the epicentre of the agitation, and talking to persons actively involved in the movement. In hindsight, even this article seems to be flawed by conceptual confusions and, moreover, uncritically reproduces the conventional views of the evolution of Assamese society, the caste and tribe equations, the process of acculturation that seamlessly enabled the tribal people to become ‘Assamese’ and so on, which, superficially, seem well-informed. I have, however, included this article because the political and cultural questions it raises remain relevant and have indeed been articulated by other people in the region who are worried about the encroachment upon and the eventual diminution of their ‘identity’— a recurrent theme of the essays in this selection. Although this was not the first of my essays to be used as a special article by EPW, its acceptance pleased me immensely and tickled my vanity, for I was a mere English teacher. Its publication opened other doors and almost certainly facilitated my joining EPW as a member of the journal’s editorial staff in December 1975, the height of the Emergency — a defining and turning point in my professional career. Earlier, in the summer of 1974 I had spent seven weeks in Mawkyrwat, a village about 50 miles from Shillong, in Meghalaya, when I was completing the writing of a novel in Kannada. While writing the Kannada novel in Mawkyrwat, I wrote a profile of a working Khasi woman whom I called Esther. This article, which appeared in EPW, and two other reports written after spending some days travelling in the flood- and famine-hit rural areas of Barpeta and Dhubri, both of which were published in EPW, should have been included in this book. A decade later, when I returned to Guwahati as a working journalist, these articles opened several doors for me. I have not, however, included them as I do not have their typescripts and do not remember the exact dates of their appearance. Three other articles, one on the reorganization of Assam, the second, on the intent and purport of the interim arrangement of an ‘autonomous state within Assam’ in the process leading to the creation of Meghalaya as a full-fledged state, and the third on the creation of the North-Eastern Council seemed superficially to merit inclusion. However, though I have the offprints of these articles, I decided against including them for the same reasons mentioned earlier.

Introduction xxv

I stayed with EPW for nearly eight years (December 1975–June 1983) and wrote many articles during this period. None of these carried a by-line. I can only think of two editorial comments, ‘Exterminating Angel’, on the meeting between Prime Minister Morarji Desai and Angami Zapu Phizo, the leader of the Naga insurgency, in London, and ‘Constitutional Fiddlesticks’ on the supposed constitutional compulsions that led to the forcing through of the bloodstained elections in Assam in February 1983, that could have been included. I have not resurrected them for being short editorial comments; they would have been misfits here. In a most happy and unexpected development, which, too, would make an interesting story, I returned to Guwahati in July 1983, as the special correspondent of The Hindu and, later, of Frontline, when I was given the responsibility to cover the whole NE region. This was when I was most productive, at least in terms of the copy I produced. From this vast mass of writing I have selected articles that appeared in The Hindu, Frontline and EPW. As is evident, the selection does not include anything I wrote during my stay and work in South Africa (June 1994–January 2002) when I travelled to neighbouring countries in southern Africa as well as Uganda, Ethiopia and Ghana. A word about the arrangement of the articles which, initially, I had arranged chronologically, barring the first and the last of the articles. These stood, and even now stand, separately, as the opening and closing articles, reflecting my larger political and cultural perspective, such as it is and for whatever it is worth, within whose framework I wish the rest of the essays to be read and judged. The remaining essays are thematically grouped under seven broad heads. However, these themes sometimes also overlap, for such rigid segmentation is not possible, given the many common strands that link these themes. Before concluding I want to say a few more words about these essays, some written decades ago, which as a matter of duty I read through once again while making the selection and preparing the manuscript. Reading what one wrote decades ago is seldom a pleasant experience; one squirms in embarrassment over the brashness, the ready and wrong judgements about complex social and political issues, and the poor quality of the writing. I plead guilty to all these, and more. As I was reading the text, my instinctive reaction

xxvi Looking Back into the Future was to junk the whole enterprise and return to Kolara. But then, this is not really my enterprise; I am grateful for the trouble so many others have taken to get these articles together in a book and their insistence that they have some merit over and beyond their curiosity value. I still believe that if they have any value, it is only because their perspectives reflect a specific time and place, as I have indicated earlier in this Introduction. Further, and I say this neither in apology nor to seek mitigation, they also reflect the frenetic urgency of journalistic writing. A further word in clarification. The articles are reproduced as they were written, with minor verbal changes and corrections of errors in grammar and construction that had remained. Further, I made some modifications — I have removed the original sub-headings and introductory paragraphs, and have restored my preferred form for referring to a date—day, month and year— which is logical and unambiguous, instead of the more favoured month, day and year format. I have replaced references to formulations like ‘this year’, ‘last month’, inescapable in journalism, with the full date, month and year. I have also, silently, corrected the silly blunders and glaring factual errors, but have not tampered with comments that, in retrospect, appear ill-informed or plainly wrong judgements.

Prologue In my beginning is my end

O

n 7 April 1912, at a meeting held in Kamakhya, an ancient centre of pilgrimage near Guwahati, and attended by about a dozen persons, a research organization called Kamarupa Anusandhana Samiti (subsequently also known as the Assam Research Society) was founded. Its objective, as stated in its prospectus issued in December 1914, was ‘to carry on researches within the area covered by the sacred province of Kamarupa’ (emphasis added). The initiative for founding such a research organization, with its focus on the sacred history and geography of the land of Kamarupa, was taken in the course of the deliberations of an older and corresponding research organization, the Uttara Vangiya Sahitya Parishad (Northern Bengal Literary Council), which had then been meeting at the same venue. The broader inspiration and ideal behind the endeavour, in Kamarupa/Assam as well in several other provinces, has been acknowledged to be the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal. As the prospectus notes, the idea of founding such an organization was not original. There had been an earlier proposal to form a ‘Historical Research Society for the Province of Eastern Bengal and Assam’. But this never took concrete shape because of the dissolution of the province of eastern Bengal and Assam, announced at the coronation durbar in Delhi on 12 December 1911 by King George V, just a little over six years after the experiment was implemented and less than four months before the founding of the KAS. It is one of those impossible-to-settle debates about whether the partition of India and the tragedy that preceded, accompanied and followed it on both sides of the border could have been avoided if the ‘vivisection of Bengal’, the highly emotive description of the administrative and political initiative taken in 1905 by the viceroy, Lord Curzon, admittedly to weaken Bengali (Hindu) nationalism and Indian nationalism, had not met with such forceful and violent

2 Looking Back into the Future opposition principally, though not solely, from the Hindu Bengalis in the province. In the event, less than 40 years later, the very same class that had so violently opposed the partition of Bengal had to acquiesce, in far bloodier circumstances, to the partition of India, one of the two central features of which was indeed the partition of Bengal, a re-implementation of the old plan with virtually the same relocation of the eastern parts of Bengal as a constituent part of a sovereign country, Pakistan — though these ceased to be a part of Pakistan a quarter of a century later in even more violent circumstances. These reflections are not a digression; they have a bearing on one of the themes of this essay. The KAS had 12 founding members, almost all of them involved in matters of study and research, though not all of them were professionally engaged in study, teaching and research. Overwhelmingly, they were high-caste Hindus from the professional class — scholars, teachers from traditional Sanskrit schools (tol), members of the bureaucracy and so on. One finds much the same kind of spread among the 45 ordinary members, including four from outside Assam (none of them, incidentally, a woman), mentioned in the appendix to the prospectus. The division and distinction between intellectual workers and those labouring in ‘non-intellectual’ professions (though, evidently, this did not include manual labour) was neither clear nor absolute in those days. It is not so even now, though the exceptional departures from what is now considered the norm tend to be obscure, more eccentric individuals labouring in dim self-effacement than acknowledged members of a scholarly fraternity. One feels confronted with a wholly original, indeed unique, world of scholarly endeavour and engagement when one goes through the membership lists of organizations such as the KAS. Two aspects of these endeavours that resulted in the foundation of the KAS and its subsequent activities deserve to be noted. One, these were almost entirely the result of private initiative; the KAS itself was (and continues to be) very much a membership organization, with a constitution and rules and regulations governing all its activities. Although, like all such endeavours of those times, the organization secured official patronage of sorts (the government of Assam made a grant of ` 250 on 18 December 1915 and, from the following financial year, increased this to an annual

Prologue 3

recurring grant of ` 1,000), its activities were sustained essentially by the labours of the members and the ‘munificent patronage’ (a favourite expression of these rather impoverished scholars) of well-to-do private individuals, zamindars and others. For instance, the original proposal to establish such a society was made by Khan Chaudhuri Amanatullah Ahmad, a zamindar of Koch Behar, and supported by Rai Mrityunjoy Chaudhuri Bahadur, a zamindar of Rangpur (now in Bangladesh), both then active in the Uttara Vangiya Sahitya Parishad. The first list of patrons published in the prospectus includes not merely Sir Archibald Earle, the chief commissioner of Assam, but also two leading members of the feudal royalty: Maharaja Jitendranath Bhupa Bahadur of Koch Behar and Raja Pratapchandra Barua Bahadur of Gauripur, Assam. Apart from the chief commissioner, the two other Europeans included E.A. Gait and P.R.T. Gurdon, patrons who were there as much for their scholarly engagement with Assam as for their official positions. Secondly, the concept of Assam envisaged in the universe covered by the KAS (Kamarupa, the ancient name of Assam, itself an imaginary construct based on puranic geography) clearly included areas of what would now be northern Bengal and Bangladesh, not to speak of Koch Behar, which was seen as an integral part of ancient Kamarup and is even now seen as having many cultural commonalities with Kamrupa district and areas to its west (the so-called Lower Assam). As recalled in An Account of Kamarupa Anusandhana Samiti (a collection of archival matter issued in 1993 to mark 80 years of its work), ‘The jurisdiction of its research work spread … over the area formerly included in the sacred and ancient kingdom of Pragjyotisha-Kamarupa, comprising modern Assam and the neighbouring [S]tates (sic) of North Bengal including Koch Behar and East Bengal (presently Bangladesh).’1 More than 80 years down the line, one of the defining elements of this initiative, the sacredness of the terrain and, by inference, also of the work undertaken, remains constant. Indeed, the history and culture of Bengal, in particular the adjoining districts of northern Bengal, including Koch Behar, was seen not so much as an extension of the history and culture of Kamarupa but as an integral part of that history. The KAS set up a branch in Rangpur, with the secretary of the Rangpur Sahitya Parishad functioning as its secretary. Not surprisingly, there was a significant Bengali presence (indicated and identifiable by the use of

4 Looking Back into the Future the honorific ‘Babu’, while the Assamese names were preceded by the honorific ‘Srijut’) at every level of these endeavours, indicating the strong intellectual inspiration and material support that these received as much from Bengal as from within Assam. Most significantly, the universe of ‘Kamarupa’, part of the sacred territory of puranic geography as perceived and presented in these efforts, saw Assam not as a remote and isolated outpost of India, as the colonial government did — by marking off on its maps large parts of the province as ‘excluded areas’, ‘partially excused areas’ and ‘unadministered areas’ — but in inclusive terms, as part of a larger cultural and geographical terrain that was linked not merely to Bengal but to the broader pan-Indian and even more inclusive universe of ‘Bharatavarsha’ from puranic times; hence its ‘sacredness’. Thus, Narakasura and Bhagadatta, mythological rulers of Kamarupa in the Mahabharata period, became historical figures in this imagination, not imaginary constructs of myth and legend. Indeed the location of Assam in such a pan-Indian context was the central theme animating the scholarly works produced by many of these intellectual leaders identified with the KAS. As a scholar has argued in his essay, the investing of names, either of persons or places, with a puranic epic identity served the purposes of both Indian nationalist historians and colonial administrators.2 While such an attempt to identify the Kamarupa of myth and legend with a part of historical India could be seen at its most innocuous as a bit of harmless fantasy, the active and living linkages such efforts saw and sought between Kamarupa and contemporary Bengal had other implications for the colonial government still confronting the aftermath — in the form of political protests and radical political mobilization — of the division of Bengal. These had acquired a momentum and dynamism of their own, taking directions that the colonial government could neither foresee nor control despite the annulment of the partition. As many historical accounts citing contemporary intelligence reports have noted, ‘terrorists’ from Bengal were routinely moving from Bengal to Assam to escape the police. The Political History of Assam (1826–1919) published by the government of Assam in 1977, a three-volume project sponsored by the state government,3 refers to the case of ‘Jadu Gopal Mukherjee, an outstanding revolutionary carrying a price of ` 20,000 on his head’ eluding the police and keeping up his activities in Assam during 1915–16. Then there was

Prologue 5

the case of ‘Nalini Ghose and some other revolutionaries who had been hiding in Fancy Bazaar and Athgaon in Guwahati, who were arrested after armed clashes with the police on 18–19 January 1918 and later tried and sentenced by Special Commissions under the Defence of India Act’. Such sparks, initially (and quite wrongly) seen as essentially a malignant importation from Bengal to disrupt the imagined tranquillity of Assam, could not anyway be contained, for the objective conditions for such unrest to thrive were very much present in the socio-economic situation in the province. Nevertheless, the knee-jerk reaction was to isolate the province from what were seen as malignant infections. The establishment of a separate department of historical research under the direct control of the government, with the domain of its research activities defined and confined to ‘Assam’ in contradistinction to the universe of Kamarupa was, at that point of time, as much a political necessity as a path-breaking endeavour to expand historical research in Assam. Like any such voluntary efforts, the KAS did the tasks it had set for itself, sometimes exceedingly well, sometimes in a workmanlike, perhaps even a pedestrian, manner. Its own summing up of its achievements on the eightieth anniversary of its founding is modest. It also notes, as if in passing, that the KAS ‘also paved the way for the establishment of sister institutions in the State, like ... the Department of Historical and Antiquarian Studies’, suggesting an organic continuity between the two structures. Such, perhaps, is the case now. But it was not so when the colonial government took the initiative to provide for a separate Department of Historical and Antiquarian Studies (DHAS). Rather, the argument of this essay is that the initiative of the colonial government was intended to facilitate and encourage a different focus to historical studies than had been provided by the KAS, in the circumstances of its birth as well as in the direction its work had taken in the first decade of its existence. These went beyond the obvious differences that had been evident from the beginning in that the focus of the KAS was more in the direction of a collection of artefacts having a bearing on the ancient history of Kamarupa with puranic undertones —– monuments and inscriptions, temple architecture and archaeology, copper plates, ancient coins and so on —– while that of the DHAS was more specifically historical,

6 Looking Back into the Future dealing with periods and events identifiably having a focus in recorded history. The KAS says: ‘Since its inception, the Samiti has been steadfastly working towards the fulfilment of its objective to carry on research in matters relating to history, archaeology, ethnography, etc., and to collect books and manuscripts, coins, copper plates, statues, carved stones, anthropological articles, etc., in short, all things that should find place in a literary museum of such a society and also the establishment of a Government Museum in Guwahati ...’ In the course of time, the KAS has now become little more than an adjunct of the Assam Provincial Museum (now the Assam State Museum, ‘a purely government institution but [with] its management ... left with the Board of Trustees’) it facilitated in bringing into being than its primary moving force. Having been from the beginning and always a department of the state government, the DHAS has not had so many ups and downs, except those that are part of the fate of any government department. However, for any scholar, or even a journalist, a visit to these institutes, which share as much of an inspiring past as a decrepit present and uncertainties about the future, is a depressing experience. What’s in a name? After asking this rhetorical question and dismissing it, the same poet, has something rather different to say in his more mature years about names and nomenclature (Othello, Act Three, Scene Three). Names, like every other physical and cultural artefact and other creations of the human intellect and imagination, are unique, with an element of magic. It is hardly necessary to press this point, for even now there are societies where people will not reveal their real names but go throughout their lives under a name meant for use in the public domain. For, men and women too, like the cat in another poet’s imagination, have names that only they know. The same uniqueness is a feature of changes in names and nomenclature, a process of reclaiming one’s history that has been distorted out of all recognition — and not merely by the colonial rulers. In Assam and the NE region, for instance, the nationalist assertion by various minority communities almost always incorporates their own reinvention as well as their local habitation and name, their land and their personal names, in terms defined by them. Instances of such reinvention are to be found among every group of people in the region.

Prologue 7

So, Kamarupa of the puranic epic became a serviceable name, Kamrup, to denote a revenue district created after occupation and conquest by the British. However, Kamarupa itself became Asam, another ancient name, but of a later date, which in due course got anglicized to Assam. However, it retained its subtle uniqueness in Assamese spelling and pronunciation, which is not easy for foreigners to comprehend in all its nuances. The Assamese spelling and pronunciation, in their reverse transliteration into Roman script letters and attempts at phonetic spelling, are now represented by two other versions of the name: Asom and Axom, the latter a still to be accepted innovation intended to represent the sound and pronunciation of the uniquely modified Assamese retroflex fricative, represented in an oversimplified spelling simply as ‘s’. The United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), the voice (and deeds) of an exclusivist Assamese nationalist assertion, claims it is fighting for the liberation of ‘Asom’, not Assam. The journey from Kamarupa to Assam and possibly to Asom and, who knows, maybe even beyond, is in no way unique. New names for old, like another siren call of new lamps for old, holds promises as well as perils. However, in the present situation in Assam, one is not even clear about what direction these calls will take, let alone worrying about what is waiting at the end of the journey.

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Notes and References ∗ First published in Frontline, vol. 21, no. 16, 31 July–13 August 2004. 1. An Account of Kamarupa Anusandhana Samiti, 1993, Guwahati: Kamarupa Anusandhana Samiti. 2. Bodhisattva Kar. 2004, ‘What is in a Name? Politics of Spatial Imagination in Colonial Assam’, CINISEAS Papers 5, Guwahati: Centre for Northeast India, South and Southeast Asia Studies, Omeo Kumar Das Institute for Social Change and Development. 3. S.K. Barpujari and A.C. Bhuyan, 1977, Political History of Assam (1826– 1919), vol. I. Guwahati: Department for the Preparation of the Political History of Assam, Government of Assam.

SECTION I: THE WORD AND THE IDEA

1 The Politics of a Script: Demand for the Acceptance of the Roman Script for the Bodo Language∗ I

W

ith the suspension on 28 November 1974 of the agitation launched by the Bodo Sahitya Sabha for the adoption of the Roman script for the Bodo language, there has been a visible relaxation of tension in Assam.1 But the relaxation of tension is more apparent than real, for the issues highlighted by the agitation are far from being resolved. Strong passions have been roused on all sides, and even if the ‘script issue’ might be decided, one way or the other, to everybody’s satisfaction, one can never be sure that such a settlement would mean an end to the continuing assertion of sub-regional nationalisms in Assam. On the face of it, no agitation could seem more pointless and unnecessary than an agitation launched by a group of people ‘demanding’ the use of a particular script for their language. The adoption of a script for a language, which otherwise possesses no script of its own, should ordinarily be entirely a matter for the people concerned. But unfortunately, things are not so simple and the question of the script has got enmeshed with so many other questions, mostly of a political and cultural nature, that the issue has really ceased to be a ‘purely academic matter’, of importance only to the people concerned. The present article is an attempt to sort out these political and cultural questions. The Bodos are a Mongoloid people who live in the whole of North-East India and speak one of the Tibeto-Burman languages. Ethnologists speak of many groups of people as Bodos; but our

12 Looking Back into the Future concern here is with the group of people known as Bodo Kiratas who live mainly, but not exclusively, in the north-east parts of the districts of Goalpara, Kamrup and Darrang. Our concern is not with the Bodo as a speech area, which would include Tripura and the Garo Hills in Meghalaya, as well as small pockets in other parts of the NE region. At the outset, it should be noted that the Bodos are only one of the many plains tribal people who are still territorially part of Assam. Some of these plains tribal people no doubt live in the hill areas now constituted into Meghalaya and other political units but the majority of them live in Assam and have always lived here. Apart from the Bodo Kachari, the other segments of this plains tribal population are the Rabha, the Hojai, the Hajong, the Deuri, the Plains Miri, the Sonowal Kachari and the Lalung. Each group has a language or dialect of its own though in some cases, the native tongue has almost completely been forgotten and the Assamese language has been adopted as the mother tongue. But the Bodo Kacharis along with the Plains Miris continue to speak their language, though substantial numbers of these peoples are fully bilingual, speaking both the mother tongue and Assamese. It is now necessary to venture upon a bit of historical and cultural background, a highly risky undertaking, but which has to be undertaken nonetheless. Who are these Bodo people? The origin of the Kachari race is still very largely a matter of conjecture and inference, in the absence of anything entitled to be regarded as authentic history… In features and general appearance they approximate very closely to the Mongolian type, and this would seem to point to Tibet and China as the original home of the race… It is possible that there were at least two great migrations from the north and north-east Bengal and west Assam through the valleys of the Tista, Dharla, Sankosh, etc., and founding there what was formerly the powerful kingdom of Kamarupa; and the other making its way through the Subansiri, Dibong and Dihang valleys into eastern Assam, where a branch of the widespread Kachari race, known as Chutiyas undoubtedly held sway for a lengthened period… It is indeed not at all unlikely that the people known to us as Kacharis and to themselves as Bada (Bara) were in earlier days the dominant race in Assam.2

In whatever mysteries the origins of these people might lie, it is generally agreed that once, and not so long ago either, they occu-

The Politics of a Script 13

pied practically the whole of the NE region of India. The Bodo tribes are linguistically connected with the Nagas, but whereas the Nagas have always remained isolated and primitive, one may say that the Bodos who spread over the entire Brahmaputra valley and north Bengal as well as east Bengal, forming a solid bloc in north-eastern India, were the most important Indo-Mongoloid people in eastern India, and they form one on the main bases of the present-day population of these tracts. Judging from the wide geographical range of their language, the Bodos appear first to have settled over the entire Brahmaputra valley, and extended west into north Bengal (in Koch Behar, Rangpur and Dinajpur districts); they may have been the Indo-Mongoloids who penetrated into north Bihar or might equally have been either Bodos or the ‘Himalayan’ tribes allied to the Newars. They skirted the southern bend of the Brahmaputra and occupied the Garo Hills, where as Garos, they form a bloc of Bodo speech. South of the Garo Hills they spread in northern Maimansing, where the semi-Bengalized Haijong tribe is of Bodo origin. From Nowgong district in Assam their area of occupation extended to Cachar district (particularly in the North Cachar Hills) and into Sylhet, and from Cachar and Sylhet, they extend further to the south to Tripura state, where there is still a Bodo-speaking bloc in the shape of the Tipra tribe which founded the state; and from Tripura they spread into Comilla and possibly also the Noakhali district; and thus they occupied the mouth of the Ganges by the eastern sea. With the exception of the isolated Khasi and Jaintia Hills, the whole of Assam (barring the eastern parts inhabited by the Nagas and the Kuki-Chin) and north and east Bengal was the country of the great Bodo people. But at the present moment, except where some islands of Bodo speech remain, the Kirata Bodos have merged into the Bengali- and Assamese-speaking masses, Hindu as well as Mussalman, in the area.3

That the Bodo people, in fact, form the base of the present-day Assamese society is hardly disputed by anybody, least of all by the Assamese people themselves. In fact, it is rather misleading to make the distinction between the Assamese people and the Bodo people for they are, if one could put it that way, the woof and warp of a composite Assamese society and culture. This concept of a composite Assamese society and culture is not entirely an instance of fantasy, of the idea preceding the fact. Perhaps at some remote period, the NE region did receive settlers belonging to the so-called upper-caste Hindus from the heartland; but the present

14 Looking Back into the Future population, even of the so-called upper-caste Hindus, is undoubtedly a product of the widespread intermingling of people, both the ‘Aryan’ and the ‘Mongoloid’. But it is not necessary to depend upon any speculative assessment of possible widespread miscegenation that should have taken place in earlier times to see that the caste-Hindu Assamese society has been fortified and enriched by ‘non-Aryan’ elements. Whatever rigidity may have existed in other areas of the country regarding the Hindu caste system, making it impossible for one born outside the caste to even enter into it, in Assam at any rate the Hindu caste system as it operated in earlier times was a remarkably open one. Upward-caste mobility was very much a reality in Assam, and not merely was the nonHindu permitted to enter the Hindu fold, but the convert (or his family) could, by stages, move higher and higher in the Hindu caste hierarchy — though, of course, the highest caste distinctions were barred to him (unless he managed to settle in an entirely new place and set himself up as a Brahmin or a Kayastha). Conversion of the aborigines to Hinduism was undertaken extensively by the Goseins in Assam, and the whole practice has been described in the Census Report of 1891, thus: The Gosein or some of his subordinates usually select certain families of the aboriginal tribes, who reside in the vicinity of Hindu villages and at a distance from the main villages of the aboriginal tribes. These families are frequently lectured upon the purity of the Hindu religion and the easy way in which they can acquire a position in the Hindu society if they give up their habits of eating pork and other forbidden food and drinking strong liquor, and conform to the Hindu methods of eating and drinking and worship. As these people frequently feel the inconvenience of their isolated position, they are easily tempted to become Hindu, and thereby be enabled to associate and move with their Hindu neighbours by whom they are hated and looked down upon as a degraded class so long as they remain in an unconverted state. When these people after frequent lectures show some inclination towards giving up their religion and becoming Hindus, a certain propitious day is selected and they are questioned as to whether they would like to give up their former habits and customs, and become perfect Hindus, or they would simply take saran (religious instruction) from the Hindu Gosein, and remain free as to their habits of eating and drinking. When they express a desire of entire conversion to the Hindu religion, they are made to fast for a day or two, and then to undergo a prayachit (atonement), for which they

The Politics of a Script 15 have to spend some 5 to 20 rupees according to their circumstances. They then receive their saran bhajan (religious instruction and mode of worship) from the Gosein whom from that day they look upon as their spiritual guide. These people then change all former utensils of cooking and eating and also their dwelling house and become quite Hinduized. The Gosein then makes them over to a certain khel (a body of Hindus who eat and drink and associate with each other) with whom the converted men are to associate. The converted men are closely watched by their new comrades as to whether they take any of the forbidden food and strong liquor or not; and if they are found to have entirely given up these things they are freely admitted into the Hindu society, and are called Saru Koch. For the first three generations from their conversion they are looked down upon a little by their Hindu comrades and they are not allowed to take any leading part of their society. From the third generation they become quite as good as any Hindu of the Koch caste.4

It should be noted that the khel referred to in the passage cited was a peculiar feature of rural Assam under the Ahom administration. The adult population of Assam was divided into khels having to render specific service to the state, such as arrow-making, boat-building, boat-plying, house-building, provision supplying, fighting, writing, revenue collecting, road-building, catching and training of elephants, superintendence of horse, training of hawks and supervision of forests. Sometimes khels were composed on a territorial basis… Each khel was like a guild to which lands were allotted for cultivation by the constituent members free of rent in return for the service they rendered to the state. The strength of a khel varied from 3,000 to 100.5

This constitution of the subjects into khels in upper Assam made it possible for even the non-Hindu elements to live in a comparatively integrated state with the caste-Hindus. Such a reorganization of rural Assam did not take place in areas which were outside the Ahom administration;6 and it is in these areas, such as Goalpara and Kamrup, that the majority of the present-day Bodos live. Every people need a myth. One of the myths that strongly persists in Assam, especially in the minds of the upper-caste Hindus, is that they — by a process of ethnocentricism, which includes their caste and class and finally, the whole of Assamese society — are peculiarly free from the bane of caste prejudices and

16 Looking Back into the Future caste feelings which are so rampant in other parts of the country. Like all myths, this myth too has an element of truth. The very fact that a non-Hindu tribal could — of course, by doing the proper penances and paying the required fees and so on — become a Hindu of sorts does indicate that the Hindu caste system was not, after all, such a closed and rigid system as it was in other parts of the country. But despite the comparative openness of the society, the caste-Hindu Assamese society could never completely absorb all the aboriginal elements. Many factors went into this partial Hinduization of Assam. But at least part of the reason for the failure of total proselytization should have been the demands made on the convert. And not all the openness of the caste system in Assam made the convert forget that he, even though a Hindu, was still a very low-class one.

II Let us for a moment consider the class vaguely referred to as the upper-caste Hindu elite. There is only one word that can adequately describe the psychological state of this class at present — panic. The sequence of events that has been unfolding for the past couple of years, roughly from the beginning of the 1970s, should seem as déjà vu, they have been there before. What is being enacted before their eyes cannot but seem as yet another act in an unending drama of the ‘dismemberment’ of Assam. Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Mizoram — each name speaks to the Assamese mind of yet another slice taken off the body politic of Assam. Inevitably, the present movement of the Bodo people against the use of the Assamese script for their language is seen as yet another rejection, by a minority group, of its Assamese identity. But the Bodos’ ‘rejection’ is undoubtedly a far more serious matter, more hurtful even, than the ‘rejection’ of the Khasis, the Nagas, the Garos, the Mizos. They were all, culturally as well as geographically, peripheral to the Brahmaputra valley. Enjoying many privileges under special provisions of the Constitution, they were, even while in Assam, never of Assam. But the Bodos are very much in Assam; they are in fact, as both the Assamese and the Bodos insist on maintaining, the original inhabitants of the land. In a way, it is silly to make a distinction between the Assamese and the Bodos, for the Bodos are Assamese (though the eager apologist will never

The Politics of a Script 17

reverse the equation and claim that the Assamese are Bodos). As pointed out earlier, it is from the Bodo stock that the present-day Assamese society has been derived, a derivation which is nowadays being increasingly insisted upon. So, how can the Bodo people reject their Assamese identity? Who else is Assamese if the Bodos are not Assamese? Rhetorical questions abound. But notwithstanding all the pious declarations about the Bodos being the mainspring of present-day Assamese society, it is very doubtful if the Bodo people were ever really considered as part of the Assamese society while they remained Bodos. Their acceptance into Assamese society was very much linked with their acceptance of Hinduism, which also meant, in the course of a few generations, the loss of the native speech and the adoption of the Assamese language.7 Those who remained outside the Hindu caste system continued to remain Kacharis, a term which, at least in private conversation among caste-Hindu Assamese, continues to have its traditional pejorative connotation. The acceptance of the Assamese language as the mother tongue was the sine qua non of entry into Assamese society, an attitude of mind not especially different from that exhibited by language groups in other parts of the country. At certain points in the past, the Bodo people found some marginal benefits accruing to them by seeking entry into the Hindu caste system, even on the terms imposed by the latter. The illusion was created that the new entrants were equal partners while the reality was that they were admitted on sufferance. And while they undoubtedly derived all the spiritual advantages offered by the entry into the lower ranks of the Hindu caste system, the more material advantages being offered by the new system of government — the jobs, the educational facilities, the contracts, etc. — while being theoretically available to the Bodos as well as to the non-Bodos, were in fact being almost exclusively cornered by the non-Bodo people. The problem faced by the Bodo people has been in essence the problem faced by all less developed communities, when they are living with comparatively advanced groups of people under a common political system. Despite all the efforts at conversion and assimilation, there still existed a substantial community of Bodos who, on the one hand were extremely poor, backward, inwardlooking; but who, on the other hand, had to live with a people who were, comparatively speaking, slightly better off than the Bodos

18 Looking Back into the Future in every way. The lower levels of both the societies were wretchedly poor; in fact it would be misleading to speak of the economic exploitation of the Bodos by the Assamese people, a kind of battle cry of the Plains Tribal Council of Assam (PTCA), for the plain fact is that both are being exploited equally impartially by Delhi. But undoubtedly, the elite among the caste-Hindus was larger, better equipped, better trained as an active partner of a feudal system of exploitation for centuries, than the almost non-existent Bodo elite. Of late, the Bodo elite has been growing in strength and numbers, and the conflict for a slice of the pie has essentially been between these elites; and a cultural manifestation of this conflict has been the recent one over the choice of the script for the Bodo language. But to say that the present conflict is between the caste-Hindu elite and the Bodo elite is in a sense to beg the question by saying the obvious. It still does not answer the question — why? The Bodos, to adopt a sentence from Eldridge Cleaver, feel that they have been rather late in waking up to the caste Hindus’ doings, and now that they have been tricked all these years, are very bitter. Other tribal groups in the composite state of Assam have not merely retained their cultural identities but have even won their rights to a distinct political identity, vindicated most triumphantly in the sprawling bureaucracies of Shillong, Kohima and other places. The plains tribal people (among whom are the Bodos) on the other hand were denied the elaborate constitutional protections contained in the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution; instead they were fobbed off with the protection contained in the provisions of the Tribal Belts and Blocks;8 and everyone agrees that even these nominal rules governing the possession and transfer of land in the tribal areas have not been observed. The result has been large-scale alienation of land in the tribal areas, whose scale and extensiveness is yet to be properly assessed. The results of a survey conducted in a couple of plains tribal villages suggest that land-pauperization and debt are rampant in these villages.9 But why should feelings of economic exploitation result in opposition to the Assamese script? If anything, the objective conditions for a sustained struggle against landlordism are ripe in the rural areas of Assam. And yet, we find the Bodos, one of the largest homogenous peasant communities of Assam, acutely suffering from the evils of landlordism, burdened by debts repaid many times over in interest alone and having a tradition of agrarian revolt and

The Politics of a Script 19

armed struggle under communist leadership, now being massively mobilized for an agitation against the Assamese script. The explanation, of course, is that the leadership of the Bodos finds it more profitable at the present juncture to mobilize the Bodo masses on the issue of the script. Often, the landlord and the village mahajan are caste-Hindu Assamese and the feelings of economic exploitation are easily turned into cultural channels. The agitation against the Assamese script is also sure to pay rich dividends quickly, which can be reaped by the leadership. Not that the grounds for the demand of the Roman script for the Bodo language are entirely non-existent. The present writer, am totally ignorant of the Bodo language; my ignorance of the Assamese language too is near-total, but if representative literary/ cultural organizations of the Bodo people like the Bodo Sahitya Sabha agree that the Roman script is more suited to their language, then that should have been the end of the matter. In fact, many Assamese intellectuals feel that even the Assamese script, as it is constituted at the present, is unnecessarily cumbersome even for the Assamese language and a lively debate is going on about the need to modify the present script, which is practically indistinguishable from the Devanagari in its composition, to suit the sound (pronunciation) requirements of the Assamese language. The activists of the Bodo Sahitya Sabha precipitated the issue (they had waited long enough) early this year (1974) by introducing the Bodo English Primer Bithorai—printed in the Roman script—in the Bodo-medium schools. The result was that the government stopped grants to the schools which had introduced the new, unrecognized textbook, and stopped the payment of salaries of teachers in the recalcitrant schools. Protests followed later in the year (1974), a token strike for a day (12 September), mass satyagraha in the ‘Bodo Medium Implemented Areas of Assam’ (18–21 September), mass picketing of schools in the same areas (24 September to 4 October) and mass indefinite picketing in government offices in the same areas (5 October). There was a let-up in the movement following discussions between the Bodo Sahitya Sabha and the government in the middle of October. The movement was resumed on 16 November, the anniversary of the founding of the Bodo Sahitya Sabha, (incidentally, one of the demands of the Bodo Sahitya Sabha is that 16 November should be declared as a government holiday) and before it was suspended on 28 November, by the government’s

20 Looking Back into the Future own admission ten people had been killed including two Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) men. During the early phase, four people had been killed: two in Barpeta Road on 28 September, and two more in Mangaldoi sub-division on 3 October.10 It is clear that the government has been quite ruthless in its reaction to the agitation of the Bodo people. But while one can understand the ruthlessness of the government, it is difficult to understand the extreme anxiety and near-panic displayed by the non-Bodo people on the Bodo demand for the Roman script. Some months ago, when the police invaded the Gauhati University campus and severely beat up many students and employees, there was widespread protest all over the state against the brutalities perpetrated by the police. But a far more severe repression let loose upon the Bodo people has elicited but little public indignation, the significance of which has not been lost on the Bodo people. Undoubtedly the demand for the Roman script is seen as only seemingly academic and cultural; in the minds of the Assamese, the demand is the thin end of the wedge, the thick end being Udayachal. Since Udayachal, conceived of as an autonomous region for the plains tribal people of Assam, is after all not a practicable idea — the Bodo people are spread all along the Brahmaputra valley, mainly but not exclusively on the northern bank of the Brahmaputra, and there are no significantly large contiguous areas where they are in a majority — the concept of Udayachal has to be seen as a pure and simple pressure device employed by a minority group to wrest concessions from the ruling elite. But with the bitter memories of earlier acts of ‘dismemberment’, one cannot be absolutely certain that future reorganizations are not going to be carried out in the NE region and we might be in for yet another redrawing of boundaries. It is this prospect that is most disturbing to the average Assamese. A group of people, who were all these centuries part of the Assamese society (on terms dictated by the latter), has suddenly started asserting that they are in fact different; and though the Bodos are stating what is merely a fact, the gesture of rejecting the Assamese script, which accompanies this assertion, has been especially difficult for the Assamese people to stomach. Viewed rationally, a script should hardly rouse such passions. A common script anyway has never automatically meant any greater understanding between the people who share the common script, a point hardly necessary to make when writing about Assam. That

The Politics of a Script 21

the Bodos wrote their language in the Assamese script all these years did not make communication between the Bodos and the non-Bodos any easier, except when the Bodos spoke Assamese. The number of Assamese speakers able to speak and write Bodo must be insignificant, compared to the number of Bodos fully fluent in Assamese. And yet, a major agitation had to be launched by the Bodos to secure something which anyway nobody could deny them; and on this issue, over a dozen people have died in the last few weeks (1974). But the issue itself is yet to be settled and a further round of talks between the Bodo Sahitya Sabha and the government is scheduled for the latter part of January 1975.

III The alienation of the Bodos from a composite Assamese society is one of the most disturbing developments for Assam in recent times; one can only hope that this alienation is not total. For long, the Bodos (and other plains tribal people) considered the entry into the lower ranks of the Hindu caste system as an essentially forward step. But what was once a phenomenon of mass conversion has now altogether stopped. Not merely that, there is even a movement back into the Bodo fold of those converts who (or whose forefathers) had taken saran or had become Kochs. While this selfrespecting acceptance of an original non-Hindu tribal identity should be heartily welcomed, the prospects are that the Bodos, too, are on the way to preaching their own form of exclusivism and a closed-society system. The constitution of the Bodo Sahitya Sabha lays down that only Bodos can become members of that body; there is no provision for a non-Bodo to become a member, a bar which does not exist in the Assam Sahitya Sabha or other similar organizations. But can the Bodos really exist outside Assam? Unlike the hills tribes, the plains tribal people have lived too long in close proximity to the rural poor of Assam. Perhaps it was the very exclusiveness of the caste-Hindu society that bred the new exclusivism of the Bodos. But even more important than tribal exclusiveness have been the factors of economic rivalry, the anxiety to have a bigger share of the loot, jobs, contracts and the like. This conflict cannot, of course, be solved under the present system and it would be comfortable to end this article with a combination of a radical denunciation of the

22 Looking Back into the Future landlord–comprador axis that rules the country, and expressions of pious exhortations to the Bodo people and the non-Bodo people of Assam to stand united and fight. But there are the intentions of the Government of India to be taken into consideration in any account of events in NE India. Outside its political opponents whose doings are of course most closely watched by the Government of India, no other group and certainly no people of a whole region are kept under such close and constant scrutiny as the people of the NE region. It is unlikely that the events of 1974 have taken place without New Delhi having a fair idea of what is going on here. There have been attempts here to explain away the agitation of the Bodos as being CIAinspired, missionary-inspired, Bengali-inspired (the last, because frustrated as the Bengalis were in their attempts to get Assam officially classed a bilingual state, they are now seen as egging on the innocent tribal people to anti-Assamese activities); but what is likely is that the movement might be receiving tacit approval and support, not so much from any external intelligence agencies but from the government itself. While no one can say that the problem has been created by the government, it would not be too far-fetched to suggest that it would not be particularly averse to further ‘dismemberment’ of this region. After all, the weakening and the fragmentation of the NE region has been the consistent policy of the government for such weakening has resulted in individual units depending heavily on New Delhi subsidies, and these units can always be expected to be loyal. It was in pursuance of this strategy that the initial reorganization of Assam was undertaken. No doubt the task of New Delhi was made easier by the Assamese elite who were unwilling to share power with the less developed nationalities of the region. Probably, a generous concession to tribal sentiments, and a frank acceptance of an unAryan cultural identity would by themselves not have removed all the suspicions and antagonisms, but the effort was well worth making, if it would have at least had the merit of retaining the territorial integrity of Assam. A strong, united Assam could well have challenged the centre not merely in the sense of a centre–state confrontation but even in more radical ways. It was imperative for the ruling elite that the composite state of Assam be destroyed and in cooperation with the Congress leaders

The Politics of a Script 23

of Assam and an emerging tribal elite; the job was accomplished a few years ago. It is not at all certain that the present agitation (if it ever goes beyond the demand for a script of choice), the incipient demand for Udayachal and an Ujani Assam state and other equally frivolous demands are not all part of an elaborate strategy of the centre to make a real patchwork quilt of the whole NE region, weakening the constituent units into heavily subsidized little bureaucratic empires, with an army of officers and policemen and contractors bloated on the good things of life, keeping things in shape and maintaining Law and Order. But to divide is also to multiply.

.

Notes and References ∗ First published in the Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 9, no. 51, 21 December 1974. 1. Following the talks between the minister of education, Assam, and representatives of the Bodo Sahitya Sabha, the agitation was suspended from 28 November 1974. While some sort of a settlement was worked out regarding the payment of salaries to the teachers in Bodo-medium schools and the release of the arrested volunteers of the Bodo Sahitya Sabha, ‘regarding the recognition of the Roman Script and the approval of Bithorai ... it was agreed upon that the matter will be discussed after suspension of the movement sometime in the 3rd week of January 1975.’ (Minutes of the meeting of the Bodo Sahitya Sabha with the government of Assam, Dispur, December 1974.) 2. Sidney Endle, 1911, The Kacharis, London: Macmillan, pp. 3–4. 3. Suniti Kumar Chatterji, 1951, Kirata-Jana-Kriti, Calcutta: Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, pp. 27–8. 4. E.A. Gait, 1892, Census of India 1891, Assam, Shillong: Assam Secretariat Press, p. 225, footnote. The passage cited, which is a note by C.G.M Kennedy, officiating deputy commissioner, Nowgong, describes the method of conversion in Nowgong. For other methods of conversion, see pp. 83–5 of the 1891 Census report. 5. S.K. Bhuyan, 1949, Anglo-Assamese Relations, Gauhati: Department of Historical and Antiquarian Studies in Assam, p. 10. 6. E.A. Gait, 1963, A History of Assam, Calcutta: Thomas Spink, third edition, p. 250.

24 Looking Back into the Future ‘It [the khel system] was still in vogue at the time of the British occupation, except in Kamrup where a system of collecting revenue according to local divisions, called parganas, had been introduced by the Muhammadans.’ 7. This reading is not applicable to the position of a non-Hindu, nontribal Assamese community as that of the Assamese Muslims. Linguistically at any rate, the Assamese Muslims seem at present to be an indistinguishable part of the larger Assamese identity. 8. Assam Land Revenue Manual, 1970, Shillong: Government of Assam, eighth edition, pp. 75–9, 169–72. 9. Unsigned editorial comment and analysis, ‘Janajati Krishak Samasya,’ (Problems of Tribal Peasantry), Natun Prithivi (quarterly magazine in Assamese), vol. 2, no. 3, Guwahati, May, 1973, pp. 586–89. 10. ‘Documents Regarding the Movement Launched by the Bodo Sahitya Sabha, etc.,’ Kokrajhar, Assam: Bodo Sahitya Sabha (typed copy).

2 Rightful Place for the Assamese Language: Scholarly Labours of Missionaries∗ The recent ceremonies commemorating the death centenary

(1983) of Miles Bronson, an American Baptist missionary who was prominent in controversies over a century ago, leading to the acceptance of Assamese as the language of the courts and education in Assam and who also compiled the first Assamese–English dictionary, and the reissue of the first nine volumes of Orunudoi, the first Assamese monthly journal, which was founded by the American Baptist Mission in Sibsagar in 1846 and which probably continued publication till 1880, once again bring to the fore some of the abiding cultural — and political — questions in Assam. The Reverend Dr Miles Bronson (1812–83) came to Assam in 1837, in the steps of the first American Baptist Mission, which itself had been set up the previous year at Sadiya in Upper Assam as a possible outpost in a campaign to evangelize the Shan tribes of northern Burma and southern China. The mission was headed by the Reverend Dr Nathan Brown (1807–86) who was later to found the journal, Orunudoi. Very soon, the mission had to move its headquarters from Sadiya to Jaipur on the southern bank of Buri Dihing, a tributary of the Brahmaputra, following an uprising in January 1839 by the Khamptis of Sadiya and the killing of the political agent, Colonel Adam White. According to Frederick Downs,1 the historian of the Baptist Church in North-East India, though the missionaries who lived away from the garrison were untouched, the reprisal raids so depopulated the area that further work there was not possible. The subsequent labours of these missionaries, especially of Nathan Brown and Miles Bronson, are now part of history in Assam.

26 Looking Back into the Future Nathan Brown established his mission at Sibsagar and along with his pastoral duties laboured on his Assamese translation of the Bible, idiomatically more accurate than the first Assamese version by Dr William Carey, ‘full of Bengali and Sanskrit words’, Grammatical Notes on the Assamese Language and of course, Orunudoi, ‘a monthly magazine devoted to religion, science and general intelligence’. Miles Bronson, who set up his mission in Nowgong, compiled the first Assamese–English Dictionary (1867) and exerted himself on behalf of the Assamese language by taking a leading part in organizing the endeavours to secure for the language its legitimate place in the administration and judiciary in Assam.2 The history of the Assamese–Bengali controversy in Assam in the nineteenth century, the facts and surmises associated with the action of the company administrators between the adoption of Bengali in 1837 for administrative and judicial purposes with its replacement by Assamese in 1873 — the 37 years of ‘Bengali captivity’ — and the exertions of missionaries like Miles Bronson and civil servants like Andandram Dhekial Phukan (1829–59), are well known. Under the provisions of Act 29 of 1839, the GovernorGeneral of India in Council was authorized: to dispense either generally, or within such local limits as may to him seem meet, with any provision of any Regulation of the Bengal Code, which enjoins the use of the Persian language in any judicial proceeding or in any proceeding relating to the Revenue, and to prescribe the language and character to be used in such proceedings.

Following the annexation of Assam in 1826, the question arose about the appropriate language to be used for judicial proceedings or in any proceedings relating to the revenue in Assam. Since the Charter Act of 1793 had also enjoined on the British administrators the responsibility ‘to provide useful knowledge to the Indians’, there arose the question of the appropriate medium in the schools that were being established in the wake of the annexation. Popular opinion in Assam for long was that the adoption of Bengali for judicial and administrative purposes in Assam in 1837 was a piece of trickery by the British under the instigation of the Bengalis, who by then had already come to, or had been brought into, Assam in large numbers in the wake of the British annexation,

Rightful Place for the Assamese Language 27

and who, it was argued, had not reconciled themselves to the existence and legitimacy of Assamese as an independent and separate language and, consequently, of the Assamese as a separate people. The battles have, however, been fought for a long time. The injustice done to the Assamese language was undone over a century ago; and it is interesting to note that both the adoption of Bengali for official purposes and its replacement by the more legitimate claimant to that honour, Assamese, were both done under the provisions of the same legislation, Act 29 of 1837. What is more relevant is the revival of interest in the work of the missionaries who laboured so valiantly for the restoration of Assamese to its legitimate place in Assam and the recollection, even if not in total tranquillity, of all those ancient battles in the present context in Assam. Miles Bronson, whose name was not widely known, except among scholars, barely years ago (there are no reports of his birth centenary being observed anywhere in Assam in 1912) has acquired in the popular mind a particularly apposite role; but for his work and the labours of other missionaries, it is claimed, the very survival of the Assamese language and Assamese people would have been jeopardized. Some even argue, less convincingly, that the language and the people would have completely perished but for the labour of the missionaries. Equally unrealistically, there are the conspiratorial suggestions from those who, at least in private, flinch at the very idea of the Assamese being a historically legitimate and independent entity, that the current public adulation of American missionaries long dead is something diabolical and is probably inspired and perhaps even financed by inimical foreign agencies out to create more divisions and bitterness between the Assamese and the Bengalis by reviving old controversies. The discovery of the ‘Bronson Papers’ in the United States, at a time when the agitation on the issue of foreign nationals in the state (the illegal migration of Bangladeshi citizens to Assam) was at its height, has lent an unusual piquancy to the revival of interest in the life and works of American missionaries in Assam in the nineteenth century. That so ancient an issue should continue to evoke strong feelings itself is indicative of the fact that the problem, despite being historically settled, is not really dead. Both at the popular level and at the level of cogently argued and well articulated literary and even official opinion, the fear and suspicion that the legitimacy of

28 Looking Back into the Future Assamese as a language, and of the Assamese as a people, continues to be in jeopardy and needs to be guarded against all possible future assaults continues to be very real. Only this can explain the fervid tributes being paid to the memory of the missionaries who had little to show for their long and difficult sojourn in Assam, except the scholarly works they left behind. That they gained few men by way of conversion from the Assamese people is a historical fact. The ethnically Assamese Christian population in the state is negligible. Unlike other regions in India where the structure of the caste-Hindu society made many of its members, not all of them necessarily from the bottom levels of the caste hierarchy, seek solace in Christ, in Assam the relatively liberal social structure and the enormous hold of the modified form of Vaishnavite Hinduism popularized by Sri Sankaradeva (1449–1569) and his disciples apparently ensured that few from Assamese society would turn to Christianity. Perhaps this very failure of the missionaries to secure converts from the Assamese society has lent their scholarly labours an aura of unselfish and disinterested love for the language of the people. The reissue of the Miles Bronson dictionary by the Asom Sahitya Sabha early last month (November 1983) and of the first nine volumes of Orunudoi (1846–54) by the Publications Board, Assam, an autonomous body created by the state government, this month (December 1983) are clearly expressions of popular gratitude of the Assamese people for the disinterested labours of the missionaries who came from such long distances to work hard in what is, even subjectively, still thought of as ‘remote Assam’. But as with so many things in Assam, even these ceremonies are not without some political content and meaning. The Asom Sahitya Sabha is a component of the All-Assam Gana Sangram Parishad which, along with the All-Assam Students’ Union, is leading the current agitation on the question of foreign nationals in Assam. While the Sahitya Sabha organized its functions honouring the memory of Miles Bronson independently and scrupulously kept out representatives of the government from its functions — the agitation leaders considered the assembly of 1983 and the ministry ‘illegal’ and the ministers and legislators were routinely referred to derisively as ‘self-recognized’ — the function organized by the Publications Board and presided over by Mr Mukut Sarma, minister of education, in his capacity as ex-officio chairman of the Board, was

Rightful Place for the Assamese Language 29

attended by three former presidents of the Asom Sahitya Sabha; two of them, Dr Maheswar Neog who has edited the Orunudoi volume and has contributed a long scholarly introduction on the role of missionaries in Assam and Dr Satyendranath Sarma, who was the chief guest at the function, shared the dais with the minister and spoke on the occasion. The reissue of the Bronson dictionary and the Orunudoi volumes may revive a less acrimonious, but not less important controversy about the Assamese script and alphabet. Put rather simply, the problem with Assamese has been one of abundance: unlike, say, in English where the 26 letters of the alphabet are not adequate to represent all the sounds of the language, in Assamese the alphabet, which is virtually the same as Devanagari, has far too many letters for the sounds of the Assamese language as is ordinarily spoken. There is little difference, for instance, between the way the aspirated and unaspirated affricated c and ch are pronounced; the whole set of retroftex plosive consonants (t, th, d, dh) as well as the retroftex plosive nasal (Ń), some argue, are redundant since the corresponding dental consonants and nasal would serve, the pronunciation of the retroftex sounds being exactly the same as that of the dentals. Similarly, the three palatal, retroftex and dental fricatives (ś, ş, š) can well be replaced by one of them (dental) since they are all pronounced similarly, the sound itself being rather unique to the Assamese language. The missionaries obviously thought so and adopted a modified Assamese alphabet and spelling based on 36 letters. This modified orthography and spelling are reflected in the very way the name of the journal is spelt on the title page; the n is represented by the dental rather than the retroftex nasal—as is the case in ‘correct’ Assamese; and instead of the mediolingual y at the end, the missionaries used the short, unrounded i. But the modified alphabet never found popular acceptance and it is arguable whether this too, apart from the hold of the Sankara culture, inhibited many of the natives seeking the spiritual solace offered by the church. Miles Bronson at least recognized the fact that the modified alphabet that the missionaries used in Orunudoi and in much of their literature predisposed the natives against the new faith. And yet, the missionaries laboured on, fighting for the cause of the Assamese language though the orthography of much of their polemics on behalf of Assamese may not have pleased all the Assamese people of those days.

30 Looking Back into the Future Indeed, one of the writers associated with Orunudoi, Hemchandra Barua (1835–90), quite a radical in every other way and a selfproclaimed atheist, strongly opposed the reformed alphabet and spelling adopted by the missionaries, and when he came to compile his own dictionary, Hemkosh,3 he pointedly drew attention to the unscientific nature of Bronson’s alphabet and spelling (varna vinyas) and adopted the prescribed original form of the Assamese alphabet for his own compilation. The controversy continues and periodically voices are heard pleading for a simplification and rationalization of the script and spelling of the Assamese language. The reissue of the Bronson dictionary and of the Orunudoi volume may revive the controversy though it is doubtful if the victory won by Hemchandra Barua (and further codified in the subsequent major dictionary Chandrakanta Abhidhan, 1932) can ever be reversed. 4 For what is really involved is the deeply held (and, no doubt, historically valid) conviction that the Assamese language is a cognate of Sanskrit; that howsoever one may pronounce a word, its written form has to reflect its proper etymology. There is ultimately no escape from the burden of thousands of years of history.

.

Notes and References ∗ First published in The Hindu, 13 December 1983. 1. Frederick S. Downs, 1971, The Mighty Works of God: A Brief History of the Council of the Baptist Churches of North East India: The Mission Period 1836–1950, Guwahati: Christian Literature Centre. 2. Miles Bronson, 1867, A Dictionary in Assamese and English, Sibsagar: American Baptist Mission Press. (A new edition of the dictionary was published by the Assam Sahitya Sabha in collaboration with Omsons in Guwahati, 1983). 3. Hemchandra Barua, 1900, Hemkosh, Gauhati: Hemkosh Printers. 4. Devesvara Chaliha (ed.), 1933, Chandrakanta Abhidhan: A Comprehensive Dictionary of the Assamese Language with Etymology and Illustrations of Words with their Meanings both in Assamese and English, Jorhat: Assam Sahitya Sabha.

3 Census in Assam: The Question of the Mother Tongue∗ C

ommenting on the emergence of those who speak the Assamese language as the single largest lingual group in Assam in the 1951 Census, the first time that this segment of the state’s population acquired such pre-eminence, Professor Amalendu Guha notes:1 The separation of Sylhet alone would not have sufficed to bring in this change. It was the census figures for Goalpara that tilted the balance. In all the census operations up to 1931, Bengali was returned as the mother tongue of more than 50 per cent of the district’s population. This figure came down to less than 18 per cent in 1951 and 12 per cent in 1961. This was mainly because, on political considerations, Bengali Muslims and a section of the sons of the soil who had earlier returned Bengali as their mother tongue declared themselves to be Assamese-speaking.

As the census operations have been launched in Assam along with the rest of the country (in 1991), after a gap of 20 years, once again ‘political considerations’ and related expectations and resentments are likely to affect these operations, especially the self-identification by various segments of the population of their mother tongues. A census of the state was not carried out in 1981 because of the disturbed conditions prevailing then as a consequence of the antiforeigner agitation led by the All-Assam Students’ Union; and the issues raised during the agitation were not unrelated to these very ‘political considerations’. The bland neutrality of the administrative instructions given to the census enumerators do not on the face of it admit any ambiguity or subjective manipulation by the enumerators. Mother tongue is the language spoken in childhood by the person’s mother to the person. If the mother died in infancy, the language

32 Looking Back into the Future mainly spoken in the person’s home in childhood will be the mother tongue. In the case of infants and deaf-mutes the language usually spoken by the mother shall be recorded. Record mother tongue in full whatever the name of the language as returned be and avoid use of abbreviations. You are not expected to determine if the language returned by a person is the dialect of another major language and so on. You should not try to establish any relationship between religion and mother tongue. You are bound to record the language as returned by the person as his mother tongue and you should not enter into any argument with him and try to record anything other than what is returned. If you have reason to suspect that in any area due to any organized movement mother tongue was not truthfully returned, you should record the mother tongue as actually returned by the respondent and make a report to your Superior Census Officer for verification.2

Despite such clear instructions, the feeling (not entirely unjustified) persists among large sections of the non-Assamese-speaking ethnic people of the state that the census figures both in terms of mother tongue and ethnicity have been deliberately manipulated by the enumerators under covert instructions of those in authority to project artificially inflated figures for the Assamese-speaking population. The leaders of the Bodoland agitation, for instance, have never accepted the official figures of the actual Bodo population (in 1971) and the projected population figures (in more recent times) as accurate. Such reservations are, however, less pronounced among other non-Assamese-speaking sections of the state’s population, though in every case there is a tendency to claim a much larger numerical strength than is recorded in the census figures. These resentments have grown especially in the last decade (1980s), the period of the anti-foreigner agitation and the subsequent rule of the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) government, when the various non-Assamese-speaking people of the state felt that they have been under-enumerated. Indeed, the very emergence of the Assamese-speaking people as the majority, which has been taken for granted since 1951, is being sought to be questioned once again, threatening to open what for 40 years had been viewed at least by the ethnic Assamese as a closed chapter The Assam of 1991, the Assam of 1951, not to speak of preindependence Assam, present sharp differences. Before independence, Assam included the whole of Sylhet district, numerically

Census in Assam 33

the largest and overwhelmingly Bengali-speaking. Sylhet district, barring the four thanas of Badarpur, Karimganj, Patharkandi and Ratabari, was awarded to East Pakistan following the referendum of 6–7 July 1947, substantially reducing both the Bengali and Muslim components of the population. This, and the conscious decision of the ‘Bengali Muslims and a section of the sons of the soil of Goalpara district’ to return Assamese as their mother tongue during the 1951 Census resulted, as noted in the passage cited at the beginning, in Assamese-language-speakers emerging as the largest single lingual group in the state. However, even in 1971, the percentage of Assamese-speakers in the state was only slightly over 60, underlining the fragile nature of this majority. Indeed, Cachar district with a 78 per cent Bengali-speaking population showed a more numerous ‘single language block’ than any of the Assamese-speaking districts of the Brahmaputra valley, except Sibsagar district where 85.76 per cent of the population returned Assamese as the mother tongue. The corresponding percentage of Assamese-speakers to the total population of the district for other Brahmaputra valley districts in 1971 were: Kamrup (76.86); Nagaon (73.72); Goalpara (63.60); Lakhimpur (62.90) and Darrang (62.83). As can be seen from the figures in Table 3.1, even if the three Barak valley districts of Cachar, Karimganj and Hailakandi (in 1971, the composite Cachar district) were to be separated from Assam, a periodical demand which may once again gain support when (and perhaps if) the lingual composition of the coming census is revealed, the proportion of the Assamese-speaking people in the state is unlikely to be significantly higher than what would have been the case had such separation been affected in 1971. Table 3.1: Language Break-up of the Population of Assam, 1971 Population Assam, excluding Mizo Hills

1,46,25,152

Minus Cachar Rest of Assam, comprising the Brahmaputra valley districts and the autonomous hill districts

17,13,318 1,29,11,834

Source: The 1971 Census Report.

Assamesespeakers

Bengalispeakers

89,04,917 (60.88%) 6,840 88,98,077 (68.91%)

28,82,039 (19.70%) 13,32,268 15,49,771 (12%)

34 Looking Back into the Future Indeed the theme of this article is that the contrary is likely to be the case. The qualifying interjection within brackets in the previous sentence is relevant because the language break-up of the 1971 Census was published after being kept deliberately under wraps for a very long time, fully 10 years after the census was conducted. There are indications that this fragile majority of the Assamesespeaking people in the state may show some erosion in the coming census figures. The emergence of the Assamese-speaking people as the majority in the state in 1951 and the subsequent marginal advances and reaffirmations of this pattern in the censuses of 1961 and 1971 were due not merely to the factors suggested in the passage cited at the beginning of this article. There were similar resolves where political considerations played little role on the part of other important segments of the non-indigenous population of the state, especially the tea garden labour population and their descendants estimated (in 1979) to have numbered about 16 lakh.3 In the 1971 Census, seven segments of this population accounting for over 1,000 speakers each, returned one or other of the tribal languages of middle India as their mother tongue (Table 3.2). Speakers of Oriya, one of the languages in the Eighth Schedule, who form a significant component of the tea garden labour population in the state are not taken into account here. What is amazing about these figures is that as many as these people, who have for generations been residents of Assam and most of whom are also fluent in Assamese, should continue to return these languages as their mother tongues. Indeed, a majority Table 3.2: Numbers of Speakers Who Returned One or Other Tribal Languages of Middle India in Assam in the 1971 Census Santali Munda Kurukh/Oraon Kharia Bhumij Parji Santali Munda Kurukh/Oraon Kharia Source: The 1971 Census Report.

86,303 76,898 33,032 7,061 4,426 3,785 86,303 76,898 33,032 7,061

Census in Assam 35

of these, as others claiming one or the other language of middle India, returned Assamese as their second language/other tongue, underlining the wide acceptance of the Assamese language among the tea garden labour community, many of whom have, from their own perspective, come to view themselves as ‘Assamese people’ and not merely one of the ‘people of Assam’. This trend may not be reaffirmed in the present census of 1991, especially in the light of the militancy of sections of the tea garden labour population now organizing themselves under the generic title of Adivasis and their resolve to reaffirm their original mother tongues. Table C-VI on bilingualism in the state in the 1971 Census Report shows that barring insignificant numbers of speakers returning Dogri, Kashmiri, Konkani, etc. as mother tongues, virtually every other language-speaker in the state who claimed to have a second language had returned Assamese as a second language, affirming formally what is the most natural and practical reality.4 This was, of course, especially the case in speakers of the various indigenous tribal languages of the state, a majority of whom returned Assamese as the second language, though characteristically only a minuscule proportion of persons who returned Assamese as their mother tongue returned any tribal language of the state as a second language. Thus, while as many as 2,94,446 persons out of the 5,33,746 Bodo-speakers claimed Assamese as a second language (55.16 per cent) only 20,785 out of a total Assamese-speaking population of 89,04,917, a mere 0.23 per cent, claimed Bodo as their second language. The number of Assamese-speakers claiming any other tribal language of the state as a second language was even smaller. In contrast, a remarkable feature of the speakers of the tribal language of the state, especially those who speak the languages of the plains tribes of the state, is that in every case the number of people who returned themselves as plains tribes by community or ethnicity was larger than the number of people who returned the corresponding tribal language as their mother tongue, indicating that a substantial section of this tribal population has only retained its tribal identity even while completely ‘Assamesizing’ itself in so far as its language was concerned. Table 3.3 presents the figures for the total population of the officially recognized nine plains tribal communities in the state and the speakers of the corresponding languages.

36 Looking Back into the Future Table 3.3: Bilingualism among the Plains’ Tribes in Assam

Number of ST (plains) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Boro/Boro Kachari Miri (Mising) Sonowal Kachari Rabha Lalung (Tiwa) Deuri Mech Hojai Barmans in Cachar

Total population 6,10,459 2,59,551 1,98,619 1,38,630 95,609 23,080 2,570 2,298 13,210

Number of persons returning corresponding tribal language as mother tongue 5,33,746 1,77,226 – 32,401 9,954 12,190 – –

Source: The 1971 Census Report. Note: The first eight belong to the Brahmaputra valley and the last to the Barak valley.

However, this trend is almost certain to be reversed in the present census of 1991. Indeed several organizations of the plains tribal people have taken formal resolutions directing their followers to return the respective tribal language as the mother tongue. Such may also turn out to be the response of even significant sections of completely ‘Assamesized’ tribal communities such as the Sonowal Kacharis who now only retain their tribal identity but who have almost completely forgotten their language, as is evident in the fact that in the 1971 Census not a single Sonowal Kachari returned the Sonowal Kachari language as the mother tongue. Other, even more unrealistic moves to revive the use of languages long forgotten (like the moves to revive the Tai language for purposes going beyond the merely symbolically ritualistic) are also not unlikely. Such moves, coupled with more vigilance over the process of enumeration itself, is likely to result in a far greater number of identifiably distinct and separate people not merely in terms of a distinct ethnic or tribal status but also as speakers of corresponding languages, thus substantially eating into the number of Assamesespeaking persons. But by far the most crucial decision will be that of the vast Muslim peasantry of East Bengal origin concentrated in the erstwhile composite districts of Goalpara, Kamrup, Nagaon, Darrang and Lakhimpur. The adoption of the Assamese language as the mother

Census in Assam 37

tongue by this vast section of the population, estimated to constitute about 15 per cent of the state population, was almost complete by 1951.5 The choice, reaffirmed at the two subsequent censuses in the state, is more on instinct than being natural and has substantially contributed to the apparent consolidation of the Assamese-language-speakers as the dominant segment of the state’s population. However, even here there are indications of a ‘rethinking’. The deliberations of the state-level convention of the All-Assam Minority Students’ Union (AAMSU) at Kharupetia in Darrang district on 27 January 1991, where all ethnic and linguistic groups in the state were urged to ‘speak the truth’ while furnishing information to census enumerators about their mother tongue; and the subsequent interventions by state and central leaders of both the Jamait Ulema-e-Hind and the Jamaat-i-Islami directing the Muslim immigrants (or more accurately people belonging to that stock) to declare — as they have done since 1951 or even earlier — Assamese as their mother tongue, are likely to be seen by the ethnic Assamese less as reassurances and more as reminders of the crucial bargaining power that this segment of the population holds and its decisive role in establishing which lingual group retains the strength of numbers in the state. Indeed, there are reports of the All-Assam Students’ Union (AASU) seeking formal talks with AAMSU on this issue with the latter demanding that the vast number of minority people killed during the election violence in February 1983 (including the victims of the infamous Nellie massacre) be declared as Jatiya Swahid (national martyrs), a status that the AASU dispenses almost entirely to its own cadres, in return for a reconsideration of the AAMSU’s reported directive to the linguistic and ethnic minorities to ‘speak the truth’ regarding their mother tongue.

.

Notes and References ∗ First published in The Hindu, 16 February 1991. 1. Amalendu Guha, 1977, Planter-Raj to Swaraj, New Delhi: Indian Council of Historical Research, p. 333 fn.

38 Looking Back into the Future 2. Saikia, A.K., 1972, Census of India 1971: Assam series 3, part ii-C (ii), New Delhi: Manager of Publications, Office of the Registrar General, p. 91. 3. Susanta Krishna Das, 1980, ‘Immigration and Demographic Transformation of Assam, 1891–1981’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 25, no. 19, pp. 850–59. 4. Saikia, Census of India 1971, Table C-VI on bilingualism in the state, pp. 185–88. 5. Das, ‘Immigration and Demographic Transformation’.

4 Shaping the Sound and Scripting a Solution∗ T

he choice of a script for a language should, on the face of it, be the least contentious of issues. The choice is for the people who use the language to make. In most cases the script itself, the shape each distinctive sound of the language in question has acquired over centuries of construction and usage, is a settled issue but for periodic minor disagreements over its minutiae among scholars. However, scripts have also stirred passions over issues that have little to do with their evolution and the history of the languages they represent. One has only to recall the controversy over the Urdu/Devanagari scripts that even now surfaces occasionally, or even the sillier suggestions that in order to promote unity and national integration, all the Indian languages should abandon their distinctive scripts and adopt the Roman script. Further, as was the case with the Bodo language and as it is once again with Konkani, the controversy could also be over the choice of a script other than what has been in use for long. In the absence of its own script, Bodo writers, most of them fully bilingual in Bodo and Assamese (the latter a more developed language), had for generations adopted the Assamese script for their language. However, this arrangement broke down with the emergence and consolidation of new forms of Bodo nationalistic assertion, one of whose primary ‘cultural’ manifestations was the distancing of the Bodo people and their language from the Assamese. However, the initial demand for the adoption of the Roman script for the Bodo language, in place of the Assamese script that had for long served that purpose, was later modified into accepting the Devanagari script as a ‘compromise’ formula. A similar ‘cultural confrontation’ over the most proper choice for the Konkani language whose correlatives are the Devanagari/Marathi script versus the Roman script periodically breaks forth and is yet to be resolved.

40 Looking Back into the Future The controversy over what should be the proper script for the Manipuri language has all these elements, and more. Its virulence and self-destructive rage, whose most dramatic instance was the burning down of the Central Library in Imphal on 13 April 2005 by activists of the Meitei Mayek script agitation, can only be understood in its broader historical context. The language, written for the past two and a half centuries in the Bengali script, was till the middle of the eighteenth century, written in the ancient indigenous script called Meitei Mayek. The broad consensus on how this switch came about (the finer details disputed by some, nevertheless) is that King Pamheiba (1709–48), more famously known as Garibaniwaza (friend of the poor), on his accepting Hinduism under the influence of a Bengali Vaishnavite missionary, Shanta Das, who became his mentor, not merely illegitimized (and, contradictorily, also absorbed) the ancient pre-Hindu faith and beliefs into the Manipuri variety of Hinduism but, in the manner of all zealots eager to affirm their newly acquired faith, also ordered the burning of old Manipuri texts written in the old indigenous script. Indeed, according to Professor Gangmumei Kamei (Kabui), an historian of Manipur, even the name Manipur, a Sanskritic construction, was introduced during the reign of Garibaniwaza, replacing the country’s indigenous name, Kangleipak. However, neither the old faith (Sanamahi) nor the ancient script disappeared entirely. Kangleipak, too, lives, as part of the nomenclature of several separatist militant organizations. With the absorption/integration of Manipur into the Indian union in October 1949, Manipuri nationalism has revived itself in new forms. Politically, these forms manifest themselves as movements for independence from ‘colonial Indian rule’. Culturally, they have meant the revival of the pre-Hindu beliefs and cults which, as noted above, never disappeared, and the demand for the restoration of the ancient script. The revivalist assertion deeply rooted in and related to a sense of national humiliation and directed inescapably against what are seen as ‘Indian’ symbols — Hinduism, Vaishnavism, the Bengali script — has not been entirely free from violence. The issue of the script is, however, not easy of resolution, here and now. For long there was no common agreement on the number of characters in Meitei Mayek, with proponents of three different forms comprising 19, 27 and 36 characters contending for recognition. The 35-character alphabet reproduced in ‘Introduction

Shaping the Sound and Scripting a Solution 41

to Manipur’ by the highly regarded historian, Lairenmayum Iboongohal Singh, is virtually identical to the Sanskrit alphabet.1 Of late, there is a consensus on the 36-character alphabet while the alphabet till now generally used for limited symbolic purposes has 27 characters. There are other practical difficulties. The most generous estimate of the persons familiar with the ancient alphabet is about 10 per cent of the Meitei population. Other estimates put the figure at 4 per cent. Further, though the issue really touches the Meitei population in the Imphal valley, any decision on the script will also affect the tribal communities, approximately a third of the total population, for whom Meitei, the lingua franca, is the second language. School textbooks, government records, newspapers and a whole variety of intellectual and academic activity of the last 250 years are recorded in the Bengali script. Indeed, newspapers have threatened to close down if there were to be a diktat enforcing Meitei Mayek here and now. The government, too, has to carry blame for the present predicament. It has made several promises about taking steps to restore the ancient script, but with little follow-up action, barring some symbolic steps. Signboards of government departments and commercial establishments now mandatorily carry their names in Meitei Mayek. Newspapers in Manipuri on their own initiative have for long carried some of the news in the ancient script, the more committed of them even writing one editorial in Meitei Mayek. If ever there was a case for gradualism, it is the switchover to Meitei Mayek. However, gradualism is the last thing on the agenda of the organization spearheading the demand for the switchover — Meelal (a Meitei anagram meaning ‘Collective for the Propagation of Meitei Mayek’) — for it has seen too many promises made, only to be broken. Further, the agitation has become part of the larger volatility affecting every aspect of the life in the valley and cannot be tackled in isolation.

.

Note and Reference ∗ First published in The Hindu, 19 May 2005. 1. Iboongohal Singh, 1963, Introduction to Manipur, Imphal: Students Store, p. 52.

5 Speech, Script and Pronunciation: The Sound and the Word of Assam and Asom∗ T

he Good Book says that ‘In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was God. However, it is the Sound, whether as sacred and celestial music prefiguring language or as the earliest incoherent articulations of speech, that has always preceded the more consciously formed Word, the building brick of that wonderful human artefact, language, as used and theorized by humans since unremembered times. Thus, even within the framework set by the cited text, nada brahma (God as sound) precedes shabda brahma (God as word). When a sound or a combination of sounds acquires — or is invested through an indefinable process of fusion and diffusion of material and cultural osmosis — an identity, transcending from merely being a sound and becomes a word and a name or, as nomenclature, part of an organized system of names linked to and deriving from each other (and so constituting a history in the broadest sense of that term), the result is magic. Such words and names hold meanings that even those who as a people have collectively given these names and words to themselves, or to the other sentient entities and inanimate objects associated with them, may not fully comprehend. This is as it should be. Not merely is this true of names of individuals, but even of seemingly inanimate entities in public space, such as names of places, streets and local habitations. Only this explains the routine changes in the names and nomenclature, individual and collective, of such entities following major shifts in the correlation of forces in societies that these inhabit. The phenomenon is not

Speech, Script and Pronunciation 43

unique to India or other countries trying to constitute themselves as nation-states following their release from colonial bondage. In the advanced Western countries, too, major political changes have been accompanied by changes in names, supposedly reflecting the past (and a future) as defined by the winners of the moment. The only certain thing about such changes is that there is nothing final and certain about such transitions. The change from St Petersburg to Petrograd to Leningrad and back to St Petersburg is not the end of the process. Nor, for that matter, can there be anything final about the revision of the perspective of the events and circumstances that led to Yekaterinburg becoming Sverdlovsk in 1924 and its reversion to its old name in 1991. However, much of this phenomenon of ‘new names for old’ as is happening in India, amounts to little more than a modification of an existing name with a view to restoring the original name rather than to a real and radical change, or the construction of a new identity, even if this is based on a remembered or imagined reconstruction of history. The change from Madras to Chennai is the exception; more to the rule is the change to or, more accurately, the reversion from, Bombay to Mumbai, from Calcutta to Kolkata, Baroda to Vadodara, Trivandrum to Thiruvananthapuram and similar reversions touching many smaller cities and towns as well. Seen in this context, the recent decision of the government of Assam to ‘change the name of the state from Assam to Asom’, as rather inaccurately perceived even within the state, does not amount to any substantive and material restoration of an old name. Rather, what is being proposed (the required legislative process is yet to begin) is a minor rectification of distortions that have crept in the way the name is transcribed in English, to bring the usage closer to the way it is spelt and written by native writers and speakers of the language. The proposed change corresponds to the change from the old Gauhati to Guwahati. Rather like Bengaluru in Kannada being more recognizably known in its English transliteration, orthography and pronunciation as Bangalore, the land known familiarly as Assam (the name is now an ‘international brand’ and so should not be tampered with, according to those who believe above all in the orthodoxy of the ‘brand’) is actually identified and known as Asam — or Asom — by those who claim its history, its material and cultural space, as their own. Other versions of the new

44 Looking Back into the Future transcription, like Oxom, claim to be in closer correspondence with the way the word is pronounced and written in Assamese, some of which may appear obscure to those unfamiliar with the complex nuances of the language as it is spoken — and written. The earliest reference to the name in a European language, provided by the Hobson-Jobson dictionary, is dated c. 1590.1 ‘The dominions of the Rajah of Asham join to Kamroop; he is a very powerful prince, lives in great state, and when he dies, his principal attendants, both male and female, are voluntarily buried alive with his corpse.’ The ‘Rajah of Asham’ belonged to the Ahom dynasty that ruled over the territory of what is now Assam for well nigh six centuries — and gave the land and the language its name. While scholars disagree over the precise origins of the name, Assam, there is a consensus that the name, given to the land by the thirteenth-century Shan invaders, impressed by the valour of the people they conquered (or, in another reading, given by the conquered to the people who conquered them, being impressed by their generosity in victory), is derived from the Sanskrit word asama, meaning unequalled, matchless, with the secondary meaning, uneven, undulating, with reference to the terrain of the land. The two standard Assamese dictionaries, Hemkosh and Chandrakanta Abhidhan, offer broadly the same definitions. Birinchi Kumar Barua, the well-known scolar and literary historian, gives a succinct summary of the origin and meaning of the word:2 The modern name of the province, Assam, is actually of quite recent origin. It is connected with the Shan invaders who entered the Brahmaputra Valley in the beginning of the thirteenth century AD, and who were known as Ahoms. The tradition of the Ahoms, themselves, is that the present name is derived from Asama in the sense of ‘unequalled’ or ‘peerless’. They say that this was the term applied to them at the time of the invasion of their valley by the local tribes, in token of their admiration of the way in which the Ahom king first conquered and then conciliated them.

Other origins suggested include the restructuring of the original Tai word, Cham, meaning ‘to be defeated’, with the addition of the Assamese prefix, a-, to mean undefeated, the conquerors. Thus,

Speech, Script and Pronunciation 45

the word used to describe the conquerors of the land later came to be applied to the very land they conquered. Barua also suggests a possible Bodo derivation. Though considered to be part of the Indo-European family of languages, with cognates in every other north Indian language belonging to that family, scholars have noted that the growth and development of Assamese (morphology, spelling and pronunciation, to take note of major areas) was influenced by its unique environment, marked by the vigorous prevalence of tribal languages and cultures outside the pan-Indian framework. Two of these unique features of the language, marking it off from other sister languages of the family, are spelling and pronunciation. With a phonetic home language (Kannada) having a near-perfect one-to-one correspondence between every sound of the language and every letter of the alphabet, this observer was hard to put to understand, on the first acquaintance with the Assamese language, the routine complaints of friends about spelling mistakes, the homework of children, in the newspapers and, with some honesty, even in their own writing. Spelling, one always thought, was a problem unique to the English language with more sounds than letters in the alphabet to represent them, viewed when young as specially designed to vex and torment foreign learners; so how could an Indian language have spelling problems? Unlike the case of English, the problem (if it is that) in the case of Assamese, the script and alphabet of which are more or less identical to Devanagari, is one of abundance. The language as it is spoken has rather fewer sounds than is the case when it is written. For instance, there is little difference between the way the aspirated and unaspirated medio-lingual affricates, c and ch, are pronounced with the pronunciation corresponding more to dental fore-lingual s than to the affricate. Children learning the two letters by rote simply identify them as pratham c and dwitiya c. The first letters of both Chandra (moon) and chhatra (student) are pronounced identically; however, when they are written, the indistinguishable initial sound is represented by two different letters. A similar abundance prevails in respect of all the four retroflex and cacuminal plosives, t, th, d, dh, as well as the retroflex plosive nasal, n, whose sounds are identical with those of the five dental, alveolar and nasal plosives, t, th, d, dh and n, that follow in the

46 Looking Back into the Future Devanagari alphabet. The most complex of these is the case of the three palatal, retroflex and dental fricatives, (the initial letters of shakthi, meaning might and power, shodashi, meaning a 16-year-old girl, and simha, meaning lion). All these are pronounced the same way, the sound (sometimes represented by x and often inaccurately pronounced by non-native speakers as h) being quite simply impossible to represent by any letter of the English alphabet. The modification proposed in respect of the name, Assam, seeks only to remove the ‘Anglicization’ that has crept into the way the word is transcribed in English, by removing the extra s; and substituting the media vowel a with o. Thus, Assam (which continues to be transcribed in Assamese dictionaries as Asam) is henceforth to be transcribed in English as Asom. The proposal has, however, provoked a variety of views where inasmuch as the transcription into English of the medial consonant and vowel, s and a, the transcription of the initial vowel sound too has become a matter of contention. The highly respected freedom fighter of Assam of the last century wrote his name in English as Omeo Kumar Das (the same form adopted by a social science research institute in Guwahati) while in other parts of the country, the first name would be transcribed as Amiya. Hence the argument that the sound of the first letter of the Assamese alphabet is best transcribed as o wherever it appears, initially or in a medial position. If the government has agreed that the word Asam is to be transcribed as Asom, where is the need to make an exception with the initial vowel? Should not the name be transcribed as Osom, not Asom? This brings us finally to the most complex of these problems relating to the transcription of the unique way in which the three fricatives, sh, sh^ and sa are articulated in Assamese. The s of Assam, a dental fricative corresponding to the initial letter of simha, and pronounced exactly like the other two fricatives preceding it in the alphabet, presents a most complex problem if the transcription is required to be as close as possible to the way the sound is pronounced. The Sentinel, an English daily from Guwahati, proposed some years ago that the name of the state is best transcribed as Axom; that the fricative wherever it appears should be transcribed as x; and began implementing the proposal on its own pages. While

Speech, Script and Pronunciation 47

the change was not implemented with extreme rigour especially in respect of personal names, the change was applied even in the case of acronyms of institutions like the Assam Sahitya Sabha which routinely was transcribed as AXX, no doubt in preference to the risible. At one point this practice was also pressed in the case of tribal organizations like the Bodo Sahitya Sabha, even though the core of the Bodo autonomist and nationalistic assertion (of which the Bodo Sahitya Sabha was an important symbol, like the adoption of the Devanagari script for the Bodo language, which was earlier transcribed in the Assamese script) is the distancing of the Bodos and all their institutions from Assam and the Assamese. What is ignored in such a hectic search for the most accurate way of transcribing the name, Assam, in the English alphabet is the simple fact that the unique sounds of the language, indeed even the way the single word, Assam, is pronounced and written in Assamese, cannot be transcribed accurately in the English alphabet. While it is true that Assamese has more letters in its alphabet than the sounds articulated by its speakers, it nevertheless does not have letters to indicate faithfully some of the unique sounds of the language. When Assamese itself has not the required letters to denote some of its unique sounds, how can one find accurate ways of transcribing these in English? When in the early part of the nineteenth century, the missionaries of the American Baptist Mission established their mission in Sibsagar (now Sivasagar) and began publishing their journal called Orunodai, they saw the anomalies between the language as it was spoken and as it was written; and tried to introduce a modified and simplified alphabet that eliminated all the unnecessary letters. However, while the labours of these missionaries to regain the language are recognized and their memory is honoured, the modified alphabet never caught on. Any radical reformation of the Assamese alphabet would necessarily mean the snapping of the umbilical chord that binds the land and the language to its pan-Indian origins. So, the tension continues between, on the one hand, nationalistic assertions seeking to distance the land and its people from India, perhaps even strive and attain sovereignty; and on the other hand, the reluctance by the intellectual establishment (which also feeds

48 Looking Back into the Future separatist ideologies) to accept any modification of an unwieldy and unnecessarily complicated alphabet where some of the letters are identified by numbers, not sounds, because these sounds are exactly alike.

.

Notes and References ∗ First published in Frontline, vol. 23, no. 11, June 3–16, 2006. 1. Henry Yule and Arthur Coke Burnell, 1886 (new edition edited by William Crooke, 1903), Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial AngloIndian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive, London: J. Murray (Indian reprint, 1986, Delhi: Rupa & Co.). 2. Birinchi Kumar Barua, 1951, A Cultural History of Assam: Early Period, vol. I. Guwahati: Lawyer’s Book Stall, p. 4.

SECTION II: ETHNICITY AND IDENTITY

6 Strident Tribal Nationalism∗ A

part from the many policemen killed, the clashes on the Assam–Nagaland boundary in June (1985) have gravely affected a large number of plains tribal people of Assam — among others — who had for long settled in these areas. In the clashes of January 1979 too, the population on the Assam side who suffered comprised a large number of these plains tribal people. According to S.C. Jamir, chief minister of Nagaland, one of the reasons for the exacerbation of the boundary problem with Assam was the Assam government’s policy of first permitting encroachment in the reserve forests on the boundary between the two states, and subsequently on the specious argument that these areas had already been encroached, ‘de-reserving’ them and formalizing such encroachments. The Assam government has strongly repudiated such allegations; and sources in Assam in turn accuse powerful, ethnically Naga interests in Nagaland itself of encouraging encroachments on the Assam side and later claiming these areas as Nagaland’s own. In view of such accusations and counter-accusations, it would be useful to take a close look at the way in which these incidents have harmed — or are seen by the leaders of the plains tribal organizations to have harmed — the plains tribal people. In a memorandum submitted to Hiteswar Saikia, Assam’s chief minister, the Plains Tribal Council of Assam (PTCA) demanded that the plains tribal people who suffered much in the Merapani area should be moved to safer places in areas inhabited by plains tribal people on the north bank of the Brahmaputra. The demand that the plains tribal people who have on their own spread and made settlements all over the state well beyond their national homeland (Udayachal) on both banks of the Brahmaputra should be shifted back to the north bank is consistent with the view of the PTCA that only the creation of a plains tribal state — the so-called Udayachal — on the north bank will provide salvation to these people.

52 Looking Back into the Future Interestingly, the encroachments in the reserve forests along the Assam–Nagaland boundary all these years by not merely ‘foreign nationals’ (about which the Nagaland chief minister has repeatedly and specifically complained) but also by some Nepalis and plains tribal people were legitimized during the Janata Party government headed by Golap Borbora, which had representatives of the PTCA. Indeed, the PTCA vice-president, Samar Brahma Choudhury, who is most vocal in explaining his party’s rationale for demanding the relocation of the plains tribal people on the north bank was the forest minister in the Golap Borbora cabinet and is accused by dissident elements among the plains tribal political organizations of simply exploiting the misery of the displaced persons for political ends. Another contentious issue having a bearing on tribal politics and the related gathering agrarian tensions in Assam is the decision of the Assam government to include the Koch-Kshatriya-Rajbanshis of Goalpara, Dhubri and Kokrajhar districts (former Goalpara district) as a ‘protected class’ in tribal belts and blocks as defined in the Assam Land and Revenue Regulations. The Assam Land Revenue Manual (Chapter 10) provides that the state government may adopt such measures as it deems fit for the protection of those classes which on account of their primitive conditions and lack of education or material advantages are incapable of looking after their welfare in so far as such welfare depends upon their having sufficient land for their maintenance; and may by notification in the official gazette specify the classes of people whom it considers entitled to such protection. The ‘protective measures’ may include the constitution of compact areas in regions predominantly peopled by the classes of people thus notified into ‘belts and blocks’. The notification states that ‘the disposal of land by lease for ordinary cultivation, the nature and extent of rights conveyed by annual or periodic leases, the termination or forfeiture of such rights, the ejectment of persons in occupation who have no valid right in the land, the management or letting out in form of land … and other allied or connected maters … shall be governed by the provisions of this chapter and the rules made thereunder.’ In other words, and in effect, there would be restrictions on sale, purchase, leasing out or settlement of land in these belts and blocks

Strident Tribal Nationalism 53

by those not notified as coming under its provisions. The provision in practice has resulted in the constitution of various areas with concentrations of tribal people (who in the Brahmaputra valley districts are necessarily the plains tribes) as tribal belts and blocks and the guarantee of certain legal and constitutional protections in the matter of agricultural land. Further, in order to ensure that those non-tribal permanent residents of areas (‘the boundaries of areas so constituted as tribal belts and blocks shall as far as possible coincide with mauza boundaries’) would not face undue difficulties, the state government can extend such protection to such other persons (including non-tribal people) as it deems fit and has been exercising this discretion in regard to various indigenous residents of tribal belts and blocks. However, the government’s decision to include the KochRajbanshis (also known as Koch-Kshatriya-Rajbanshis), a backward Hindu caste of Assam belonging to the so-called other backward classes (OBC), in this category of a protected class in the tribal belts and blocks is seen by many tribal leaders as simply a prelude to the entry of this class into the category of scheduled castes and perhaps, eventually, of scheduled tribes as well. As it is, there is some controversy over the status of the KochRajbanshi people in the former Goalpara district of Assam and the adjoining Garo Hills district of Meghalaya; while they are considered both in Assam and Meghalaya as belonging to the other backward classes (OBC), there are demands that they should be reclassified as a scheduled caste in Assam and as a scheduled tribe in Meghalaya. Further, the incidence of individual Koch-Rajbanshis now in the lower ranks of the caste-Hindu fold, which they entered fairly recently through a process of taking saran (a common feature of upward caste mobility among Vaishnavite Hindus in Assam) with affidavits renouncing their caste-Hindu names and reverting to tribal surnames, is not an uncommon phenomenon. Indeed, a similar move to secure the restoration of what is believed to be an ancient tribal status—now classified as an OBC—is apparent among certain other groups in upper Assam as well, chiefly the Morans and the Chutiyas. The suspicion among plains tribal leaders is that some of the more politically astute leaders of the Koch-Rajbanshis have realized the advantage of formally laying claim to a tribal status. The PTCA,

54 Looking Back into the Future as indeed every other tribal organization, fears that these moves to settle the Koch-Rajbanshi people in the tribal blocks by bestowing upon them the status of ‘protected persons’ is merely the thin end of the wedge and that before long this segment of the population, too, will claim a share of the few benefits that the scheduled tribes are now entitled to. That these Koch-Rajbanshis are not even indigenous people of Assam but are actually of Bengali stock (the Koch-Rajbanshis of Goalpara district form a mixed stock and include both the Assamese and Bengali elements) is a further sore point though the PTCA leaders’ emphasis on this is perhaps intended to win support for their demand from the majority Assamese people, who have their own reasons to be apprehensive of further Bengali settlements in Assam. Other demands of the PTCA include the appointment of special sub-deputy collectors (SDCs) and assistant deputy commissioners (ADCs) for the tribal belts and blocks as provided in Chapter 10 of the Assam Land Revenue Manual, the constitution of advisory committees at the sub-divisional levels for tribal belts and blocks and the creation of a special directorate at the state level for the implementation of these provisions. Underlying all these demands are the still relatively dormant tensions over agricultural land which are a feature of agrarian relations in Assam. This often takes on contrary shapes in the form of seemingly contradictory demands. For instance, a demand uniformly voiced by the tribal leaders is that the government should stop eviction of tribal people from government khas land (held directly from the government) and forest land while at the same time expediting evictions of non-tribal encroachers on tribal territories. The demand has acquired a shrill urgency following the policy decision of the Assam government declaring all encroachments made after 1 January 1980, ‘illegal’. The government has been engaged in the eviction of encroachers on forest land in the Daranga area in the Tamulpur block on the Assam–Bhutan border. The tribal leaders, however, argue that only ‘foreign nationals’ who have encroached into these areas should be thrown out and not the tribal people. Another interesting feature of the protests against the eviction of allegedly legitimate residents of these tribal belts and blocks

Strident Tribal Nationalism 55

is that, as with so many other similar complaints, this too has become embroiled in the internal politics and rivalries of various tribal organizations. The persons who are resisting the eviction at Darranga had first been settled in the Doyang and Rengma reserve forests on the Assam–Nagaland border and were uprooted from there following the disturbances in January 1979. They then moved to Darranga where they were promised a settlement by virtue of being plains tribal people. But even here these people seem to have become unintended victims of rivalries of tribal leaders and now there is a controversy about the status of 813 tribal families (about 4,000 persons) who were once again being sought to be evicted from Darranga. While the PTCA has come out with a statement making a general complaint about evictions in general, other organizations like the United Tribal Nationalist Liberation Front, a recently floated set-up headed by the former leader of the PTCA in the Assam assembly, Binai Basumatari (who resigned, or as the PTCA leaders put it, was expelled from the organization), and the Tribal Rights Protection Committee have demanded that all ineligible people should be evicted from the Darranga area. Indeed, there have been reports that while tribal people have been most vocal about eviction of the tribal people from these areas they are themselves actively cooperating with the government in the eviction of ‘foreign nationals’ from these areas. This pattern is going to become more and more a general feature of the gathering agrarian tensions in Assam. The illusion that immigrants would simply remain distant and invisible in the remote and inaccessible char (alluvial) land could anyway not be sustained perpetually; in the course of time when these immigrants were drawn to the relatively less strenuous environment of the forest areas or encroached into tribal belts and blocks, a situation arose which decades ago might have led to a state of wary coexistence. With the worsening of objective conditions, such coexistence is now not possible. A factor is the realization of the substantial gains to be made by capitalization of agricultural practices with the entry of moneybags, who deliberately encouraged such encroachments from the hardy peasants with the expectation, realized profitably in many cases, of getting them to grow cash crops to feed the growing and diversified industries run without virtually any control in the remoter regions. Sugarcane to feed the distillery in Dimapur, for

56 Looking Back into the Future instance, is grown by virtually bonded ‘encroachers’ as a captive crop in substantial areas on the Nagaland–Assam boundary. And as in so many other areas of Indian politics, the awakening among the plains tribal people and the emergence of an educated and conscious leadership has meant that these agrarian tensions, instead of being channelled along political lines under the leadership of the Left, are being appropriated by tribal nationalists.

.

Note ∗ First published in The Hindu, 11 July 1985.

7 Tribal Ferment in Assam∗ S

ome recent (1988) developments in the tribal politics of Assam deserve notice. First, the All-Bodo Students’ Union (ABSU) headed by Upendranath Brahma, which had suspended its agitation last month (October 1988), has threatened to revive it. The threat came in the wake of a massive rally organized by the Plains Tribal Council of Assam (PTCA) in Guwahati on 10 November 1988, as part of its own revived programme of agitation for the creation of ‘Udayachal’. Further, and not entirely unrelated to these agitational programmes, has come the announcement by the state government that elections to the district council in Karbi Anglong district will be held on 7 January 1989. This follows the recent (1988) drastic reconstitution of the council of ministers in which a second man from the district was inducted in addition to Samsing Hanse who continues to be in the cabinet. Holiram Terang, the new man, is known to be a political rival of Samsing Hanse in the district and Hanse has been divested of the hill affairs portfolio whose control is crucial for any minister from the hills to consolidate his own base. The induction of Terang and the curtailment of the powers of patronage of Samsing Hanse, taken with the announcement of a definite date for fresh elections to the district council in Karbi Anglong (where a protégé of Hanse holds office) means a diversion of political energies from the path of agitation to secure the status of an ‘autonomous state within Assam’ for the two hill districts to electoral politics. Another all-embracing tribal students’ organization, All-Assam Tribal Students’ Union (AATSU), has persisted with its own agitation for the ‘reorganization of Assam on a federal basis’ ensuring autonomy to each and every self-recognized ethnic, linguistic and religious group in the state. Its latest programme was a dharna (sit-down strike) near the Assam assembly premises on every day of the recently concluded assembly session.

58 Looking Back into the Future Of all these, undoubtedly, the agitations by student organizations and political parties of the plains tribes, demanding the separation of areas dominated or inhabited by them as a political unit outside Assam, are the most important. Upendranath Brahma is threatening to resume the ABSU agitation because neither the union government nor the state government, he says, has responded to his gesture of suspending it at the end of last month (October 1988). The ABSU agitation launched on 2 March 1987 has in the subsequent 20 months completed 29 phases. These have included virtually every form of agitational tactics used by the All-Assam Students’ Union during its own six-year-long agitation on the issue of foreign nationals as well as several innovations and refinements such as mass demands for a separate tribal homeland in its eleventh phase on 12 October 1987. But all this has not got the ABSU anywhere. Its chief aim of securing an invitation from the union government for formal talks is still unrealized. The state government has tackled the agitation nicely with a mixture of the four well-known ways of dealing with political opposition: holding talks, offering inducements, creating dissensions in the ranks of the opposition and applying pressure. It has held and is holding talks not merely with the ABSU headed by Upendranath Brahma but also the other faction of the ABSU headed by Gangadhar Ramchiary. It has also held talks with the PTCA. Its stand is that barring the one for separation from Assam, it will discuss all demands with every agitating group and political party. The substance of the political demands of each and every party and group claiming to speak for the plains tribes is the same: separation of areas claimed to be predominantly inhabited by plains tribal people on the north bank of the Brahmaputra from Assam and their constitution into a separate political entity (the nomenclature used by the various organizations vary) with union territory status, and additional safeguards for the plains tribal people on the south bank of the Brahmaputra, and the Bodo Kacharis of Karbi Anglong district in the form of district councils and regional councils under the provisions of the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution. And yet the leadership among the students is split and the PTCA, the pre-eminent political party of the plains tribes in post-independence India, has now to contend with the challenge of the new and apparently more militant political formation — the

Tribal Ferment in Assam 59

United Tribal Nationalist Liberation Front (UTNLF). These challenges have stemmed as much from personal rivalries as from differ-ences over the perception of what the contemplated ‘tribal land’, ‘Bodoland’, ‘Udayachal’, and so on is going to be like. However, they are all united in ignoring some highly inconvenient facts, such as the presence of a substantial number of nonBodo plains tribal people in these areas (not to speak of non-tribal people) who might justly be apprehensive of Bodo domination in any new political arrangement; the patently non-contiguous nature of the areas claimed to be predominantly inhabited by the plains tribal people, clever cartographic exercises notwithstanding; and the fact that not all the plains tribal people, not even all the Bodo people are exactly united on the demand for separation from Assam. All these factors are brushed aside as irrelevant or as part of a conspiracy by the caste-Hindu Assamese leadership to divide and deceive the plains tribal people. The PTCA, which first gave organized expression to this desire for separation from Assam, was born on 27 February 1967 at a time when the other tribal communities of the erstwhile Assam such as the Khasis, the Garos, the Jaintias, the Mizos and others were clamouring for separation. The creation of Nagaland in 1963 (1 December) — the circumstances leading to it, including the insurgency and gradual veering round to the constitutional path by a section of its leadership did not matter — fed the craving of the other tribal people for separation. The several schemes proposed and discarded during the protracted negotiation that culminated in the North-Eastern Areas (Reorganization) Act, 1971, however, dealt only with the demands of the hills tribes, the plains tribes being viewed then as requiring no special constitutional protection, not even of the kind that had already been available to the hills tribes. Indeed, this distinction between the hills tribes and the plains tribes goes back to the Government of India Act of 1935. Section 311 (1) of the Act, its Schedule vi and its modification under the Government of India (Excluded and Partially Excluded Areas) Order,1936, were later adopted in all their essentials as the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution with necessary modifications in the nomenclature of the constituent units. These special provisions to ensure a measure of local autonomy were made for areas predominantly inhabited by tribal people in the hills of Assam: the

60 Looking Back into the Future Naga Hills (now Nagaland), the Lushai Hills (now Mizoram), the Khasi and Jaintia Hills and the Garo Hills (now Meghalaya), the Mikir and North Cachar Hills (now the autonomous districts of the Karbi Anglong and North Cachar Hills). The assumption was that these people in the hills were quite different and separate from the majority of the Assamese people in the plains and so required special protection. The problem is that while such official recognition was accorded and necessary constitutional arrangements were made to formalize the status of the hills tribes, a similar distinction was not perceived between the tribal and non-tribal people in the plains. Instead, the tribal people of the plains, despite their being numerically the largest tribal community in the whole region and despite being constitutionally classified as scheduled tribes, were viewed as indistinguishable in every other respect from the nontribal people of the plains. Such a perception was undoubtedly influenced by historical considerations that viewed the plains tribes as an inalienable part of the still evolving (caste Hindu) Assamese society on whose periphery they were placed, but into whose lower ranks they would eventually find entry. Such was also the view of the nascent leadership of the tribal communities in the plains, if one were to go by the positions taken on various political and social issues by their organizations that deposed before the Simon Commission or by the first political party of the plains tribes, the Assam Plains Tribal League in the years between the 1935 Act and Independence.1 Whatever be the historical view (including the historicity) of the process of assimilation in Assam, by which over a period of time those on the periphery of caste Hindu society secured entry, even if at the very lowest levels, into the caste hierarchy, that process is no more valid or even current now. The conditions that perhaps once prevailed, facilitating such assimilation, simply do not obtain today. The reasons for this disruption are too complex to be gone into here; but the responsibility for this disruption and eventual breakdown has to be borne principally by the caste-Hindu Assamese society itself, which sought (some would say, imposed) assimilation entirely on its own terms. Moreover, the demonstrated effect of the progress achieved by other tribal communities in the hills has been much too strong for the plains tribal people to resist. The reorganization of Assam has let loose certain forces and the process itself is yet to be taken to its logical conclusion.

Tribal Ferment in Assam 61

Viewed thus, the elevation of the status of the Karbi Anglong and North Cachar hill districts of Assam — which did not go along with the leadership of the All-Party Hill Leaders’ Conference nor sought separation in the late 1960s and early 1970s — to full statehood via an autonomous state within Assam can only be a matter of time unless democratic elements, believing that unity and not separation can solve the problem, come to power both in the districts and at Dispur. What about the residual tribal population in the plains of the Brahmaputra valley, the only homeland of the Assamese people? For, despite the alienation of the plains tribal people from what for want of a better expression one may call the Assamese mainstream, it is difficult even to conceive of a fragmentation of the Brahmaputra valley, the geographical and cultural homogeneity of which is itself predicated on the variety of the people it has historically sustained. Above all, the demands of the ABSU or the PTCA are difficult to concede. For, as the demands for additional safeguards for the plains tribal people on the south bank of the Brahmaputra pointedly indicate, the plains tribes are widely dispersed over the whole Brahmaputra valley on both banks of the river; and unlike the tribal people in the hills do not inhabit compact and geographically contiguous areas. Further, even without these flaws in their argument, graver impediments related to the crisis facing the nation itself and its leadership at the centre militates against concession of statehood. The result has been an impasse. The Government of India and the state government cannot make and do not want to make any concessions, the former because it would be like opening the Pandora’s box, the latter because it would be undermining the very reason for its existence. The leadership of the agitation can do little but keep reiterating that its demands should be met. Its only recourse is to increase the pressure through larger and, necessarily and inevitably, more violent confrontations with the organs of state power and also, ominously for Assam, with organized and unorganized ‘populist’ opposition from the non-tribal people. Is there a way out of this impasse or ruinous fratricidal conflict? The initial mistake, it appears, was to categorize the tribal people of the erstwhile Assam on a topographical basis, as it were, as hills tribes and plains tribes, and superimpose presumed social and cultural modes and movements on that distinction. The assumption that the former were irrevocably separate from the Assamese while

62 Looking Back into the Future the latter were or eventually were bound to become an integral part of Assamese society was plainly ahistorical, even if at some points of time such assimilation did take place. This assumption that the plains tribes, because of the assimilation they were supposed to undergo, eventually did not require any constitutional protection has been the root cause of the stark poverty and neglect of the Bodos. But for the constitutional safeguards, it is doubtful if the hills tribes would have been able to retain their identity, let alone make some progress, though the fruits of development have always been far too unequally distributed in these new states. Even in Karbi Anglong and the North Cachar Hills, only the constitutional safeguards under the Sixth Schedule have ensured the preservation and enrichment of the indigenous languages, provided some protection against land alienation and given the local institutions some control over their affairs. A corresponding arrangement for the plains tribes, too, might have prevented many abuses they have been subjected to. The one protective provision — to prevent tribal belts and blocks from being invaded by outsiders — has remained only on paper because it is merely an administrative device without any constitutional guarantee attached to it. It is interesting to note that the recognition that such a provision was necessary came as early as 1939 when it was realized that the so-called line system to limit the extent of settlements of peasants from east Bengal had utterly failed to prevent encroachment by these hardy, venturesome and highly productive people on compact tribal inhabited areas, causing much social and economic disruption. But the formal legislation demarcating the tribal belts and blocks to prevent settling of outsiders in these areas had to await the solution of the Muslim political question in pre-partition Assam. The logical corollary to the passage of the Assam Act XV of 1947 should have been the extension of the provisions of the Sixth Schedule to the plains tribes as well, for even at the time of the enactment of the Constitution, there were (and are) three or four well-marked and compact areas predominantly inhabited by the plains tribes: the Kokrajhar subdivision of the erstwhile Goalpara district (now Kokrajhar district); the Udalguri area of the erstwhile Darrang district (now Udalguri subdivision of the truncated Darrang district); the Jonai and Dhemaji areas of the erstwhile Lakhimpur district and Majuli of the erstwhile Sibsagar district

Tribal Ferment in Assam 63

(now subdivisions). These could well have been demarcated as autonomous districts/regions with district/regional councils. Had such a step been taken and had the protective provisions been implemented fairly, much of the recent bitterness could have been avoided. There have been three broad approaches to the ‘problem of the tribal people of India’. These, as perceptively discussed in a publication of the government of Tripura are: (1) isolation, which will never work and is only a cover to shameless exploitation of every kind; (2) assimilation, which has worked at times and in some parts of the country, but almost always on terms set by the more dominant social group into whose mores the tribal is expected to merge even to the extent of forgetting his own language; and (3) integration, which is the only humane, democratic way.2 But integration implies free choice, which is possible only when the people expected to integrate are politically and economically free to make the choice. Few tribal communities in India have attained even in relative terms enough economic freedom to make a free choice in favour of integration with the larger non-tribal communities in their neighbourhoods. Leaving aside these larger economic and political issues (which can only be sorted out at the all-India level), in the limited context of the alienation of the plains tribes of Assam and their desire for separation, some of these political aspirations can be met under the provisions of the Sixth Schedule. The autonomous district councils and regional council provided for under the Schedule are one of the more humane and democratic features of the Constitution. As explained by the former chief justice of the Supreme Court, Justice Hidayatullah, in his Anandaram Barooah Law Lectures in Guwahati in 1979, if the provisions of the Fifth and Sixth Schedules are implemented fairly, it would ensure genuine autonomy and opportunities for growth without disrupting the existing broader political and constitutional structures. The initiative taken to resolve the Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF) agitation and the compromise arrived at in the Gorkha Hill Council are yet other pointers to how alternatives are always available and it is not necessary to keep fragmenting the states. But time too is running out, for inaction is bound to harden attitudes on all sides. Unfortunately for the people of Assam,

64 Looking Back into the Future tribal and non-tribal, any solution to the ethnic question appears unlikely under the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) government. Further, it requires changes in the Constitution which can only be initiated by the union government and which do not need the concurrence of the state government. This is not to suggest, as the AGP leaders do, that the centre is backing the current agitation, especially the ABSU agitation, which has created many problems for the AGP government. But the centre is certainly not in a hurry even to suggest a solution because any solution would only mean one worry less for the AGP government, especially if it does not envisage the further breaking up of Assam. So the centre’s policy appears to be to let the agitation continue since it would further enfeeble the AGP government and make it more unpopular with the tribal people. But the best laid plans go awry. Underneath the more publicized turbulence among many sections of the people, other social and political forces as yet dimly perceived are at play, and continued turbulence and instability may well help these forces to consolidate and spread further, taking the polity along unpredictable and dangerous directions.

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Notes and References ∗ First published in The Hindu, 25 November 1988. 1. Binai Khungur Basumatari (ed.), n.d. Plains Tribals Before the Simon Commission, Harisinga, Darrang, Assam: The Beacons; Amalendu Guha, 1977, Planter-Raj to Swaraj, New Delhi: Indian Council of Historical Research; and Political History of Assam 1940–47, 1980, Guwahati: Government of Assam. 2. Mahadev Chakravarti, 1986, The Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council and the Tribal Problems, Agartala: Government of Tripura.

8 Assam’s Search for Identity∗ Unlike as in many other parts of the country, where the Sanskrit

word jati and its cognates in the corresponding local language simply stand for caste, in Assam (and in other parts of eastern India) the word jati stands for the community of the people as a whole, what in modern sociological and political terminology would be described as the ‘nation’. Thus we have expressions like Asamiya jati standing for a whole community of people who identify themselves as ‘Assamese people’, a self-identification not without ambiguities, and the Bangali jati; and deriving from this practice and also departing from such self-identification, we have the even less numerous communities identifying themselves as Bodo jati; Karbi jati, Mising jati and so on. Homilies from public platforms in the metropolitan areas might speak of India as a nation-state and Indians as a people forming a nation in and of themselves, but in the self-perception of many people living in the eastern and northeastern parts of the country, the Assamese, the Bodo, the Karbi and others also constitute a nation, an identifiable jati. Like other Indians, the Assamese too are segmented along caste lines, openly and recognizably in the case of the Hindus and by derivation and imitation by other non-Hindu Assamese. Indeed, even tribal society is not without caste distinctions, with its own priests, warriors and workers, though these categories are not as exclusive and rigid as among the caste-Hindus. The expression in Assamese to denote caste is jat, derived but distinct from jati. Thus a person belongs to the Kalita jat, Keot jat, Bamun jat and so on, but all these are (in their own perception) part of the Asamiya jati. This Asamiya jati itself is a conglomeration of not merely various jats identified with the Assamese Hindu society, of Assamese Muslims (also segmented like other Indian Muslim communities along caste limes imitating Hindu caste stratifications but having

66 Looking Back into the Future their rationale in imaginary origins in Arabia and Turkey) and of Assamese Christians many of whom, like Christians in Bengal and other parts of the country retain their original caste-Hindu surnames, but also many tribal communities from whose very stock the overwhelming majority of the present non-tribal Assamese people have been derived. This is a reality that once was not accepted by the caste-Hindu and Muslim Assamese. Ironically, because of the present ferment among the tribal people and the ongoing agitations for various degrees of separation from Assam, these sections nowadays go out of their way to emphasize their tribal origins while it is now the turn of the tribal leadership to grudge them this recognition. A telling illustration of this ironic reversal of postures is the agitation of the Koch-Rajbanshi, a caste-Hindu community now classified as one of the other backward classes (OBCs), whose derivation from the Bodo Kachari stock is unmistakable and is indeed historically established, for reclassification as a scheduled tribe, and the strong opposition of the leadership of the Bodoland agitation and indeed of all sections of Bodo opinion to any concession on such a demand. But while insisting on their self-identification as a ‘nation’ and rejecting stratification along caste lines in imitation of the casteHindu social order, the tribal communities of Assam (for purposes of this discussion, confined to those inhabiting the old six districts of the Brahmaputra valley and the two hill districts) are also further stratified as the hills tribes and the plains tribes — a collective identification not always cherished by the less numerous of these hills and plains tribal people. Thus, though in the view of the leadership of the Bodoland agitation, the demand for Bodoland reflects the aspirations of all the plains tribal people of Assam and the envisaged Bodoland will be their homeland, the prospect is not viewed with the same self-assurance by the smaller plains tribal communities. A similar problem exists in respect of the demand for the constitution of the two autonomous hill districts of Assam (Karbi Anglong and North Cachar Hills) into an autonomous state within Assam. In any such arrangement the Karbi people, being by far the most numerous of the hills tribes and also relatively more advanced, will dominate; and the prospect is not at all relished by the smaller hills tribes of these districts.

Assam’s Search for Identity 67

But then, it is only the tribal people who view themselves as a jati, a ‘nation’ no less significant and well-defined in their perception of themselves as a coherent ‘nation’ than the far more numerous and materially advanced Assamese people. In the perception of the latter, the numerous smaller tribal communities would be upajatis, the equivalent of the word ‘tribal’. But while not eschewing the English expression ‘tribal’ or its bureaucratic equivalent, the scheduled tribe — such self-identification has brought the tribal people some very definite and tangible material advantages — the hills and plains tribal people would still bristle at being characterized as only an upajati. The radically more modish term ‘Adivasi’, like the corresponding term ‘Dalit’ in vogue for those once identified as Harijans, has not found acceptance among the indigenous tribal communities of the region. However, ‘Adivasi’ is the preferred term which the nonindigenous people of scheduled tribe origin, that is people whose forefathers had migrated to the region but whose descendants are now shorn of their status as a scheduled tribe, apply to themselves. The anomaly of a person belonging to the tea garden labour community and whose ancestors were of Munda stock (a recognized scheduled tribe of central India) being classified as a member of more other backward castes (MOBC) has to be traced to the rules laid down by the bureaucracy according to which people lose their tribal identity when they move into an area where that particular community is not formally notified as a scheduled tribe. And where does one fit in the concept of ‘nationality’ in this discussion about jat, jati and upajati? For in any discussion of the so-called ethnic question in a multi-nationality country that is India, one needs a conceptual framework to identify and differentiate the various distinct people of the country vis-à-vis the common and collective identity they possess, or have come to acquire, or have it imposed on them (not necessarily under coercion) due to complex historical circumstances — all the three being true to some extent in respect of the ongoing process of nation and nationality formation among the various peoples of India. Thus, over the years, a convenient paradigm has been devised to represent the Indian people: that they represent various discrete nationalities with a distinct and unique history, language and literature, heroes and villains, with recognizably different cultural

68 Looking Back into the Future habits, who have over a long period of time and through social, economic and political interaction mingled to form a nation. In the vocabulary of such polemics in Assam, these people would actually be a ‘nation’ (jati) who have come together to form a mahajati, the great, perhaps more accurately the greater, nation. The word coined to represent the intermediary stage between an upajati and jati (a stage which the Assamese people had crossed by being, at least in their own mind, a ‘nation’, a full-fledged jati) was jatisatta (also jatisattwa), a nationality. The term has had to be coined because the concept itself was unfamiliar; for the Assamese-speaking people by and large cannot even comprehend the possibility of their being anything but a full-fledged nation, whatever may have been the ambiguities and contradictions in the history of the people which affected their emergence as a distinct community, and whatever the present uncertainties are, as can be imprecisely perceived by a detached observer, that still stalk and impede the process of the consolidation of the people as a nationality. It is only in the context of their becoming a part of ‘India’, which too, is in the process of consolidating itself as a ‘nation’, even while the various Indian people are correspondingly in a process of consolidating themselves as individual nationalities, that the need to have a term to represent the idea was felt. In flashes of generosity, the intellectuals arguing for the idea of the Assamese-speaking people and even the various peoples of Assam as a ‘nation’ would allow that perhaps the Bodos, the Karbis and other hills and plains tribal people, historically viewed as only several of the upajatis, were also a nationality, a jatisatta; but they cherish no doubts at all about the identity of the Assamese-speaking people themselves as a full-fledged and internally coherent nation. Such being the terms of the debate on the process of nation/ nationality formation in Assam, one wonders whether the participants are addressing their polemical adversaries or only addressing themselves and the committed. For each of the terms is perceived differently, each descriptively ‘lower’ category is seen as being applicable to others, but not to oneself. Indeed, a stage has been reached when a collective effort to understand the ongoing phenomenon has become impossible because of the hardening of the divisions and the rigidity of perceptions about each other. Thus, while geography, economy and production forces and to an extent,

Assam’s Search for Identity 69

history, unites the people of the state (limited in this article to the Brahmaputra valley and the hill districts), more atavistic passions promise to splinter it into inward-looking and exclusivist units thriving on imagined memories of nationhood.

.

Note ∗ First published in The Hindu, 19 October 1991.

9 More Than Just a Nomenclature∗ E

ven as the progressive diminution and narrowed down definitions of subjectively perceived ‘ethnic identities’ continue relentlessly in Assam and other areas of the NE region, two related features of this phenomenon deserve to be noted. First, the sheer spread of the net of ‘ethnicity’, especially the desire of various groups of people once perceived to have been part of the caste-Hindu structure or even of non-Hindu social formations to ‘downgrade’ themselves and, rather more materially, launch agitations to secure formal recognition from the government as a scheduled caste (SC) and eventually as a scheduled tribe (ST). The cultural and political calculations, purport and significance of such movements have been discussed earlier. Another related development has been the desire of several of the tribal communities and, on occasion, even some non-tribal communities, to effect a change in the nomenclature by which they had been known historically and seek a new handle, as it were, to the community as a whole. Practical steps taken in this regard have almost as a rule met with severe opposition from forces external to the community and, less often, from within the community as well. It is not merely an individual signing an affidavit before a magistrate and changing his or her name, though this too is happening. For instance, newspapers in Guwahati routinely carry announcements from persons who (or rather, whose ancestors) had originally belonged to the tribal stock and had over the years ‘risen’ to be accorded a lowly status in the caste-Hindu hierarchy; and whose modern descendants have decided for very practical and well-calculated reasons to now revert to their original status and formalize such a return by public announcements of a change from their ‘Sanskritic’ name to a tribal one. Rather more interesting is the phenomenon of a whole group of people known historically by one appellation deciding — the

More Than Just a Nomenclature 71

process by which that decision is arrived at is equally complex and is outside the theme of this article — for a variety of complex reasons that henceforth they would be known by another name. In many cases, the change only restores to the community its own proper name in its proper pronunciation and spelling, freed of distortions imposed on its usage by alien settlers who eventually became rulers, and is in no way different from the decision of, say, the people of Pune that they would no longer accept the term ‘Poona’, the anglicized orthography and pronunciation of the name of their city. Nearer home, Gauhati is now more correctly spelt as Guwahati. However, these changes have neither been smooth nor complete. For instance, the changeover in the pronunciation of the term, ‘Akashvani’, with reference to the Guwahati station of All India Radio from its Sanskritic form to the Assamese form, took several years of importuning and pressure; and the ‘concession’ when it came was made with little grace. Interestingly, Guwahati University continues to formally describe itself as ‘Gauhati’ University even now though the change in spelling of the city became official over a decade ago. Beyond the simple rectification of a wrong pronunciation or spelling of a name, what is being sought is a purging of the unpleasant or uncomplimentary connotations of long-established nomenclatures (established by who else but the ‘other’, one can hear the affected groups subalternly scoffing) and their replacement by self-consciously nativistic terms. Examples abound from all the states of the NE region. Here is a brief (and by no means complete) list with the earlier discarded names within brackets. Assam: Bodo (Kachari), Karbi (Mikir), Tiwa (Lalung), Mising (Miri); Arunachal Pradesh: Adi (Abor), Nishi (Dafala), Sherdukpen (Bhotia); Manipur: Meitei (Manipuri), Zeliangrong (Kacha Naga/Kabui Naga, ZemiLiangmei-Rongmei), Thadou (Kuki); Mizoram: Mizo (Lushai and indeed all other Kuki-Chin tribes of Mizoram); Nagaland: Naga (all Naga tribes). The least complicated of these changes, which are also now an accomplished fact whatever the controversies were when they were first mooted, were dictated by the desire to reject the ‘other’ name almost always with real or imagined pejorative connotations. Kachari, for instance, is apparently derived from the expression kuachara, a bad or evil practice which that particular tribal

72 Looking Back into the Future community was supposed to be addicted to. The now universally accepted name, Bodo, has no such value-loaded connotations, standing simply for those who speak one or the other of the Boro family of languages. The term Mikir, used earlier for the predominant people of what was in those days the United Mikir and North Cachar Hills district is not, according to Holiram Terang, leader of the four-member group of MLAs from the Karbi Anglong district in the Assam assembly representing a political party called the Autonomous State Demand Committee, a native word at all. Apparently the expression was used by the neighbouring people of the Jaintia Hills to denote someone who was savage or uncivilized. The now accepted word, Karbi, simply means ‘man’ in the Karbi language. Almost the same (or at least corresponding) perceptions apply to the change in the nomenclature of the Abor to Adi, the Dafala to the Nishi, the Miri to the Mising or the Lalung to Tiwa. Not all such changes are, however, dictated by considerations of ‘self-respect’. In several other instances, more complex factors, including political calculations, have come into play, thus inviting opposition and even resistance. In Manipur, for instance, the desire of three Naga sub-tribes, Zemi, Liangmei and Rongmei inhabiting the Tamenglong district (and parts of the Sadar and Churachandppur districts as well as the North Cachar Hills district of Assam) to view themselves as ‘one people’ and devise for themselves a name contrived from the first parts of these names, Ze-Liang-Rong, has not found universal acceptance from ‘the other’. The desire in Nagaland of the various Naga tribes, known for as long as one can remember by their clan or tribal names, to shed that identity and view themselves simply as ‘Naga’ has met with resistance from people within these clans or tribes. Similar problems exist in Mizoram where, despite the resolve of the dominant Lushai people to subsume their identity in the broader collective identity of all the Kuki-Chin people and accept the general appellation Mizo (highlander), the smaller non-Lushai people have resisted the move. Not merely two of these, the Lakher (more correctly the Mara) and the Pawi, have district councils under their denominational names, but even the Hmar, so indistinguishable from the rest of the Mizo people to an outside observer, are now on the warpath (under the Hmar Peoples’ Convention) for a separate autonomous district for themselves in the north-east part of Mizoram, where their cultural identity would be

More Than Just a Nomenclature 73

protected and eventually, a separate Hmar Ram (just like Mizoram), a full-fledged state comprising Hmar-inhabited areas in Mizoram, Manipur, Tripura and Assam would be created. Even more complicated is the case of the nomenclature not so much of the Bishnupriya (also Bishnupuriya) in Manipur, but of their language. The correct name of that language according to those who speak it is Bishnupriya Manipuri (or Bishnupuriya Manipuri) but the majority of the people in the plains of Manipur, the Meiteis (once known as Manipuris) insist that the Bishnupriya have no right to add on the term ‘Manipuri’ to their language since they are not an indigenous people of Manipur. Much bad blood has been generated even as the two sides keep on reiterating their stands, repeating the same arguments in their polemics. Indeed, an unspoken subtext of these polemics and the ongoing agitation for the inclusion of Manipuri in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution is the irreconcilability of the perceptions of ‘the other’ in Manipur; and at least one of the reasons for the union government’s inability to take a decision on the demand has been this unresolved and indeed irresolvable controversy over the nomenclatures, which is only a superficial manifestation of the deeper and more widespread divisions touching the people in the valley and the hills. All this only shows that even words, not to speak of languages, as a political weapon have been as much a force for unity as for division. This is, of course, true of other areas as well. But what is perhaps unique in the NE region is that the ostensibly ‘cultural’ decision to discard an old appellation and adopt a new one, a ‘new name for old’ as it were, almost always has a political dimension. Only this explains the earnestness of the changes, the passions generated over nomenclatures. A relevant analogy here would perhaps be the progressive changes that have come over in the self-perception, including especially the chosen appellation of the black American in the United States. As in the United States, the studied and respectful deference in public on the part of the dominant groups to the sensitivities of ‘ethnic minorities’ in Assam and other areas of the NE region invariably cracks when one is with one’s own kind; the old forms of reference become especially apparent in private speech. In other words, this phenomenon of extreme sensitivity and self-conscious deference to ‘ethnic sensitivities’ notable even among

74 Looking Back into the Future people who speak the same language and inhabit the same cultural universe only shows that though united they may have been in language (and certainly so in their lingua franca), divided they certainly are in the words they use to describe themselves and their speech.

.

Note ∗ First published in The Hindu, 23 June 1992.

10 Chasing a Mirage∗ Like the corpse in the old grim farce that refused to stay buried, the

issue of illegal migration into Assam, in particular the controversy over the demand for the annulment of the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act (IM[DT]), 1983, simply refuses to disappear from the polemics of Assam. There was a most curious exception, however, which has a bearing on the present. During the decade of the 1960s, at the beginning of which this writer started living in Guwahati, almost every day the newspapers used to carry reports about the detection and deportation of illegal migrants from what was then the eastern wing of Pakistan (then, as now, axiomatically enemy territory), under the provisions of the Foreigners Act, 1946, and the Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act, 1950. Came the liberation of Bangladesh in 1971, or more accurately, the dismemberment of Pakistan, and almost as if a tap had been turned off all such reports and indeed the very issue of illegal migration into Assam virtually disappeared from the newspapers. With the assassination of Bangladesh’s founding father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in 1975, however, the problem came to be resurrected (if only in newspapers, for the issue had never died) in the form of the illegal migrants from Bangladesh. What happened to the lakhs and lakhs of illegal foreigners during those three years and more, those malevolent Pakistani infiltrators whose expulsion, even if in single or double digits, used to be highlighted in the newspaper reports day after day for over a decade, and how did the issue come alive only after Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was killed, now as one involving illegal Bangladeshi infiltrators, one may well ask. Thereby hangs a tale, but that is not the subject of this article.

76 Looking Back into the Future Nearly two decades after the IM(DT) Act was legislated, a Bill was introduced in the Lok Sabha on 9 May 2003, the last day of the budget session, for the repeal of the Act in the teeth of opposition from the Congress party and most other opposition parties. The process of annulment is likely to be a prolonged one; and even if the Bill were to be adopted by the Lok Sabha, its passage in the Rajya Sabha is bound to be problematic.1 However, though the battle lines appear to be clearly drawn, it is not at all certain that these divides are permanent, or even clearly set, considering that general elections are due in 2005. One has only to view the strange mazes along which the Congress (I) and other so-called anti-Hindutva forces are chasing and appropriating the Hindutva ideology in recent times to realize that any principled stand on such issues is strictly for the birds. Closer home, one notes that while the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) was permitted by the state government, headed by the Congress (I), to hold an openly provocative Virat Hindu Sammelan with a public rally in Guwahati on 8 June 2003, the United Minorities Front, a recognized regional political party claiming to represent the interests of the religious and linguistic minorities with origins going back to the Assam agitation and the Assam Accord and once a close ally of the Congress (I), was prevented from holding its open session scheduled to be held in Guwahati on the same day. The introduction of the Bill to annul the Act, predictably, has been both welcomed and opposed: welcomed on the grounds that the annulment of this invidious measure applicable only to Assam (and not even to the rest of the NE region, let alone the rest of the country) removes the biggest hindrance to the expeditious and effective detection and deportation of illegal migrants, whose estimated numbers vary from a few lakhs to several millions, from the state; and opposed on the grounds that the move has the potential for further polarization of a society and polity whose religious, linguistic and ethnic divides are already under great strain. The actual fact, which few want to acknowledge honestly and openly, is that irrespective of the annulment of the Act or its continuance, there has been such a thoroughgoing and irrevocable shift in the balance of forces in Assam that any measure in this regard will have little impact on the ground reality: the entrenched presence of

Chasing a Mirage 77

the migrants in the state, legal or illegal, from Bangladesh or from other parts of India, and the increasingly decisive assertiveness of their economic and political clout. Put simply, no political formation can come to power in Assam without building an alliance with the very sections that have been now and for long routinely reviled as infiltrators. This has been a fact of Assam’s political life for years, if not decades. The Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) learnt this lesson, the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) has had to find shelter and support in Bangladesh in its quest for ‘Swadhin Asom’, and even the Bharatiya Janata Party will have to build bridges with the very sections against which VHP leaders are proposing an ‘economic boycott’ with a view to driving them out, if it wants to come to power in the state. Indeed, one of the interesting shifts that have taken place in the state and the region as a whole during the last decade is the increasing legitimacy of the presence of the Bangladeshi migrants, be they seen as legal or illegal; and a willingness on the part of the political, cultural and commercial establishments, not to speak of the ordinary people in the state and the region, to acknowledge this reality and ‘do business’ with Bangladesh. A brief recalling of recent history will illustrate this point. Making a statement on the issue of illegal infiltration from Bangladesh into Assam (and several other parts of the country, including Delhi) on the floor of the Assam assembly on 10 April 1992, the late Hiteswar Saikia, then serving his second term as chief minister, said that there were ‘between two and three million’ such infiltrators in Assam. The nine-paragraph statement, distributed to the media, discussed the economic and political dimensions of such illegal migration and disclosed that ‘in ten out of the 13 districts’ of the state (the state now has 23 districts), ‘the presence of Bangladeshi infiltrators had contributed to an increase in the population’. The statement caused some sensation, given the fact that Saikia had consistently denied or underplayed the issue. Political analysts also saw a link between such claims and the disclosure that senior leaders of the ULFA, whose very ‘reason for existence’ at least at the time of its birth, was the perceived threat to the identity of the state and its people from the continued illegal influx from Bangladesh, had found sanctuary in Bangladesh. The state government took out a series of advertisements in newspapers highlighting this link, and

78 Looking Back into the Future asking the rhetorical question: ‘Who is the enemy of the people?’, a description that the Assam agitation leaders had routinely applied to Saikia. An immediate reaction to the claim that there were ‘between two and three million’ Bangladeshis illegally staying in Assam was the founding on 30 April 1992 of an outfit calling itself the ‘Muslim Forum’ by Abdul Muhib Mazumdar, a senior Congressman and a political rival of Hiteswar Saikia, who had been a minister in Saikia’s first government (1983–85). At the first and only general meeting of the Forum in Guwahati on 24 May 1992, Abdul Aziz, one of its conveners, did some plain-speaking; he reminded the chief minister of his party’s dependence on what he called ‘Muslim votes’, and added that it would take ‘just five minutes for the Muslims of Assam to throw Hiteswar Saikia out’. The message went home, and just two weeks later there was a ‘clarification’ from the chief minister. Addressing a meeting of the All-Assam Minority Students Co-ordination Committee at Juria near Nagaon on 7 June 1992, Saikia said that there was not a single illegal migrant in the state.2 The IM(DT) Act, 1983 was conceived and was born in highly controversial circumstances and its life over the last 20 years of its existence has been equally contentious. The origins of this legislation, as well as the political and other compulsions that dictated it, are deeply rooted in history, going back to the annexation of this frontier land and its subsequent ‘settlement’, as part of a process of integrating these peripheral areas and expanding them to serve the needs of the British and Indian capital. The process covering over a century and half of the history of this region had, and continues to have, a material bearing on the lives of the people, touching them in every possible way. Migration from areas that later became East Pakistan (and Bangladesh), perfectly legal before independence, as well from other parts of India, was part of this larger process. Its long-term consequences, outside the impetus it has given to the economic growth of the state and the region, are a matter of common knowledge and shared resentment, at least in Assam. Almost the same point can be made of the resentment about the Act as well as of the reactions, favourable and adverse, provoked by the move to repeal the legislation as well. Briefly speaking, the Act, a piece of central legislation, was passed by parliament in the wake of the controversial and bloodstained

Chasing a Mirage 79

elections of February 1983, held in the teeth of violent opposition to the holding of the elections mobilized by the All-Assam Students’ Union (AASU) and its allies on the ground that no elections to the state assembly should be held until the issue of illegal migration into Assam was resolved. The political and legislative history of the state over the previous five years was marked by a series of crises, each of which was influenced by issues thrown up in the course of the AASU-led agitation on the issue of illegal migration into the state and, indeed, into the region. The elections were not merely bloodstained; they were also a farce. However, a Congress (I) government under Hiteswar Saikia assumed office in Dispur. It was not an ‘illegal’ government, though the Assam agitation leaders consistently characterized it so. But it certainly lacked any kind of legitimacy. The quest for legitimacy could not even begin without a settlement with the agitation leaders. The assassination of Indira Gandhi, who had profoundly alienated the agitation leaders (the feelings were mutual), provided just the opportunity for the latter to resume negotiations with the Government of India. The agitation leaders, as always, insisted that the ‘illegal state government under Hiteswar Saikia’ should be kept out of the talks. Thus, under the dispensation of Rajiv Gandhi, the Memorandum of Settlement on the Problem of Foreigners in Assam (Assam Accord) was signed on 15 August 1985. Just over four months later, the leaders of the Assam agitation, who in the meanwhile had transformed their movement into a political party, the Asom Gana Parishad, won the elections and formed the government. Of the many conundrums and masterly misdirections that the Assam Accord comprises, the most curious is the reference to the IM(DT)Act. Passed in the context of the yet to be resolved Assam agitation, the Act was intended to be an assurance to the presumed ‘objects’ of that agitation — that is, those residents of Assam who had reason to fear that the agitation had targeted them — that their interests would be protected, that they would no more be the ‘objects’ of a process initiated under the provisions of a piece of legislation made before independence (The Foreigners Act, 1946) or of an Act legislated immediately after independence (The Immigrants [Expulsion from Assam] Act, 1950), both with a context quite remote from the realities and compulsions of a democratic state that had attained independence several decades earlier. Thus, the rationale.

80 Looking Back into the Future Nevertheless, the Act was the most offensive bugbear for the Assam agitation leaders whose demand has, from the beginning, been for the strict and rigorous application of the provisions of the Acts of 1946 and 1950, applicable universally in the rest of the country and indeed in Assam as well until then. They deeply suspected the new legislation, which by then had been sold to the ‘objects’ of the anti-foreigner agitation as the one and only protective measure that they could not do without. Moreover, it was initiated by a government and a leader, which they continued to insist, was ‘illegal’. Quite simply, the Act and the Accord, so diametrically opposed to each other in their substance and intent, had also become the reverse and the obverse of one and the same phenomenon. The Assam Accord (Para 5.9) tried to square this circle. ‘The government will give due consideration to certain difficulties expressed by the AASU/AAGSP regarding the implementation of the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act, 1983.’ From unqualified opposition to the IM(DT) Act to accepting the anodyne that the government would ‘give due consideration to certain difficulties’ relating to the implementation of the Act was quite a climb down, a price the agitation leaders paid without demur; for only thus could they begin a process which in a matter of weeks transformed them from ‘student’ leaders to leaders of a political party deciding the destiny of the people of Assam. Since the signing of the Accord, the political inheritors of the Assam agitation have twice formed the government in Dispur. Nevertheless, they have done little, or have been able to do little, in the matter of the removal of the ‘certain difficulties’ experienced in respect of this Act. Indeed, there has been ambivalence, especially in the AGP (though not so in the case of the AASU) even on the issue of the annulment of the Act, for strictly speaking, the Act remained part of the Accord. Without the Act, as chief minister Tarun Gogoi says, the Accord itself would fall. Those leaders of the Assam agitation, such as Nibaran Bora, who opposed the Accord even at the height of the euphoria of its signing, recognized the binds and traps into which the signatories of the Accord were entangling themselves. Going by its preamble, the Act appears unexceptionable in its analysis of the problem of illegal migration into Assam, and the need to solve the problem:

Chasing a Mirage 81 Whereas a good number of foreigners who migrated into India across the borders of the eastern and north-eastern regions of the country on and after the 25th day of March 1971, have, by taking advantage of the circumstances of such migration and their ethnic similarities and other connections with the people of India and without having in their possession any lawful authority to do so, illegally remained in India; and whereas the continuance of such foreigners in India is detrimental to the interests of the public of India; and whereas on account of the number of such foreigners and the manner in which such foreigners have clandestinely been trying to pass off as citizens of India and all other relevant circumstances, it is necessary for the protection of the citizens of India to make special provisions for the detection of such foreigners in Assam and also in any other part of India in which such foreigners may be found to have remained illegally...

However, if one is allowed to mix metaphors, the nuts and bolts of the legislation provide loopholes rather than tightening and sealing the escape vents. This is especially so in respect of the functioning of the Tribunals, the key component of the Act. The most charitable way to describe their functioning is to say that they are ‘non-functioning’. According to a report on the issue of illegal migration into the state submitted by the state governor to the President of India in November 1998, only five of the 16 Tribunals are functioning. ‘The remaining eleven have only one person each on the bench [the Act originally required each Tribunal to have three members, and in its amended form requires two members] and as such are non-functional. Salaries and TA bills of the staff are not paid in time. Essential facilities like transport and telephone are lacking and funds are often not available to buy even postage stamps.’ More eloquent are the numbers, even though these vary considerably, especially insofar as estimates of the number of illegal migrants go. As is well known, the issue of illegal migration from Bangladesh affects not merely Assam and other states bordering Bangladesh but the region as a whole. Indeed it is an issue even in cities such as Delhi and Mumbai and areas even more remote. However, while in the years before the promulgation of the Act, according to official admission, over three lakh illegal migrants were deported from Assam alone between 1962 and 1984 (1,74,349 between 1962

82 Looking Back into the Future and 1966; 69,174 between 1967 and 1973; and 58,148 between 1974 and 1984, all under the provisions of the Foreigners Act, 1946), in the 18 years since then, that is, since the coming into force of the Act, the number of such deportees has fallen sharply, with just 1,501 being deported in the last 18 years. According to a statement made by the minister for Assam Accord implementation in the state assembly on 11 March 2003, the state government had so far spent nearly ` 13 crore (` 12,89,28,385, to be exact) on the Tribunals set up under the Act for purposes of ‘determination’ of the illegal nationality of persons impugned to be so, a process which has till now resulted in 1,501 such persons being ‘determined’ and ‘deported’. One obvious reason for the steep fall is the more elaborate process (including the hearing before Tribunals) laid down in the Act, which has to be followed before a ‘suspected illegal migrant’ is established to be really one, and ordered to be deported. Complicating the process further is the Assam Accord which distinguishes three streams of such migrants: those who came to Assam before 1 January 1966, whose presence is to be ‘regularized’; those who came after 1 January 1966 but before 25 March 25 1971, to whom the Foreigners Act, 1946, will apply, but only to the extent that they would be ‘detected’ and their names would be ‘deleted’ from the electoral rolls for a period of 10 years — a proviso which is now only of academic interest; and those who came after 25 March 1971, to whom the provisions of the IM(DT) Act, 1983, will apply. In contrast, in West Bengal, which too has a large number of illegal migrants from Bangladesh, but where there has been neither an organized anti-foreigner agitation by ‘student’ leaders aspiring to political office, nor an Accord with the centre, and where the IM(DT) Act, theoretically applicable to the whole country, has not been notified, nearly half a million illegal migrants have been deported under the provisions of the Foreigners Act, 1946, with hardly a whimper of protest. Addressing the media in Guwahati on 28 April 2003, Manik Sarkar, chief minister of Tripura, said that his government, a Left Front government as in West Bengal and where too, only the provisions of the Foreigners Act, 1946, are applicable, had pushed back over a lakh of illegal migrants from Bangladesh during the last one decade. There may be few lessons in this for the leaders of the Assam agitation (who are anyway beyond learning anything) but, more

Chasing a Mirage 83

relevantly, would there be any lessons for those trying to replicate the history of the last three decades?

.

Notes and References ∗ First published in Frontline, vol. 20, no. 13, 21 June–4 July 2003. 1. The IM(DT) Act was eventually repealed by the Supreme Court in its orders challenging the constitutional validity of the legislation by an AGP MP, Sarbananda Sonowal, now with the BJP, in 2005. 2. M.S. Prabhakara, ‘Border Brinkmanship: Blowing Hot and Cold in Assam’, Frontline, vol. 8., no. 14, 4–17 July, 1992.

11 Reinventing Identities∗ In the morning of 19 March 2004, an armed gang, believed to

belong to the anti-talk faction of the ‘United People’s Democratic Solidarity’ (none of the four terms bespeaking any of the recorded or claimed words and deeds of the organization), which operates in the Karbi Anglong district with the stated objective of attaining a political territory for the Karbi (a hills tribe of Assam) entirely free of any non-Karbi population, raided a Kuki-inhabited village and killed six Kukis. The Kukis are also a recognized hills tribe though without a defined territory. The apparent reason for the hostility of the organization, which represents an extreme and exclusivist form of Karbi nationalist assertion, towards the Kukis is that the latter, despite being not ‘indigenous’ to the district, have been agitating for the constitution of a separate regional council under the provisions of the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution. There is an across-the-board consensus among the Karbis that a concession in this regard would be just the thin end of a wedge, that its logical denouement would be the creation of a political territory for the Kukis in what is seen as the ‘historic homeland’ of the Karbis. Four days later, on the night of 23–24 March, another gang of armed persons, supposedly belonging to an outfit called the Kuki Revolutionary Army, raided three Karbi-inhabited villages in what was clearly a retaliatory action and killed, according to reports, around 30 persons. The approximation of the numbers of those killed is both typical and unavoidable, for the incidents took place in areas difficult to gain access to; and most of the reports of the incidents are based on police briefings in Guwahati. Some scepticism about the outfit named in connection with the killings, too, would be in order given the fact that there are several active and moribund ‘militant’ groups whose names include the words, Kuki, Revolutionary, Army, and several other synonyms, in one or other combination.

Reinventing Identities 85

Subsequent incidents of violence in the district, not directly involving clearly identifiable groups, have become subsumed under the term ‘poll-related violence’, ignored and forgotten. A month later, on 23 April, three activists of the All-Rabha Students’ Union (the Rabhas are numerically the fourth largest of the plains tribes of Assam), which is part of and indeed the driving force and the striking arm of an organization called the Rabha Hashong (Rabhaland) Sixth Schedule Demand Committee, were lynched by a mob of traders in Krishnai bazaar, about 100 km west of Guwahati in Goalpara district, when they were trying to ‘peacefully enforce’ a bandh. The demand for the creation of a Rabha homeland is related to the creation of the Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC), a territorial and political unit of the Bodos under the Sixth Schedule through an amendment of the Constitution in February 2003. (The provisions of the Sixth Schedule were, before the amendment, applicable only to hills tribes.) Since then, there has been a revival and upsurge of autonomist assertion among other plains tribal communities; and three of these, the Mising, the Rabha and the Tiwa, who have ‘Autonomous Councils’, are carrying on various forms of agitation to secure their upgradation, with a clear political content, as ‘Territorial Councils’ under the Sixth Schedule. The killings in Karbi Anglong, the latest (2004) in a seemingly never-ending cycle of violence involving as perpetrators and victims a people relatively marginal to the concerns and anxieties of the people of the Brahmaputra valley, the core area of Assam, have not noticeably bestirred the administration. Krishnai is a different case. The town, just a little over a 100 km from Guwahati on NH 37, is an important trading centre. The population, as in any other part of the state, is a heterogeneous mix of caste, tribe, religion, language and ‘ethnicity’. The Rabhas are part of this mix; the potential Rabha Hashong would include parts of Goalpara district. This mix, once romantically viewed as a true reflection of the mosaic culture of the state and the harmony it represents, is now a tinderbox. The relative prosperity and vibrancy of trading centres such as Krishnai on highways dominated by traders of indigenous, immigrant and refugee stock does contrast with the sense of deprivation and rejection nursed by the rather larger body of a more heterogeneous mix in what is not even the hinterland but a mere extension of the bazaar. The bandh was called by the Rabha Hashong Committee against the arrest of its organizing secretary. Although the violence has abated and the recovery of stray bodies

86 Looking Back into the Future in dribs and drabs has stopped, the situation is far from normal because of its all-too-obvious ‘communal’ dimension. The state does not appear to be involved in such incidents of violence directly, although there are routine accusations that the state itself is encouraging this or that group as part of its broader strategy of crushing militancy. The fact is, the state does not seem to have the information and resources or even the will to use the minimum amount of force to forestall or stop such violence. Such incidents of violence, and many more of their kind that do not even get reported, are not always related to what caused them, not even when they appear to be so as in the ongoing violence in Karbi Anglong. But the agitations and the accompanying violence do bear another kind of a causal link to the demonstrable success of the Bodoland agitation. They all seem to be related in rather complex ways to the accord over the creation of the BTC. Some of these, like the mobilization of the Koch-Rajbanshis, now classified as an other backward class (OBC), are expressions of protest against the very creation of the BTC. Others, like the mobilization for the attainment of a Rabha homeland, are following the successful example set by the Bodo autonomy movement. The ST population figures of the 2001 Census have not yet been released; only provisional totals are available. The census enumerates 14 hill tribes; 12 of these are tribes whose settlements go back to the days of undivided Assam and include pockets of Khasi, Jaintia and related tribes, Garo, Naga and a clutch of Kuki and related tribes — the most numerous and significant component outside the eight plains tribes and two hills tribes. The total Kuki population in the 1991 Census was 21,883, the highest after the Karbi and the Dimasa. At present, Kuki political organizations claim they number about 40,000. Not included in the list are other communities, such as the Adivasis and the Nepalis, who too have demands relating to identity and autonomy. Incidentally, every people, tribal and non-tribal, claim that they are under-enumerated (Table 11.1). Almost every one of these groups has demands arising out of anxieties about its identity and aspirations for autonomy. Every one of these demands also impinges and encroaches on similar anxieties of others occupying broadly the same political space and, more important, sharing the same socio-economic and cultural space as well, forcing them on a path of shifting confrontation and collaboration with the ‘other’.

Reinventing Identities 87

The terrain of struggle is full of pitfalls and holds false promises. Yet, ethnic mobilization is a flourishing industry in the region. It covers a whole range of agitational methods, from petitioning to insurgency. Money procured by extortion and threats, with which the region is flush, easily buys weapons. A few incidents of militant action and well-planted media reports have the required demonstration effect. Indeed, most of these groups are very well informed about how the media works and have excellent and articulate spokespersons. Some of them also run their own websites. But what do expressions like ‘political space’ mean in reality in a context where the dividing lines between insurgency and plain criminality are blurred, where organizations claiming to represent people numbering, in some cases, in tens of thousands or even less, seek greater political autonomy and recognition of an identity; ranging from regional councils and territorial councils to Sixth Schedule provisions and beyond, into the realms of sovereignty and independence? Table 11.1: Scheduled Tribes Population of Assam: Plains and Hills (1991 Census) Total population Total ST population Plains tribes Bodo (Bodo Kachari) Mising (Min) Sonowal Kachari Rabta Tiwa (Lalurg) Deuri Barman of Cachar Mech Hojai Hill tribes Karbi Dimasa Kuki

2,24,14,322 28,74,441 (12.62% of total population) 24,27,714 (84.45% of the total ST population) 12,67,015 (52.14% of total pains tribal population) 4,67,790 (19.25) 2,51,725 (10.36) 2,36,931 (9.75) 1,43,746 (5.91) 35,839 (1.47) 13,348 (0.54) 6,738 (0.27) 4,582 (0.18) 4,51,084 (15.69% of total tribal population) 2,85,811 (63.36% of total hill tribes population) 65,009 (14.41) 21,883

Source: Census Report of 1991.

Perhaps the most elemental form of the contestation in this context is the demand by people not recognized as STs for such recognition, partly with a view to undercutting those already enumerated as STs and partly under the dangerously reactionary ideological assumption that the very classification of a people as STs makes them privileged. Nothing illustrates the marginalization of the political process and the surrender to the mob more than the way

88 Looking Back into the Future such demands are gathering momentum. What else can one make of the proposal of the Communist Party of India (CPI) in Assam that the best way to meet these demands is to declare the whole of Assam a tribal state, as if highly complex issues of social change with far-reaching implications for the people of the state and the region can be sorted out by trickery and legerdemain. For instance, the creation of the BTC has led to the emergence of an organization called the Sanmilita Janagosthiya Sangram Samithi (United Ethnic People’s Struggle Committee), an ad hoc alliance of about 20 non-Bodo organizations in the BTC area, including some of the non-Bodo tribal people that are opposed to the very creation of the BTC. One of the important constituents of the SJSS, the Koch-Rajbanshi, a people historically belonging to the same stock as the Bodos but now a caste-Hindu community classed as an OBC, are demanding to be recognized as an ST, perhaps enabling them to return to their original fold as it were as ‘Ur-Rajbanshi’. The Bodos naturally see such demands as an intolerable provocation and an encroachment on their political space secured after a hard struggle. Others making such demands are the Adivasis, the new name adopted by the tea garden labour and ex-tea garden labour communities. Their cause, however, is rather more legitimate, for these communities are recognized as STs in the lands from which their ancestors were brought, areas broadly in the present Jharkhand and its peripheries. However, as things exist, they lost this status once they migrated out of their original habitats, very much along the lines of the exclusionary locational provisions that govern the recognition of a people as hills tribes and plains tribes, not to the more relevant social and economic denominators that should govern such recognition. Following the first accord on the Bodoland issue, which gave birth to the failed experiment of the Bodoland Autonomous Council (February 1993), the state government under Hiteswar Saikia created, in the course of a few months in late 1995, three other corresponding autonomous councils for the Mising, the Rabha and the Lalung (Tiwa). When these accords were made, both the government and the organizations claiming to represent the three tribes knew full well that the BAC experiment was not working; that instead, it had enabled the emergence of newer forms of militancy upping the ante. The inspiration and the model are clear: the

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success of the leadership of the Bodoland movement in using the political space provided by the BAC to carry on the agitation for yet another decade, calculatedly combining militancy and negotiations to secure what they consider as more substantial political concessions in the form of the BTC, but which may still turn out to be a chimera. Perhaps a more realistic understanding of such demands is provided by the controversies surrounding the existing autonomous councils. The Sadou Assam Tiwa Sanmilan (the All-Assam Tiwa Association), a body with rather more legitimacy than the Tiwa Autonomous Council, has made the most serious allegations of rank corruption against the TAC and has called for its dissolution. Among the allegations made are the increase of the members of the TAC (members of the legislative assembly) from the original 30 to 41 and of the council’s executive members (ministers) from the original three to eight, the more-than-fourfold increase in the salaries of the executive members and the chief executive member (chief minister), and the creation of new posts of speaker, deputy speaker and deputy executive member and so on. So routine are such allegations and so inured have the people become to such situations that there has been no reaction of any kind to these charges. To no one’s surprise, in the eight years since the creation of these autonomous councils, the territory of none of these councils has been demarcated. And yet, every one of these councils is seeking the same kind of renegotiated upgradation of its structures into autonomous territorial councils as was done in the case of the BAC. Consider, for instance, the case of the Deuri, a plains tribe whose habitat is dispersed on both banks of the Brahmaputra in Upper Assam. The total population of the tribes in 1991 was 35,839. The figures are disputed, but even allowing for a 100 per cent increase, the Deuri population would still be just over 70,000. They do not have at present even an autonomous council. And yet, organizations claiming to speak on behalf of this small and dispersed population demand the creation of a Deuri Autonomous Territorial Council. There is also an element of contrived construction in such demands. Generations of the closest interaction with the Assamese people, language and culture has blurred many elements of uniqueness of these communities. Thus, the deliberations of the Tiwa Sahitya Sabha were apparently conducted almost entirely

90 Looking Back into the Future in Assamese; and yet, the political content of Tiwa autonomist mobilization in which the TSS has a major role, is the distancing of the Tiwa from the Assamese. Such demands, in the view of those raising them, are both legitimate and attainable, maybe with a show of force, now that the Bodos, the largest of the plains tribes of the state, have secured the BTC. The amendment, against which there have been some protests from the dominant tribes in the two hill districts, was necessary because the Sixth Schedule as originally envisaged and legislated limited its applicability only to the hills tribes of Assam. Yet others, like the clashes in Karbi Anglong, are related to the fears of the Karbi people that the Sixth Schedule, once considered a protective provision, contains seeds of a potential diminution of the Karbi political space. They are also pointers to an increasingly generalized and particularized phenomenon of agitation and violence going beyond ethnic violence, that catch-all argument stopper. Such coercive violence is being mobilized by the numerous tribal and non-tribal people to press for, and attain, an increasingly exclusivist definition and demarcation of a political space for themselves, that by definition would exclude the often subjectively perceived and arbitrarily determined ‘other’. Nothing illustrates this process of exclusion of so extreme a kind as to blend into rank murder than the incidents in the two hill districts since 2001 marked by generalized massacres involving almost all the people of the districts, both as perpetrators and as victims. The Karbis, earlier known as the Mikir, are the predominant population of the Karbi Anglong district. The Dimasas are the majority in the North Cachar Hills district, though their position vis-a-vis the other people inhabiting the district has never been so clearly dominant as has been with the Karbis in Karbi Anglong. These two are autonomous districts, enjoying this status from the very beginning of the Constitution. There is a long-standing agitation in both the districts for their elevation to an autonomous state (but with the existing district councils intact), under the provisions of Article 244-A. This Article was incorporated in the Constitution in 1969 as the twenty-eighth amendment, to enable the creation of Meghalaya as an autonomous state within Assam — the first step in the progressive ‘dismemberment’ of the once composite state of Assam. Article 244-A became an anachronistic anomaly just

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over a year later when the short-lived experiment failed and the autonomous state was reconstituted as the full-fledged state of Meghalaya in January 1972. However, Article 244-A has not been repealed. The Sixth Schedule provisions, described as ‘a Constitution within a Constitution’, are unique. (The discussion below is limited to Assam though the Sixth Schedule provisions continue to cover Meghalaya, barring the municipal area of Shillong, and the Chhimtuipui district of Mizoram, inhabited by the Chakmas, the Lakhers and the Pawis, and were extended in 1984 to the Tripura Tribal Areas District to enable the creation of tribal area autonomous district councils.) Their origins go back to the very beginnings of the conquest and annexation of Assam (1826) when the colonial government had to chart a policy to negotiate the links with the people living on the periphery of its latest acquisitions. When the new territory was constituted in 1874 into a separate province of Assam, provision was made to administer certain parts of these new acquisitions and conquests under the Scheduled Districts Act of 1874, the mother of all subsequent provisions that were to culminate in the Sixth Schedule. Over a century and a quarter of their evolution, these provisions have covered areas identified and demarcated at various times as ‘backward tracts’, ‘excluded territories’, ‘partially excluded territories’, not to speak of areas marked in old maps as ‘unadministered territories’. The paternalistic rationale for such exclusion from the common run of administration was that the people inhabiting these areas, being very backward, needed special protective provisions as much against any arbitrary exercise of power by the lower minions of the colonial bureaucracy as against the rapacity of the materially more resourceful plains people. The areas identified in the 1874 Act, after many boundary and territorial modifications over nearly a century and the reorganization of Assam (in 1969) and later the NE region (in 1971), evolved into the present full-fledged states of Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland. However, similar protective provisions were not provided to other people scheduled as backward, now part of the larger ST community in the state but not living in the scheduled districts. Thus arose the distinction between the hills tribes, the community into which those living in the areas included in the 1874 Act evolved; and the plains tribes, that is, people as backward as those demarcated

92 Looking Back into the Future in the scheduled district areas, in many cases even more backward, but who by virtue of their locational proximity to the materially more advanced and more resourceful people in the plains, were presumed to have already entered into a social contract of acculturation and gradual assimilation with these relatively more advanced people in their environment, evolving in course of time into one or other of the numerous castes of Hindu society. What such a perception has consistently ignored is an obvious fact, which defies all theories of location-linked development: plains, in Assam as anywhere else in the world, are not all plains; and similarly, hills are not all hills. And as absurd as the linking of such classification with a people’s altitudinal location are the exclusionary and exclusive features of their status as STs linked to their location. Put simply, a plains tribesperson, were he or she to move into the hills, would lose the ST status, and vice versa. This strange provision and the anomaly in respect of the status of the Adivasis take on stranger forms in implementation and practice. Both the Karbi and the Dimasa, as indeed the Kuki, are hills tribes, although it is only the Karbis and the Dimasas who inhabit a clearly demarcated territory, sharing it with others who are less numerous. However, the Kukis, although one of the hills tribes, are considered to be so by the dominant populations in the two hill districts of Assam only by courtesy, for they are not considered an indigenous tribe. Historically one of the greatest migrating people, their identity as a hills tribe is simply a carry-over of the recognition and acknowledgement they had in a very different geographical and political Assam of colonial ethnographic studies. Without any well-defined territory demarcating their inhabitation, they are spread in small pockets principally in the two hill districts of the state, in Manipur and Mizoram, and also in Nagaland where they are conflated with the Zeliang, the last a curious abridgement of another portmanteau nomenclature, Zeliangrong, formed out of three Naga tribes of Manipur: Zemei, Liangmei and Rongmei. In fact, the word Kuki itself is a bit of an inclusive expression. Official descriptions, as in census reports, always refer to ‘any Kuki tribe’, of which 37 sub-tribes have been identified by census enumerators in Manipur. Not considered an indigenous tribe and, unlike the Karbi and the

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Dimasa, both hills tribes, and the nine plains tribes who (in theory) inhabit the plains of Assam, the Kuki have no territory in Assam to call their own, not even a very small administrative unit where they are the predominant population, and from where they can launch an agitation for a ‘territorial recognition’. The accord over the establishment of a Kuki regional council in Karbi Anglong signed in December 2000 by the Autonomous State Demand Committee (ASDC), then a united political movement and a party in Karbi Anglong and in office in Diphu, marked the first formal acknowledgement of the desire and right of the Kuki people to have their own political space. The accord has, however, not been implemented because of the radically changed political situation in the district, most significantly the split in the ASDC and the emergence of the United Peoples Democratic Solidarity (UPDS), which too has split, and the return of the Congress (I) to political office in the state and the district.

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Note ∗ First published in Frontline, vol. 21, no. 11, 22 May–4 June 2004.

12 Massacres Unbound: Outrage Selective∗ I

t all began as a relatively minor, and not in the least unique though entirely reprehensible (Maharashtra is following suit), incident of confrontation between ‘locals’ and ‘outsiders’ over the issue of preferential appointment of local job seekers in the Northeast Frontier Railway (NFR). On 9 November 2003, candidates from outside the state who had travelled to Guwahati for tests conducted by the Railway Recruitment Board, Guwahati, for appointment to Class III and Class IV jobs (now re-designated in a euphemistic exercise as Category C and Category D jobs) were prevented from writing their tests. According to some reports, they could not write their tests because some local aspirants for these jobs seized and destroyed their entry cards. Among those affected were candidates from Bihar as well as from Tripura. Though the reaction in Tripura, very much a part of the NE region, was muted, the reaction in Bihar was rather more outspoken and emphatic. Within days, passengers from Assam and other parts of the NE region travelling in trains passing through Bihar — all trains going westwards to destinations in the rest of the country have to pass through Bihar and Bengal — were assaulted, one woman reportedly molested. Exaggerated and highly coloured reports of such assaults and alleged molestation, like the one which said that travellers from Assam had been killed and their dead bodies put back in trains going back to Assam, or an editorial which spoke of the ‘traumatic gang rape of a Naga girl who was later paraded naked’, both incidentally, in English-language dailies, inflamed passions in an environment always volatile, leading to assaults on the so-called Biharis. These soon developed into more generalized attacks, including arson, looting and killing.

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The victims of these so-called Assamese–Bihari clashes (a meaningless expression if ever there was one) are almost entirely the so-called Biharis, more correctly Hindi-speaking people from many parts of India, including perhaps predominantly Bihar, residents of the state and the region for generations. The backlash began in Guwahati but spread soon to areas in Upper Assam, with the major toll being in Tinsukia district. Two weeks after the first outbreak, the officially admitted toll was 56 persons. The victims, who included women and children, had been hacked to death and a whole family in Tinsukia was stabbed and shot. The violence was not confined to ‘remote’ areas; houses and settlements in Guwahati, including in Dispur, the capital complex and the Guwahati University campus, were burnt. Hundreds of houses and homesteads were set on fire. Livestock too was destroyed. Not to be left behind, the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) issued a statement calling upon all ‘Hindi-speaking people’ to leave Assam, an initiative that was widely believed to have contributed to the escalation of violence, with ULFA itself playing a leading role in some of the killings. ULFA, which has a history of viewing the Hindi language and the speakers of the language as ‘agents’ of ‘Hindu/Indian imperialism’ had already given a call for the boycott of Hindi-language films, though this has not been strictly imposed. However, while not disowning the ‘quit Assam’ call and still very firm in its call for a boycott of Hindi films, ULFA has denied any hand in the killings. In the later phases when the violence seemed to be under control, the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB), the Bodo separatist outfit with complex linkages to ULFA, entered the fray, with some killings in the Bodo-inhabited areas of Udalguri. The toll is almost certainly to go up by the time this report appears. Many of the survivors have abandoned their homes, taken shelter in refugee camps. Given the spread of the Hindi-speaking people all over the state, including villages and small towns (the 1991 Census in Assam enumerated 10,35,474 persons as Hindi-speaking, though the figures do not tell how many of these are second- or third-generation settlers bilingual in Hindi and Assamese, and in varying degrees of acculturation into Assamese society), there are no official figures of those internally displaced and those who have fled the state. Even the number of persons in the camps is constantly changing. Leaving aside the uncounted numbers of those

96 Looking Back into the Future internally displaced, about 20,000 persons, perhaps more, are believed to have fled the state. Clearly, the scale and organization of the violence suggests that the grievances run deeper. A near-racist and deeply entrenched perception going back to decades that has informed and even rationalized this violence is that the so-called Biharis are rough and uncouth in their deportment and manners and almost deserve what they are getting. This perception is strengthened by urban legends as well as the unpleasant experience of many travellers from the region in reserved compartments of trains passing through the state, though the phenomenon of travellers without reservations, indeed without tickets, swarming into reserved compartments is not specific to any state, region or people. The violence is organized, not mindless or chaotic and ad hoc. Equally, it is exploited to promote agendas that have little to do with the catchy slogan — ‘jobs for the boys’, the issue which on the surface seems to have stirred passions and led to violence. One widely held view, openly expressed by the minister for the development of the NE region, C.P. Thakur, is that the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan and Bangladesh, the usual suspects in such developments, are behind the disturbances, with a view to driving out the Biharis who do many lowly paid but essential jobs in the unorganized sector, thus creating a vacuum which will be filled by Bangladeshis, leading eventually to a Muslim-majority Assam, the realization of the unfulfilled dream of the creators of Pakistan. ‘Biharis out, Bangladeshis in’, the headline given to several letters to the editor in newspapers, says it all. In another exercise of buck-passing, chief minister Tarun Gogoi has put the blame on the union government, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP). The president of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), Laloo Prasad Yadav, made much the same point during his two-day visit to Guwahati. Interestingly, both Tarun Gogoi and Laloo Prasad Yadav had very nice things to say about the All-Assam Student’s Union (AASU), whose leaders lose no opportunity to stand the AGP, the party they created, and its leaders in a corner. However, and even without the advantage of hindsight, one can see that that the 24-hour Assam bandh beginning from 5 a.m. on 17 November called by AASU marked the beginning of the escalation of violence. AASU leaders, as always, have maintained that they called for a peaceful bandh

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to register a peaceful demand and protest — jobs for the boys and protest against the violence done to people of the state in Bihar. Jobs for the boys, however, is not merely a catchy slogan. In many ways, it encapsulates a conviction and a mindset that sees the essence of the slogan as a matter of life and death. With over two million ‘educated unemployed’ (the number of unemployed in the live register of employment exchanges in Assam, as on 31 December 3001, was a little under 15 lakh), and with the state having little capacity for employment generation on its own, the youth of the state depend heavily on agencies from outside the state to provide employment. With little inflow of private sector investment, only the state and central governments, and structures like the Indian Railways and other public sector undertakings are seen as providers of jobs, howsoever huge the problem of unemployment and howsoever meagre their contribution in alleviating the problem is in the totality of things. For instance, in the current imbroglio (according to a published analysis) there were over six lakh applicants, more than half of them from outside the region, for 2,720 Grade IV posts, tests for which were disrupted, resulting in a spiral of violence and extreme counter-violence. Given this reality, there is a near unanimity, cutting across other divisions, that local youth should have preference for jobs in these establishments, especially for jobs in the lower categories that do not require the importation of personnel with any special skills. Apart from AASU, other ‘student and youth’ organizations like the Assam Jatiyatabadi Yuva Chhatra Parishad (AJYCP), and their clones, are quite vocal in their demand that there should be a 100 per cent reservation for local youth (more frequently, ‘indigenous youth’) for Class III and Class IV jobs. The distinction, local and indigenous, is both important and ambiguous. Though the major portion of the NFR railway falls within Assam with mostly a symbolic presence in or extensions into five of the other six states of the region (Tripura has nearly 45 route kilometres and the railway link is eventually expected to reach Agartala, while Meghalaya has no railway on its territory), a substantial portion of the NFR railway stretches westwards outside Assam, up to Malda in West Bengal and Katihar in Bihar. About 800 of the approximately 3,800 route kilometres of the NF Railway cover areas outside the region. The aspiration for people from Bihar and West Bengal for jobs on the NF Railway, even without the

98 Looking Back into the Future constitutional provisions (Article 16) and the Supreme Court’s ruling, is entirely understandable and legitimate. The rub, however, is the widespread conviction that successive railway ministers have manipulated and misused their powers to provide jobs for their boys, depriving legitimate and qualified local aspirants. This perception and grievance is held not merely by agitating youth organizations; even government leaders in states that have not had one of its MPs as railway minister share similar grievances. Hence, the increasing consensus in Assam, the state through which the major part of the NF Railway runs, that local youth/ ‘indigenous’ youth should have preference for jobs in the NF Railway, as indeed in other central government undertakings situated in the state, or that have their offices in the state. The expression ‘local youth’, given the still very inclusive political demography of the state, does not always cover only and exclusively the category known as ‘Assamese people’, that is the people who, even though increasingly dwindling in their numbers in relation to other language and ethnic groups, continue to be a dominant force in the Brahmaputra valley. It is for this reason that the occasional choice of the expression ‘indigenous youth’ is made, an expression that has a closer approximation to this category. Like every outbreak of such violence against ‘outsiders’, this too will subside. As the anonymous writer of the old English poem ‘Widsith’ puts it, this too will pass. There is a point, recognized on all sides, beyond which such confrontation cannot be pressed. For instance, the killing of five lorry drivers in a dhaba on the Assam–West Bengal border on 18 November, as they were watching the 2003 India–Australia cricket match, has already disrupted the inflow of goods into the state — and the region. Indeed, the dependence of the people of the state and the region on the so-called Biharis and others of the same ilk for a whole slew of essential goods and services is crucial. There is concern that the riots and the dislocation and departure of so many people, many of them craftsmen and craftswomen in the building industry, will affect the major construction projects that have to be completed over the next year and a half for the city to be ready to stage the 2005 National Games. Solutions will be found, will have to be found, for what is involved is big money, even outside of the big games. Only this explains the high-powered visits of central leaders to the state, the

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concern expressed at the highest levels of both the union and state governments, indeed by heads of other governments in the region as well, over these clashes and their long-term impact. Chief minister Tarun Gogoi has already agreed to refer the matter to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). Even the so-called civil society in Assam, while supportive of the demand for preferential treatment to local/indigenous youth in appointments, is equally exercised over these events. Students and teachers, ‘intellectuals’ and senior citizens, political parties and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have held peace marches and signed statements calling for peace and harmony. Such concern is natural because events in Assam — and Bihar — have an impact going beyond what happens to the people of these states and the region, with implications for the national economy and the agenda of the unimpeded integration, on unequal terms, of the national economy into the global economy on terms dictated by the more powerful agenda of globalization. This brings us to a most curious aspect of the situation in Assam. In the midst of all this quite legitimate concern nationally and within the state and the region over violence and calls for harmony, what one misses is a similar concern in respect of corresponding incidents of violence that have taken place during more or less the same period, indeed are even now taking place, in the autonomous district of Karbi Anglong involving a faction of a separatist Karbi outfit called the United People’s Democratic Solidarity (UPDS) and the Kuki National Assembly (KNA), the political organization of the Kuki people in the district, though the individuals involved as perpetrators or victims may not be members of either of these organizations. Karbi Anglong, along with the neighbouring North Cachar Hills district, enjoy autonomy under the provisions of the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution, an arrangement that considerably precedes the creation of Meghalaya. In the clashes that have taken place in and around the Kukiinhabited Sinhasan Hills, at last 20 persons, perhaps more, Kuki and Karbi, have been killed. Abducted children have been beheaded, burnt alive. Abducted women have been raped and killed. Villages have been torched. These clashes spread to areas bordering Meghalaya that have for decades been a bone of contention between the two states, preceding the creation of Meghalaya and a leftover of that process, though the people inhabiting these areas, Khasis and Karbis (and, invariably, Kukis in pockets) have historically lived in harmony.

100 Looking Back into the Future The roots of this conflict run deep, though a proximate political context seems to be the breakdown of the compact that had existed between the KNA, the political organization of the Kuki people with claims to a trans-regional, indeed trans-national, ethnic and political identity (the Kukis, like so many other tribal groups, are found all over the region and also across the international borders) and the Autonomous State Demand Committee (ASDC), a district-level political party with indefinable links to one of the factions of the Communist Party of India-Marxist-Leninist (CPI-ML). The ASDC was the ruling party in the district council when the compact was entered into. The major political development in the last decade in this district, as well as in the neighbouring North Cachar Hills Autonomous District is the split in the ASDC brought upon largely by the ASDC leaders themselves, and the return of the Congress party to political office in these districts.1 Muddying the situation further is the recent emergence of the UPDS, the Karbi Anglong-based separatist outfit, with its predictable agenda for a Karbi state purged of all non-Karbis; and its equally predictable modus operandi of extortion (taxation) with equally predictable consequences to those who refuse to pay. The split in the UPDS and the emergence of a pro-talks faction which signed a ceasefire agreement with the union government in May 2002 had made it necessary for the anti-talks faction of the UPDS to assert, by demonstrated deeds, a more militant posture. The Kukis, seen by many separatist outfits of the region as not sufficiently driven by similar separatist urges, are a natural target in every part of the region where they are in significant numbers. There appears to be an immediate economic dimension to the conflict as well. Ginger of the most excellent quality is grown on the Sinhasan Hills — as indeed in many other Kuki-inhabited areas — though the Kukis of Karbi Anglong have benefited little by the trade in ginger over which they do not have control. Early this year (2003), at the height of the ginger harvest season, the UPDS imposed a seven-day blockade beginning from 12 January to protest against ‘the destruction of the forest by ginger cultivators’. Ecological concerns take curious forms, and not merely in this region. The real reason for the blockade call, apparently, was that the ginger farmers, overwhelmingly Kuki, had refused to pay ‘taxes’ to the UPDS. The tension was building up. It only required one killing, or one act of abduction, to let loose violence and counter-violence.

Massacres Unbound 101

The conflict has been more or less a continuation, similar in its gruesomeness but with different motivations, of the so-called Hmar–Dimasa clashes that raged for months earlier this year in the autonomous district of North Cachar Hills. About 60 persons are known to have died in those conflicts. And yet, what strikes an observer is that these incidents have attracted much less notice, and evoked hardly any concern nationally, than the incidents of violence against persons considered Hindi-speaking in the Brahmaputra valley. The high-power dignitaries visiting Tinsukia and Guwahati are not travelling to Diphu. The President and the prime minister who issue statements of concern with such alacrity whenever and wherever large-scale violence breaks out are strangely silent. The silence is curious, but perhaps not really surprising. The so-called Assamese–Bihari clashes involve two major national groups, with considerable national clout and considered very much part of a larger pan-Indian network, indeed closely integrated into the network of transnational capital. What is happening in these two states has national and international implications. But Karbis and Kukis? Who are they? Where are the Sinhasan Hills? Where for heaven’s sake is Karbi Anglong? What is an ‘autonomous district’? Nationally such questions only provoke a yawn, for what happens to such obscure people from obscure corners of an obscure land really do not affect the world, the country and the home of the 30 crore or so people, give and take a crore or two, who own the country, who are having a ball of a time arguing and quarrelling among themselves, forming rival political parties, mongering progressive and reactionary slogans, forming and overthrowing governments. We end this essay with a quotation from, and a reference to, two opinion pieces by two former secretaries to the union government. Their hearts are in the right place, they throb with sympathy for the NE region; however, their actual knowledge of the nuts and bolts of the region, or even simple and easily verifiable facts about the region reflects the larger indifference in the rest of the country suggested in the preceding paragraph. The first passage is from an opinion piece by Bhaskar Ghose, former secretary, ministry of information and broadcasting, in The Telegraph (20 November), throbbing with righteous indignation over the neglect of the NE region by successive governments in

102 Looking Back into the Future Delhi: ‘Just consider the record. We’ve had more than fifty years of independence — and what have we done in that period to provide good, and I mean really good, communications with the North-East? Oh, yes, there is a rail link that goes as far as Dimapur. Big deal. It’s a shoddy link, just one line, and the trains run only when the officials feel like running them.’ One can fault the NF Railway on many grounds, but the trains, even if occasionally delayed as they are in any other zone, do run according to a published timetable, and do not depend on the mood and fancy of railway officials. The rail link, incidentally, does not end at Dimapur but goes much farther to the east, with the broad-gauge link terminus being Dibrugarh, from where one can take a Rajdhani to Delhi, not to speak of branch lines further to the north and east. Should one be charitable since secretaries to the union government, even when they become ‘ex’, do not normally travel by trains? In another opinion piece, also in the same paper and also by a former union government secretary, a former foreign secretary, no less, the author speaks of the common border that Bangladesh has with Myanmar and Manipur in India, which add to ‘Bangladesh’s importance in terms of India’s border security concerns in that region’. The article in fact builds up a whole scenario of ‘security threat to the region’ on the basis, among other factors, of this nonexistent border between Bangladesh and Manipur.2 With such friends, do the people of the region really need enemies?

.

Notes and References ∗ First published in Frontline, vol. 20, no. 25, 6–19 December 2003. 1. For a background on the complex politics of these two districts, see M.S. Prabhakara, ‘Assam: Hot in the Hills’, Frontline, vol. 6, no. 20, 30 September–13 October 1989; and M.S. Prabhakara, ‘North Cachar Conundrum: A Tribe’s Anxieties over Identity’, Frontline, vol. 9, no. 23, 7–20 November 1992. 2. J.N. Dixit, ‘Ignored Neighbours’, the Telegraph, 21 May 2003.

13 Manufacturing Identities?∗ In March 2005, there came into existence in Titabor, near Jorhat in

upper Assam, an organization called Thengal (also spelt Thangal) Kachari Autonomous Council (TKAC) Demand Committee whose stated objective is explicit in its very name — the creation of an autonomous council for the Thengal Kachari, a community of people living mostly in some villages in the Jorhat and Golaghat districts. On 10 August, barely five months later, the state government signed an accord with the TKAC Demand Committee; and two days later, the state assembly passed the Thangal Kachari Autonomous Council Bill, 2005, providing for the formation of such a council. Pending the assent of the governor to the Bill, an 11-member interim executive council was appointed by the state government, as provided for in the Transitional Provisions of the Bill (Section 80). Thus, following the path charted in the creation of autonomous councils for the Mising, the Rabha and the Tiwa (earlier known as Lalung), between July and October 1995, and the more recent accord (of 4 March 2005) for the creation of similar councils for the Sonowal Kachari and Deuri, all designated plains tribal communities and enumerated so in successive censuses, the state now has a sixth autonomous council, this time for the Thengal Kachari whose very status as a tribe is fraught with some ambiguities. Further, the utterly uneventful five months between the formation of the ‘Demand Committee’, the passing of the legislation and the appointment of an interim TKAC do stand in sharp contrast, for instance, with the militancy and violence, that preceded and accompanied and even followed the creation of the Bodoland Autonomous Council (May 1993) and, subsequently, a body with slightly more substantial powers, the Bodoland Territorial Council (February 2003). Indeed, the interim BTC itself came into being on 7 December 2003, nearly 11 months later, after the BTC accord was signed.

104 Looking Back into the Future Similar was the case with the agreements on the formation of the autonomous councils for the Mising, the Rabha, the Tiwa, the Sonowal Kachari and the Deuri, each of which was preceded by prolonged agitation, though not as violent as those that accompanied the Bodo autonomist assertion. In the case of the Deuri and the Sonowal Kachari, though the accord for the creation of the autonomous councils for these two communities was signed on 4 March and the required legislation was passed on 6 April, the appointment of the interim executive council pending elections to the autonomous councils has not taken place. In the case of the Deuri, progress in this regard has been hampered apparently because of differences within and between several organizations, all claiming to represent the community. Incidentally, none of these bodies that agitated for greater autonomy is satisfied with the autonomous councils that have been legislated into existence; and it is a mere matter of time when the struggle will be resumed to the next, higher stage, for the creation of territorial councils for these communities. The fact that even in the case of the Bodos, the largest of the plains tribal communities, the ambiguous territoriality that has been attained continues to be contested by other communities, tribal and non-tribal, occupying the same space, has not come in the way of similar territorial assertions by other plains tribes. The census in Assam enumerates 23 tribal communities, as well as a small and notional twenty-fourth category described as ‘unclassified’. Fourteen of these are designated as ‘hills tribes’ and the remaining nine are ‘plains tribes’. The hills tribes are a residue of the once composite state of Assam that included the four hill districts that eventually became the separate states of Nagaland (1963), Meghalaya (1973) and Mizoram (1972, 1987). However, the political leadership in the two hill districts, Karbi Anglong and North Cachar Hills, at the time of the creation of Meghalaya forming one district called the United Mikir and North Cachar Hills district, chose not to join the All-Party Hill Leaders’ Conference (APHLC) that led the movement for separation from Assam in the contiguous Khasi Hills and Jaintia Hills district and refused to become part of the new state of Meghalaya. Instead, they chose to remain part of Assam, with the substantial autonomy under the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution that the district, like other hill districts of Assam before they split to become separate

Manufacturing Identities? 105

states, enjoyed. Since then, the once united district has been constituted into two separate districts, Karbi Anglong and North Cachar Hills. There is a demand, and an on-now-off-now agitation as well, cutting across party lines, for the upgradation of the two districts into an ‘autonomous state within Assam’ under Article 244-A of the Constitution, a status briefly enjoyed by Meghalaya before it became a full-fledged state. For reasons that are not clear, this Article was not annulled after the creation of Meghalaya. A curious way in which this historical background impinges on the present is that the 14 designated hills tribes of Assam are enumerated only in the two hill districts of the state, though a substantial number of these tribal people also dwell in other parts of Assam, including of course in Guwahati, the capital and largest city, without however, being identified as a scheduled tribe in the plains. Similarly, this same location-specific identity applies also to the nine plains tribes who are enumerated as a tribal community only in the districts of the Brahmaputra and the Barak valleys, though here again, many of these plains tribes also live in the two hill districts, but without being recognized there as a scheduled tribe. This anomalous locational specificity that flies against common sense was at the root of one of the core demands of the Bodoland agitation — that the Bodo Kachari of Karbi Anglong should be recognized as a scheduled tribe. Another peculiar anomaly is that one of the plains tribes, known as the Barmans of Cachar, are so recognized only in the Cachar district of Barak valley and not in any other district, neither in the two hill districts nor the 19 plains districts of the Brahmaputra valley. Further, when Cachar district was trifurcated in the 1980s by the elevation of two of its subdivisions to full districts, Karimganj (1983) and Hailakandi (1989), the Barmans of Cachar were not enumerated in the 1991 Census in the Karimganj and Hailakandi districts, but only in the residual Cachar district, though historically they were part of the undivided Cachar district. Who are the Thengal Kachari and where do they fit in this categorization? The simple answer is: nowhere. The community has never been separately enumerated in any of the five census operations (1951, 1961, 1971, 1991 and 2001) conducted in Assam since independence. (Because of the disruption caused by the Assam agitation, the 1981 Census could not be held in Assam.) The published details about Assam’s scheduled tribe (ST) population

106 Looking Back into the Future in the first four of these censuses make no reference to the Thengal Kachari. This is the case with the 2001 Census as well, though population figures of individual tribes are yet to be released. On the face of it, the Thengal Kachari, as the very denomination of Kachari indicates, should have been recognized as a tribal community, part of the great Kachari family and enumerated in successive censuses as a scheduled tribe. This has not been the case. According to the government and community leaders that this correspondent has spoken to, the Thengal Kachari were, in all these censuses, counted as a tribal community but not enumerated so separately. They were instead included with the Sonowal Kachari, a people closely related, and their numbers were subsumed in the total of the Sonowal Kachari. Indeed, the TKAC Bill as originally drafted, clubbed the Sonowal Kachari and the Thengal Kachari and envisaged the creation of a Sonowal Kachari–Thengal Kachari autonomous council. However, such a hyphenation was not acceptable to either of the communities. Thus came into being two separate autonomous councils for the Sonowal Kachari and the Thengal Kachari. However, while some figures, howsoever disputed as underenumerations (as the population figures of every community in every census are), are available for the Sonowal Kachari, very little is known about the actual numerical strength or the broad habitat of the Thengal Kachari for whom and in whose name the autonomous council has been created. According to B.K. Gohain, the state’s home commissioner who is closely engaged in the issue, the estimated population of Thengal Kachari is ‘about 3.5 lakh’, a figure that is also cited as the estimated ‘total population of the council area’, which of course, will also include many people who are not Thengal Kacharis. Kula Das, a Communist Party of India (CPI) leader from Titabor closely associated with the movement for the creation of the TKAC, suggests that the figure is closer to ‘about 2.5 lakh’, which too seems to be a gross over-estimate. These figures have to be set against the final population totals of the 2001 Census that have been published. These figures show that the total scheduled tribe population of the Jorhat (which includes Majuli island, predominantly inhabited by the Mising) and Golaghat districts, the broad habitat of the Thengal Kachari, is 2,17,054, a figure that includes not merely the very large number of Mising but also substantial numbers of Sonowal Kacharis and Deuris. According to Dr Mohammed Taher, the highly regarded

Manufacturing Identities? 107

geographer and demographer of the state, the total population of the Thengal Kachari is unlikely to be very much over 10,000, probably closer to the population of the Deuris which, according to the 1991 Census was 35,839 and which may have now reached about 50,000. No wonder, therefore, that the community does not even figure in any published records and government publications. Inquiries at the Tribal Research Institute at Guwahati, a structure under the government of Assam, which has published several monographs on the plains tribes of Assam, revealed that the institute had not published any material on the Thengal Kachari, not even the smallest article. Indeed, Tribes of Assam Plains, published in 1980 by the Director, Welfare of Plains Tribes and Backward Classes, government of Assam, does not even consider Thengal Kachari (‘Thengals of Upper Assam’) as a tribal people.1 According to the Peoples of India volume on Assam, ‘although they [Thengal Kachari] are a Scheduled Tribe of Assam, nevertheless they have not been shown separately in the list of Scheduled Tribes of Assam’.2 In other words, a community never enumerated separately and never finding even a mention in all the literature on the tribal people of the state, including literature published by the government of Assam, about whose numbers or habitat little is known, has within a few weeks of the set-up of a ‘Demand Committee’ for the formation of an autonomous council found this demand conceded. The alacrity, not to speak of the democratic response to popular demand, is astounding, given the history of violent agitations that have marked the grudging concessions for even the most legitimate of demands. However, these anomalies have to be seen in the context of the acknowledged social reality in Assam — that tribal and caste identities in Assam are marked by a certain elasticity defying the rigid stratifications in the rest of the country. The reason for the Thengal Kachari not even finding a mention in the official classification of the tribal communities of the state and getting little more than a passing mention in ethnological studies could be that historically, their identity has been marked by such elasticity, as indeed is the case with several other tribal people. Such plasticity and fluidity is part of the survival strategy of any small community living in the midst of a people more numerous, more powerful.

108 Looking Back into the Future A passage from Tribes of Assam Plains is worth quoting because it also highlights other problems related to the enumeration and population of the plains tribes, including the tea garden tribes. In the plains of Assam it is very difficult to gauge the exact population of the Tribals (sic) because of very many artificial constraints. A sizable population representing a number of tribes, the dominant section of which live in the adjoining hills, is not treated as tribal in the plains. Again, a great number of plains tribals have not been recorded as tribal because they have accepted Hinduism, though the acceptance of Christianity has not been regarded as a bar. The bar against Hinduised tribals is also not uniformly applied. For example, the Hinduised Sonowals of Upper Assam are tribals while the Hinduised Thengals of Upper Assam and the Saraniyas of Lower Assam are not, though the social customs and mode of living of all these tribes are identical. Owing to inaccessibility of their habitat, too, a considerable number of tribal population has been left out of the census. And the most disquieting phenomenon is that approximately five lakhs (1971 Census figures) of Oraon, Munda, Santhal and other such tribal people, whose forefathers had been brought to Assam during the last century in connection with tea cultivation have been missing from the list of tribals.3

The Hinduization of a tribal community has not always been the determining factor in its retaining or losing its tribal status. The Dimasa Kachari in the North Cachar Hills district, predominantly still Hindu, continue to be recognized unambiguously as a hills tribe and the Sonowal Kachari, a people even more Hinduized, who inhabit some districts of upper Assam, also are recognized as a plains tribe, but the same has not been the case with the Hinduized Saraniya Kachari, a community inhabiting parts of middle and lower Assam. The standard explanation for the exclusion of the Saraniya Kachari from the list of tribal communities is that the people going under that tribal appellation became Hinduized by taking saran, a process of detribalization involving the acceptance of the prescriptive demands of caste-Hindu society as they prevailed in rural Assam, including abjuring of forbidden food and drink, and became a part of the caste Hindu hierarchy, albeit at a very low level now classed as other backward classes (OBC). This historic process, described by several ethnographers (the classic account is in the Assam volume of the 1891 Census by Edward Gait),4 has more or less ceased; there is instead a drive now for retribalization.

Manufacturing Identities? 109

The most telling manifestation of this process of retribalization, if not in actual practice, at least in political terms, is the ongoing agitation with deadlines announced and extended for recognition as a scheduled tribe by six OBC communities of the state: the KochRajbanshi to which stream most of the Saraniya Kacharis belong, the Tai Ahom, who ruled Assam during medieval times, the Moran, the Mottock, the Chutiya and the Adivasi, the appellation now preferred by tea garden and ex-tea garden labour. As against these demands one has to set the certain opposition from the existing scheduled tribes against making any concession on such demands. The Bodo Kachari, despite securing recognition as a ‘Sixth Schedule tribe’ and so qualifying as a scheduled tribe in the hill districts, has till now not secured such recognition in Karbi Anglong. Given these anomalies, is there a ‘story behind the story’, an ‘agenda within an agenda’, in the creation of the TKAC with such speed and promptitude and with virtually no debate? At the most obvious level, these initiatives are cynically seen by the opposition (which boycotted the assembly on the day the Bill was passed) as so much of pre-election distribution of a fairly minor kind of patronage. After all, said Hiten Goswami, the chief whip of the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP), Titabor, the ‘homeland and heartland’ of the TKAC, is also the constituency of chief minister Tarun Gogoi. This is, however, too facile an explanation; and even if correct, is not relevant. The more immediate problems precipitated by such ad hoc measures is further intensification of the bitterness that is already deeply entrenched among and between various plains tribal communities in Assam. Elections to three of the autonomous councils (Mising, Rabha and Tiwa) are to be held before the end of the year (2005). This means that in every village that has been included in one or other of these autonomous councils, the identity of those who do belong to the respective communities has to be ascertained. This explains the generalized demand, common to all the three autonomous council areas, for exclusion or inclusion of villages from their autonomous council areas on the grounds that such villages are inhabited by the ‘other’ or by their own people. Indeed, the problem might touch individual villages and households as well. Kula Das of the CPI was rather more exercised about the problem of identifying and locating Thengal Kachari people in the villages that are included in the TKAC area than the lack of clarity about the Thengal Kachari population. Officially,

110 Looking Back into the Future the TKAC will cover ‘264 Thengal Kachari villages’, which few agree approximates to the reality on the ground. But even if this figure were correct, these ‘264 Thengal Kachari villages’ have nonThengal populations as well as who should be identified first before electoral rolls are prepared and elections are held. Such sheer ad hocism, with little thought given to the ground reality, has been a constant in this and similar initiatives, relating to the ongoing assertions of ‘ethno-nationalism’ (to use a really ugly phrase) that range from demands for reclassification as a scheduled tribe or restoration of such a status from communities that believe that historically they had belonged to such a stream to demands for autonomy to straightforward secessionist struggles. A whole range of such struggles is going on in virtually every part of the NE region. This is not new. Such dynamism and flux is inherent in any social situation. What is new is the quick-fire solutions produced with a flourish, an exercise in legerdemain as it were. The strange story of the TKAC provides a most salutary and striking instance of this new fast-food style politics, picking out instant solutions out of a hat to any and every problem, without even considering whether such a process of mechanical autonomization and the consequent inescapable atomization of Assam is the only way out of the more fundamental predicament that is facing Assam. This is the real purport and moral of this tale.

.

Notes and References ∗ First published in Frontline, vol. 22, no. 20, 24 September–7 October 2005. 1. M.M. Chaudhury, 1980, Tribes of Assam Plains, Gauhati: Director, Welfare of Plains Tribes and Backward Classes, Government of Assam. 2. K.S. Singh, B.K. Bardolai, R.K. Athaparia (eds), 2003, People of India: Assam, vol. XV, part 2, Calcutta: Seagull Books Pvt. Ltd. (published on behalf of the Anthropological Survey of India). 3. Chaudhury, Tribes of Assam Plains, p. 9. 4. E.A. Gait, 1892, Census of India, 1891: Assam, Shillong: Assam Secretariat Printing Office.

14 In the Name of Tribal Identities∗ T

his article is an attempt to explain and analyse the two tables that accompany it. Table 14.1 presents the district-wise distribution of the tribal population of Assam according to the 1991 Census (the corresponding breakdown of the 2001 Census was not available at the time of writing), officially classified into two mutually exclusive categories: the hills tribes and the plains tribes. Table 14.2, based on a much longer table that gives the details about the speakers of the 94 languages with a strength of 10,000 and above not specified in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution (languages and the mother tongue and their strengths in the 1991 Census), which highlights the disjunction between the total population identified and enumerated as hills tribes and plains tribes in Assam and the number of people enumerated as speakers of a particular language identified with a tribe. The article also draws attention to some interesting inferences that can be made from these figures. The exercise is intended to throw some light on two aspects of the present situation in Assam that, by extension, may have implications nationally as well. One, the killings in Karbi Anglong district where in an almost tit-for-tat exercise, scores of persons were killed over a period of less than a month (2005) in a carnage that seems to have abated for the present. These, usually described as ‘ethnic clashes’, are, more accurately, targeted killings of ‘the other’ periodically with a view to making ‘unpersons’ of that hated other. One such group of alleged killers calls itself the United People’s Democratic Solidarity (UPDS), and claims to defend the interest of the Karbi people (still officially referred to in the table by the old name, Mikir), the majority population in the district. The other group, called Dima Halam Daogah (DHD), claims to represent the interests of the Dimasa, the majority population in the neighbouring North Cachar Hills. Given the highly complex

1. Chakma 2. Dimasa, Kachari 3. Garo 4. Hajong 5. Hmar 6. Khasi, Jaintia, Synteng, Pnar, War, Bhoi, Lyng 7. Any Kuki 8. Lakher 9. Man (Taispeaking) 10. Any Mizo 11. Mikir 12. Any Naga Tribe 13. Pawi 14. Synteng 15. Barmans 16. Bodo, Bodo Kachari

Name of tribes

0 0

0 0 0 0

0 0 0

0 0 0

0 0 0 39,207

0 0 0 0

0 0 0

0 0 0

0 0 0 22,628

0 0 0 9,592

0 0 0

0 0 0

0 0 0 0

0 0

Dhemaji Morigaon

0 0

Dhubri

0 0 0 12,614

0 0 0

0 0 0

0 0 0 0

0 0

Nagaon

0 0 0 23,515

0 0 0

0 0 0

0 0 0 0

0 0

Golaghat

0 0 0 1,535

0 0 0

0 0 0

0 0 0 0

0 0

Jorhat

0 0 0 2,910

0 0 0

0 0 0

0 0 0 0

0 0

0 0 0 4,855

0 0 0

0 0 0

0 0 0 0

0 0

Sivsagar Dibrugarh

Name of districts

Table 14.1: Assam —– Scheduled Tribe Population: District Data 1991 (Part-I)

0 0 0 1,966

0 0 0

0 0 0

0 0 0 0

0 0

Tinsukia

569 350 0 0

421 2,81,507 2,446

7,711 3 1,814

17,460 383 399 8,452

3,989 15,065

Karbi Anglong

208 18 0 0

610 4,224 12,908

14,172 33 786

538 1,255 10,790 2,906

198 49,944

NC hills

0 0 0 70

0 0 0

0 0 0

0 0 0 0

0 0

Karimganj

17. Deuri 9 5,891 18. Hajoi 16 115 19. Kachari, 707 19,775 Sonowal Kachari 20. Lalung 3 4,340 21. Mech 34 284 22. Miri 10 1,38,472 23. Rabha 8,704 1,954 24. Unclassified 149 274 32,260 2,10,312 Total ST 13,32,478 4,78,830 Total Population % ST 2.42 43.92 Population 15.4

81,740 19 139 128 516 98,483 6,39,682

77 302 5,970

64 90 19,098

3.69

10.25

50,185 415 245 408 184 39,785 1,887 1,281 245 260 69,848 84,916 18,93,171 8,28,096

145 582 3,761

3,843 53 7,250

2,168 422 64,432

12.09

3.8

7.95

17 17 117 188 1,219 2,291 77,536 19,079 7,254 64 50 451 277 75 930 1,05,307 34,496 82,920 8,71,206 9,07,983 10,42,457

3,759 108 21,823

5.35

72 870 10,476 212 190 51,493 9,62,298

4,939 178 32,590

0 0 0

51.55

39.41

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1,069 262 3,41,638 98,852 6,62,723 2,50,801

0 0 0

0.1

0 11 6 5 110 806 8,27,063

15 520 69

1. Chakma 2. Dimasa Kachari 3. Garo 4. Hajong 5. Hmar 6. Khasi, Jaintia, Synteng, Pnar, War, Bhoi, Lyng 7. Any Kuki 8. Lakher 9. Man (Tai-speaking) 10. Any Mizo 11. Mikir 12. Any Naga Tribe 13. Pawi 14. Synteng 15. Barmans 16. Boro, Boro Kachari

Name of tribes

0 0

0 0 0 0

0 0 0

0 0 0

0 0 13,378 95

0 0 0 0

0 0 0

0 0 0

0 0 0 54

Cachar

0 0

Hailakandi

0 0 0 3,18,432

0 0 0

0 0 0

0 0 0 0

0 0

0 0 0 1,33,904

0 0 0

0 0 0

0 0 0 0

0 0

0 0 0 31,048

0 0 0

0 0 0

0 0 0 0

0 0

Kokrajhar Bongaigaon Goalpara

Assam —– Scheduled Tribe Population: District Data 1991 (Part-II)

0 0 0 1,03,413

0 0 0

0 0 0

0 0 0 0

0 0

Barpeta

0 0 0 1,47,690

0 0 0

0 0 0

0 0 0 0

0 0

Nalbari

0 0 0 1,12,796

0 0 0

0 0 0

0 0 0 0

0 0

Kamrup

Name of districts

0 0 0 1,89,962

0 0 0

0 0 0

0 0 0 0

0 0

Darrang

0 0 0 1,02,369

0 0 0

0 0 0

0 0 0 0

0 0

Sonitpur

0 0 0 8,360

0 0 0

0 0 0

0 0 0 0

0 0

Lakhimpur

777 368 13,378 12,67,015

1,031 2,85,811 15,354

21,883 36 2,582

17,998 1,638 11,189 11,358

4,187 65,009

Assam

0.03 0.01 0.47 44.08

0.04 9.94 0.53

0.76 0 0.09

0.63 0.06 0.39 0.4

0.15 2.26

Percentage

733 0 685

575 18 1,061 14 14 16,573 12,15,385

1.36

1 443 66

1 0 8 0 142 715 4,49,048

0.16

41.15

27 10 37 9,656 366 3,29,461 8,00,659

28 79 826

17.53

42 14 45 5,658 204 1,41,542 8,07,523

13 26 1,636

61 76 4,491

13 49 15,752

611 253 18,922

19 77 5,549

1,333 428 7,638

17.23

7.98

17.67

10.72

17.36

10.71

45 13 21 5,440 18 87 244 9 6 62 12 742 44 54 48 1,026 56 34,868 80,694 2,232 15,839 74,954 29,010 3,970 205 103 223 276 254 1,063 1,15,099 1,10,452 1,79,641 2,14,340 2,24,957 1,52,498 6,68,138 13,84,659 10,16,390 20,00,071 12,95,860 14,24,287

8 154 2,657

Source: National Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.

17. Deuri 18. Hajoi 19. Kachari, Sonawal Kachari 20. Lalung 21. Mech 22. Miri 23. Rabha 24. Unclassified Total ST Total Population % ST Population

35,849 4,582 2,51,725

23.57

12.82

571 1,43,746 52 6,738 1,37,612 4,67,790 168 2,36,931 259 7,466 1,77,156 28,74,441 7,51,517 2,24,14,322

12,119 62 17,953

5 0.23 16.27 8.24 0.26 100

1.25 0.16 8.76

116 Looking Back into the Future Table 14.2: Languages and Mother Tongues not Specified in the Eighth Schedule Used by the Hills Tribes and Plains Tribes of Assam (1991 Census)

Name of language Boro/Bodo Boro Mising Rabha Lalung/Tiwa Deuri Karbi/Mikir Dimasa

Total population 12,67,915 4,67,790 2,36,931 1,43,746 35,849 2,85,811 65,009

Number of persons who returned the language as mother tongue 12,13,545 3,90,583 1,39,365 33,746 17,901 3,63,715 87,284

Source: Census of Assam, 1991. Series 04: Assam. Language. Directorate of Census Operations, Assam, Guwahati, and Registrar General of India, Delhi, 2002. Note: The figures in the table are collated from the figures for the distribution of 68 non-scheduled languages.

demographic composition of the two districts, such clashes have occasionally involved other people, both as perpetrators and as victims and survivors. The districts, which were not so long ago one administrative unit, continue to share many commonalities, the most significant of which is that they are inhabited by tribal people who are officially designated as hills tribes. The people whose interests these groups claim to represent, the Karbi and the Dimasa, are significant minorities in the ‘other’ district — 15,065 Karbis in the North Cachar Hills and 4,224 Dimasas in Karbi Anglong. Small numbers, much blood. The two outfits have signed ceasefire agreements (rejected by small factions of these groups) and have designated camps outside of which they are not supposed to move wearing uniforms and carrying arms. This part of the ceasefire agreement is routinely flouted by both groups. Both, like so many other similar groups of killers, are routinely referred to as ‘militants’, a euphemism which has acquired legitimacy through repeated use by the media all over the country. In reality, there is nothing militant about their actions, such as dragging unarmed villagers out of their beds in the dead of night, lining them up with their arms tied behind their backs and shooting them down, or dragging them out of buses and hacking them to death. Second, the exercise is also intended to focus attention on what may be in store when elections to the three autonomous councils

In the Name of Tribal Identities 117

(Mising, Rabha and Tiwa), created at various points over the past decades as part of an exercise of defining and consolidating ‘identities’, are held, some time within the next six months (2005). The aim is to draw attention to the more fundamental problems surrounding the so-called ‘identity’ questions in Assam in the light of the disjunction between language and ‘ethnicity’, so-called because much of the discussion about identity is as much about issues that are real as about a fabricated fetish — if not rationalization for plain murder. To take a stark example, the total population of the Deuri, a plains tribe of Assam, as enumerated in the 1991 Census, is 35,849. However, according to Table 14.2, the total number of people who returned Deuri as their mother tongue in the 1991 Census is 17,901. There is nothing mysterious about this disjunction, given the social reality of Assam where several tribal people, living in the vicinity and in the environs of more advanced languages, have lost their mother tongues through the process of both pull and push, and have over a period of time come to use the more advanced language which gradually becomes their first language. The case of the Sonowal Kachari, another plains tribe of Assam, far more numerous than the Deuri, presents a classic instance of a people who retain their tribal identity but have more or less completely lost their language. Their mother tongue, if it had ever existed as different and distinct from Assamese (the word Sonowal refers to the profession of goldsmiths that they historically followed) does not even find a mention in the table of 94 languages not specified in the Eighth Schedule, referred to above. Table 14.1, based on the 1991 Census, presents the distribution of the population of the plains tribes and the hills tribes of Assam in the 23 districts of the state. Two of the districts, Karbi Anglong and North Cachar Hills, are designated as the hills districts—the remaining 21 are assumed to be plains districts. Since topography or the choices that people make do not always necessarily follow distinctions made by politicians and bureaucrats for administrative or other kinds of convenience, these districts are not exclusively located in the plains or the hills of Assam. The social and cultural mores of the people inhabiting these districts that are historically supposed to be unique and exclusive to their locational status, do not always apply to the people concerned. In other words, there are many commonalities between the peoples of the plains and the hills.

118 Looking Back into the Future The total population of Assam according to the 2001 Census was 2,66,55,528, of which the scheduled tribes (ST) population was 33,08,570 (12.41 per cent) and the scheduled castes (SC) population 18,25,949 (6.85 per cent). The figures of the tribal population in the 2001 Census breakdown are not yet released (at the time of writing); but the trend, including the errors and fictions, are unlikely to be different. A striking feature of Table 14.1 is the strange preponderance and distribution of the ‘zero population’ of some of the tribal communities in some areas. One notices straightaway that the first 14 communities (nos. 1–14), who are all hills tribes and are a residual feature of the once composite state of Assam, are enumerated only in the two hills districts, and not in any of the other 21 districts of the state. Similarly, the nine plains tribes (nos. 15–23) are not enumerated in either of the two hills districts. Thus, the zero population of people classified as hills tribes in each and every one of the 21 plains districts; and the zero population of people classified as plains tribes in both the hill districts. This does not mean that these communities, the hills tribes and the plains tribes, do not inhabit the ‘other’ districts; it only means that they are not enumerated as tribes outside the hill districts and plains districts, and so are not recognized as what they are outside their notified habitats. Guwahati, the largest city in the region, is home not merely to every other hills tribal people enumerated in the table but also to tribal people from other states of the region; it is also home for a substantial number of non-tribal people from other parts of the country. However, while the latter are enumerated for what they are, with whatever identity they have or claim, recognized and recorded, the same is not the case with the hill people of the region who, too, have made a home in Guwahati, or in any of the other plains districts of Assam. Thus the so-called locational specificity unique to Assam, where areas, along with specific communities of people inhabiting that area, are notified as ‘scheduled’. Thus, too, the scheduling of a people has come to be intrinsically linked to the scheduling of the areas they inhabit. The theoretical underpinnings, such as they are, of this approach can be traced to the colonial administration’s approach to the peripheral areas it annexed following the conquest and annexation of Assam. These, supposedly inhabited by ‘wild tribes’, were

In the Name of Tribal Identities 119

variously classified as Excluded Areas, Partially Excluded Areas or Unadministered Areas, with notional lines drawn to separate them from British Indian territory. The rationale was apparently colonial paternalism and, rather more materially, concerns for the safety and security of the colonial administration and settler communities. The colonial administration paternalistically viewed these ‘wild tribes’ as dangerous but also innocent in the ways of the wicked Indian world. Such people, therefore, required to be protected from the rapacity of Indians, especially the Indian traders — historically always seen by the colonial administration as a real, long-term challenge in every area Britain colonized. At the same time, the British commercial interests like the powerful planter community whose domains extended to the very edge of British territory and sometimes crossed into the so-called Excluded Areas needed to be protected from the all too real threats of ravaging raids from the ‘wild tribes’. These twin approaches, sustained throughout the colonial period, took a formal shape in independent India with the adoption of the Sixth Schedule as part of the Constitution. The Sixth Schedule presents, like so many other features of the Constitution, both continuity and departure from the inherited colonial state. The scheduling of the tribal communities in Assam came to be related, in a way strangely reminiscent of the colonial rationale, as much to the classic requirements that defined a community as a tribe (economic and social backwardness, remoteness and difficulty of access of the habitat and such things) as to the scheduling of whole areas, once classified as Excluded and Partially Excluded areas. The figures in Table 14.1 for the Sonowal Kachari, a recognized plains tribe inhabiting mostly pockets in the undivided upper Assam districts of Lakhimpur and Sibsagar, present a curious story. As can be seen, very substantial numbers in the districts of Nalbari (15,752) and Kamrup (18,922) in lower Assam returned themselves as Sonowal Kachari in the 1991 Census, though the population of Sonowal Kachari in these districts is nowhere near these numbers. The only explanation can be that this is part of the struggle on the part of the Koch-Rajbanshi/Sarania Kachari, once part of the Boro Kachari group but now Hinduized, to secure recognition as STs by seeming to subsume themselves under this broader identity. After all, if Hinduized Sonowal Kacharis and the Thengal Kacharis can be recognized as STs, why not the Sarania Kachari?

120 Looking Back into the Future A further peculiarity marks the enumeration of one of the plains tribes, the Barmans of Cachar, referred to simply as ‘Barmans’ (no.15). This tribe, actually part of the Dimasa Kachari family (hills tribe) that had migrated in historic times to the neighbouring Cachar district, had lost their hills tribe status after moving to the plains, and so were recognized as a plains tribe only in that district. However, when in the 1980s the old Cachar district was restructured into three districts, Cachar, Karimganj and Hailakandi, the Barmans of Cachar lost their recognition as a plains tribe in Karimganj and Hailakandi and are now recognized as a plains tribe only in the new smaller Cachar district.The zeroes against their names again tell this weird tale. In the perspective of exclusivist nationalism of every kind, in this kind of location-specific context, which provides the rationale for those who simply hate and want to kill the other, the zeroes should ideally cover other columns as well, marking the space that the communities at present occupy exclusive to themselves. Given the complex population mix of the two districts, this would mean periodic killings, involving all the people jointly and severally. These, as and when they happen, do get reported, but as ‘ethnic clashes’, though ethnicity is not a special requirement that transforms ordinary people into perpetrators and survivors. More central is the felt need to clear the space of the hated ‘other’, for which historically colonial practice has provided the rationale, continued in independent India, by legitimizing exclusivist, but quite false, histories and memories and ground realities. Much of the so-called ‘ethnic clashes’ in the hill districts have this openly stated objective of totally eliminating the hated ‘other’ from their own space. Table 14.2 is intended to provide some insight into some of the potential problems posed by a generalized phenomenon in Assam, where communities recognized as STs (plains) are seeking greater autonomy in the form of autonomous councils and territorial councils. There is also a related phenomenon of communities at present not recognized as ST seeking such recognition. Six communities, at present classed as OBC, are seeking such ‘upgradation’ to full tribal status. The potential for more violence of the kind that occurred in Karbi Anglong is inherent in the structuring of the various autonomous councils for the plains tribes of the state. Eight of the nine plains tribes live in the Brahmaputra valley; and of these eight, the Boro

In the Name of Tribal Identities 121

have a territorial council while five others — Mising, Rabha, Tiwa (Lalung), Sonowal Kachari and Deuri — have, or are in the process of having, autonomous councils. Legislation was passed recently for the creation of an autonomous council for the Thengal Kachari, a people about whose numbers or habitat little is known for certain, who have never been enumerated in all the post-independence censuses separately and whose status as a plains tribe is therefore fraught with ambiguities. When elections to these autonomous councils, in which the state’s electoral commission has no role to play, are held, a most important preliminary exercise will be the tribe-wise enumeration of the villages included within these councils. There are unending controversies in every autonomous council ‘area’ over the inclusion or exclusion of village(s), the ‘area’ having the vaguest kind of definition. For instance, one claim is that the Mising Autonomous Council will comprise 1,713 villages, a claim hotly contested by the non-Mising population. Indeed, it is conceded on all sides that not all the 1,713 villages are 100 per cent Mising villages. A corresponding situation exists in every other autonomous council ‘area’. Any enumeration in these villages with a view to the tribe-wise identification of the inhabitants is bound to be a recipe, or even a provocation, for violence. The situation is repeated in virtually all the villages included in the three autonomous councils where elections are to be held. Further, the disjunction that seems to prevail between the so-called ethnic and linguistic identities, brought out in Table 14.2, is another area of potential conflict and violence. There are already situations where a tribal community does not have a corresponding tribal language as its mother tongue, and yet has secured all the supposed advantages that tribal status brings, including, in the case of the Sonowal Kachari, the passage of a Bill providing for the creation of an autonomous council for the Sonowal Kachari. The Thengal Kachari, not even recognized as a tribal community, also recently got an autonomous council though little is known of this community’s numerical strength. In contrast the Sarania Kacharis, whose situation is indistinguishable from that of the Sonowal Kachari (near-total Hinduization, loss of any original mother tongue that may or may not have existed historically, a habitat no different from that of the neighbouring non-tribal communities)

122 Looking Back into the Future are striving for the restoration of their status as a tribe that they undoubtedly once had. Just as the silly question — who is an Assamese? — is now being solemnly debated, questions scarcely less silly, challenging the identity or even the very right of existence of every one of these tribal communities, are not unlikely in the future, if this trend continues. The implications of such provocative challenges and inevitable responses that await them are too grim to contemplate.

.

Note ∗ First published in Frontline, vol. 22, no. 24, 19 November–2 December 2005.

15 Behind the Adivasi Unrest in Assam∗ T

he continuing violence in Assam over the last few days (2007), in particular the wanton vandalism and the crude and vigilantist retaliation that took place in and around Dispur in Guwahati on 24 November, has rightly attracted wide and critical notice. However, any exclusive concern with the violent events of that Saturday, in particular the voyeuristic focus by the visual media on the shameful attack on the person and personal dignity of a young woman by the mob that has been unreservedly condemned by the people of the state, may obscure the real issues: the demand of the Adivasis for classification as a scheduled tribe, and the complex factors that inform the resistance to that and similar demands. The Adivasi, a nomenclature now adopted by the approximately 20-lakh-strong tea garden and ex-tea garden labour community, is not the only community in Assam seeking classification as a scheduled tribe. Five other communities (the Tai-Ahom, the Moran, the Motok, the Chutiya and the Koch-Rajbanshi), all presently classified as other backward classes (OBCs), have also for long been pressing for recognition as scheduled tribes. The first four live predominantly in the districts of upper Assam while the KochRajbanshi live predominantly in western Assam, sharing broadly the same physical (and political) space as the Bodos, the most numerous of the tribal communities of the state. The Adivasis are, for the most part, settled in the vicinity of the tea gardens. Contrary to the general impression, the clashes do not bespeak any deeply ingrained hostility between ‘tribal people and non-tribal people,’ or between the tribal people and caste Hindus, in Assam — a convenient distinction between supposedly irreconcilable categories made in much of the analysis of the so-called ethnic clashes in Assam and the NE region. The Adivasis, though aspiring for

124 Looking Back into the Future recognition as a tribal community and indeed historically belonging to authentic tribal stock, are at present not recognized as a tribal community. It is only in popular usage that they are referred to as tea garden and ex-tea garden tribes. Strictly speaking, their fight is not so much for their recognition as a tribal community as for the restoration of that tribal identity to which they believe they are entitled, being the descendants of various tribal communities of central India who, over a century and a half ago, went or were indentured to work in the gardens of eastern India. What they are fighting for is, therefore, the restoration of their legitimate cultural patrimony. Why and how did the descendants of the tribal people, whose ancestors were brought to Assam from other parts of India, cease to be tribal people in their present environment? The answer lies in the peculiar rules that determine such recognition, according to which a person’s tribal identity is irrevocably and forever linked to her or his place of origin — in the present instance, the persons’ ancestral origins. For instance, the progeny of a Munda, a recognized tribal community in Jharkhand and other contiguous states, one of the 96 communities listed under the category — tea garden labourers, tea garden tribes, ex-tea garden labourers and ex-tea garden tribes in the official ‘Central List of Backward Classes Assam’— was taken to Assam to work in the tea gardens over a century and a half ago. These people lost their tribal identity, though were such a person to return to his (now notional) ancestral place, he would regain his tribal identity. Such absurd rules and requirements do not however apply in other cases of migration. A non-tribal person moving, say, from Karnataka to Assam, continues to retain all the socio-cultural coordinates of his or her identity. Indeed such absurd anomalies govern even the movement of tribal communities within Assam, and in the states that were carved out of colonial Assam after independence. For instance, the 23 recognized tribal communities in Assam are broadly identified under two categories: the hills tribes, that is, the 14 communities recognized as ‘tribal’ in the ‘hill areas’, now comprising the two autonomous districts of Karbi Anglong and the North Cachar Hills; and the plains tribes, that is, the nine communities recognized as ‘tribal’ in the rest of Assam, supposedly all of the ‘plains’. Neither of

Behind the Adivasi Unrest in Assam 125

the locational identifications is accurate, indeed cannot be accurate, given the facts of geography but that is the least of the problems. More materially, neither of these two categories carries its tribal identity when it moves out of its ‘designated areas’.Thus, census figures for Guwahati city, very much in the plains of Assam, which has people from every part of the country and also from foreign parts, do not enumerate a single person belonging to any of the 14 ‘hills tribe’ categories. Indeed, every plains district enumerates a zero population of hills tribes. Similarly, the census figures for the two hill districts do not enumerate a single person from any of the nine designated ‘plains tribe’ categories. The reality is different; however, such persons living outside their allotted spaces are for official purposes simply made ‘un-persons’. While the Adivasis’ case for the restoration of their primordial tribal status seems strongest, the issues and demands underlying the struggle of the five other communities seeking recognition as scheduled tribes are equally complex. The Koch-Rajbanshi, also known as Sarania Kachari, historically part of the Bodo Kachari stock, lost their tribal identity over a long period going back to the days before the colonial conquest of Assam through a complex process of conversion and acculturation into the Vaishnavite variety of Assamese Hinduism. Such advantages as the conversion may have brought have lost their relevance in post-independence India where, increasingly, the tribal identity is getting to be previously seen as privileged by non-tribal communities. Corresponding urges and expectations no doubt drive the demands of the other communities seeking to be classified as scheduled tribes. The state government says it is not opposed to conceding the demands but has pleaded its inability to do so in view of the existing rules. There are indications that these rigidities may be relaxed, at least in respect of the Adivasi demand. However, if the Adivasi demand is conceded, the demands of other communities too will have to be eventually conceded. The issue also has national implications, in the context of the contradictions highlighted in the presently dormant Gujjar agitation for classification as STs. The more immediate opposition in Assam to the extension of ST recognition to the six communities is, however, likely to come from the presently recognized scheduled tribes. The estimated 20 lakh

126 Looking Back into the Future Adivasis constitute about 60 per cent of the total ST population of the state which, according to the 2001 Census, was 3,308,570. The addition of such a large population to the present ST pool will undoubtedly affect existing allocations in areas such as reservation of seats in legislative structures, higher education and jobs. Put simply, such identity struggles carry a cost, and a price.

.

Note ∗ First published in The Hindu, 3 December 2007.

16 Identity Politics: Where it is Leading∗ A

nxieties about ‘identity’, a catch-all term that embraces a variety of contradictory perceptions and passions by a people about themselves and the ‘other’, and political mobilization exploiting such anxieties, are not unique to any one part of the country. Such mobilizations in Assam and its neighbourhood are seen as threatening regional and national stability and security. However, this is not a recent phenomenon, nor is it region-specific. Historians and anthropologists place ‘ethnicity’ at the very beginning of human history and civilization. However, the articulation of ethnicity in the Indian political idiom is a more recent phenomenon. For instance, though the term was not used, the consciousness of a unique identity that could not co-exist with the firang or foreigner was a crucial element in the mobilization of the 1857 uprising. The struggle for Pakistan, ‘the land of the pure’, though essentially a political struggle of non-denominational Muslim nationalist assertion, was articulated almost entirely in terms of the threat that Muslims of the subcontinent (and Islam, though Islam is opposed to nationalism) faced if they could not secure a physical and political space exclusively demarcated for them. Post-independence, the linguistic reorganization of India was closely related to anxieties about protection and advancement of a peoples’ language, which required a clearly demarcated political space coinciding with real or imagined historical memories. Caste as a weapon of political mobilization has been a permanent given in Indian politics, reflecting an inescapable reality of social and political divide. If religion and language were the markers of such anxieties during the freedom struggle and in the decades following independence, these are being articulated by citing threats to a variety of other identities (caste and tribe, very broadly) which, for want of a better word,

128 Looking Back into the Future are claimed as ‘ethnic identities’, the imprecision of the latter part of the expression compounded by the introduction of an equally imprecise element of ‘ethnicity’. For, ‘ethnicity’ encompasses and transcends ‘religion’ and ‘language’ and ‘caste’ and ‘tribe’ and other identity-markers even while introducing new elements into its struggle vocabulary. It is generally assumed that caste has not played a major role in political mobilization in Assam. This is not strictly true, though this is a view cherished by the higher Hindu castes, Brahmin and non-Brahmin. Of the 13 chief ministers the state has had since independence, all but one from the Congress party or from the Congress stream, only one belonged to one of the scheduled castes. He became chief minister by accident and default, during the chaotic politics of the post-Janata Party government headed by Golap Borbora, and lasted all of three months and seven days. Of the rest, the first was a Ganak-Brahmin, six were from the decidedly upper-caste Kayasta-Kalita stream (these hyphenations would probably not be accepted by any of the four juxtaposed communities), three Ahoms, including the present chief minister Tarun Gogoi, one Muslim and one Koch, a community that was once seen as being in transition from a tribe to absorption into the lower orders of caste-Hindu society. In an interesting reversal of this once historically recognized phenomenon of ‘upward’ mobility and as an instance of ethnic assertion of a different kind, the Ahoms, once part of Assam’s ruling dynasty, are now seeking ST status. However, Assam has never had a scheduled tribe chief minister though the ST population of the state even now, more than three decades after the reorganization of Assam (1970–72) when the tribal majority districts of present-day Meghalaya and Mizoram were separated, constitute 12.8 per cent of the population. In 1961, the ST population was 17.42 per cent. Important and able tribal leaders had occupied leading positions in the governments formed under the Government of India Act of 1935. The attainment of a separate state of Meghalaya was the first practical demonstration of the triumph of an exclusive ethnic assertion in what used to be referred to as the ‘composite state of Assam’. The unravelling that began then has not stopped. Unlike in the 1960s when the movement for separation was begun by some tribal people in the hills, barring exceptions like Mavis Dunn, a minister of the provincial government from Shillong and a Khasi, who had once famously claimed that she belonged to the sisterhood of Assam, the current ethnicity assertions are from within the

Identity Politics 129

Brahmaputra valley, historically viewed as the core homeland of the Assamese-speaking people, the Assamese. Going from the west to the east, this is the trajectory of the ethnicity-based separatist movements in the Brahmaputra valley. The Koch-Rajbanshi spread over both banks of the Brahmaputra, once seen as occupying an intermediate social space between a tribal status and a caste-Hindu status, and are now seeking a separate Kamatapura state. Kamatapuri, the language of the fortnightly Voice of Kamatapura is recognizably Assamese, and not Assamese; and in a pointed gesture, the paper has a separate section in Assamese. In their neighbourhood are the Bodo, one of the nine plains tribes of the Brahmaputra valley, who see the present Bodoland Territorial Autonomous District as a transit point on the way to attaining a full-fledged Bodoland state outside Assam. The Rabha, another plains tribe, who have an autonomous council and whose territory is not demarcated, want to be covered by the Sixth Schedule, now applicable only to the hill tribes of the two hill districts of Karbi Anglong and the North Cachar Hills, though these two districts want to be constituted into an ‘autonomous state within Assam’, the transition that Meghalaya went through in 1970–72 before becoming a full-fledged state. Further to the east, three other plains tribes, the Tiwa, the Mising and the Sonowal Kachari, all having non-territorial autonomous councils, also want to be ‘elevated’ to the same status as the hills tribes and covered by the provisions of the Sixth Schedule. Six other communities dwelling on both banks of the Brahmaputra (Ahom, Moran, Mattock, Chutiya, Adivasi and Koch-Rajbanshi, now classified as OBC or MOBC), want to be re-classified as ST. Each of these demands, if conceded, has the potential to inspire other agitations for similar reclassification or ‘up-gradation’. However, far more fearsome are the developments in the two hill districts. In the North Cachar Hills, extortion and murder has become the rule, seemingly to advance political objectives ranging from greater autonomy within the existing framework to secession and independence. In the three months (2009) since this writer returned to Guwahati, hardly a day has passed without reports of abduction, attacks on public transport, extortion, murder, directed as much against the state as against those hated ‘others’ who live in the district. Insurgencies, of a kind, active in both the districts are as usual split into ‘pro-talk’ and ‘anti-talk’ factions, a piece of overclever manipulation by covert agencies which, again as usual, has boomeranged, for to divide also means to multiply.

130 Looking Back into the Future The situation is murky beyond belief. For, the ‘ethnic mix’ of the two hill districts is incredibly complicated, with every community of the hills and the plains of Assam having a presence in the districts, though the plains tribal people are not ‘recognized’ in the districts. The reality on the ground simply does not admit any exclusive ‘ethnic homeland’ even in the smallest of political spaces. The district is home to the majority Dimasa tribe as well as to many other tribal and non-tribal people: Assamese, Bengali, Hindi-speakers and several Naga and Kuki tribes. Indeed almost every community enumerated in the state’s census has been enumerated in this district. The chief executive member (CEM) (corresponding at the district level to the chief minister) of the North Cachar Hills was arrested yesterday (30 May 2009) following the recovery of ` 1 crore from two militants of the Jewel Gorlosa faction of the Dima Halam Daogah (DHD-J), the insurgency making all the news, who have alleged that the money was given to them by the CEM to help the DHD to purchase arms. Indeed, chief minister Tarun Gogoi admitted following the arrest that ‘development funds’ meant for the district were being diverted to the militants by the district council. This broad survey has not even mentioned the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) and the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB) which, too. in theory are fighting to attain a sovereign Asom and a sovereign Bodoland, the contradictions between not coming in the way of some co-operation, again showing that there is a gulf of difference between the stated objectives of every one of the so-called insurgencies and the reality. Finally, a common feature of all these organizations is their profound anti-democratic mindset and the total absence of any understanding of the larger socio-economic realities of the state. What they do share, however, is an equally profound hatred of the ‘other’, alien and threatening and so deserving no consideration, a necessary component of all such ‘ethnic’ mobilizations.

.

Note ∗ First published in The Hindu, 4 June 2009.

17 To Divide is to Multiply∗ T

he centre’s decision to ban the Jewel Gorlosa faction of the Dima Halam Daogah (DHD-J), also known as Black Widow, under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, 1967, is of a piece with its well-established response to problems whose essence is no great mystery and which neither side — or, of late, sides — to the dispute want to make an honest attempt to resolve. They are instead keen on making tactical gains. The DHD-J, banned on 2 July (2009), following the arrest of its leader Jewel Gorlosa in Bangalore in June, joins the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) and the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB), which have also been proscribed under the same Act. The ULFA was banned on 28 November 1990 simultaneously with the launching of Operation Bajrang, the first military operation against it. The NDFB was outlawed on 21 December 2000. The curious thing about banning rebel outfits is that the action has followed or has been followed by the emergence of clones, often carrying the same name, styling themselves as dissident or protalks factions, or as structures even more genuinely representative than the original, of which they were till recently a part, and more committed to their stated objectives. Further, despite seemingly nuanced differences, as for instance, an apparent shift from a commitment to secure ‘sovereignty and independence’ to a demand for greater ‘autonomy,’ the core objectives of these factions, pro- or anti-talks, remain the same. The rhetoric is self-determination; the reality is ethno-nationalism, a deadly cocktail in the context of the territorial and ethnic mix of the region’s land and people. Both pro- and anti-talks factions continue to be in contact, directly or indirectly, with the government — at the centre and in the states — they are supposed to be fighting against, suing for peace and seeking talks, on their own terms. What, then, should one make of

132 Looking Back into the Future such bans and the more or less simultaneous phenomenon of both the banned outfit and its ‘pro-talks’ factions apparently suing for peace and talks? There is hardly an insurgent/terrorist organization in Assam or the NE region that has not gone through such a process. The standard explanation of the rebel groups is that such splits are encouraged, indeed, engineered, by the ‘agencies of the union and state government[s]’, the standard code for intelligence agencies of the Government of India with a view to weakening their ‘revolutionary resolve’. There might be some truth in such paranoia. However, such a reading is also a typical instance of scapegoating since it fails to address the weaknesses and contradictions of the ideology and practice of such groups, in particular the attainability of their stated objectives — sovereignty and independence. In reality, such perceived malevolent manoeuvres have not necessarily led to the ‘weakening’ of these outfits. Thus, Operation Bajrang and Operation Rhino (September 1991), the first two military operations against the ULFA, directly contributed to the phenomenon of the so-called Surrendered ULFA (SULFA), the first instance of a split in the outfit. Though an element of criminally tainted careerism characterized the activities of many SULFA cadres, not all of them abandoned the ‘politics’ that first led them to the organization whose stated objective has remained the same: restoration (not attainment) of the lost sovereignty and independence of Asom. Since then, there have been other groups that, while still considering themselves organically linked to the ULFA, want to talk to the centre about their objectives, which in essence are no different from the stated objective of the ULFA, also on their own terms. Similarly, with the ‘removal’ of Ranjan Daimari as NDFB founderchairman in December last, the residual leadership of the outfit has come to be identified as the ‘pro-talks faction’. The description is not strictly accurate; nor was the development, like what happened with respect to the ULFA nearly two decades ago, sudden or unexpected. The outfit entered into a ceasefire agreement with the state and union governments in May 2005. However, the NDFB leader who signed it was Dhiren Boro, who was to replace Daimari as chairman over three years later. Indeed, the decision to replace its founder-chairman was preceded by a decision in the outfit’s general assembly in September 2008 to take part, directly or indirectly, in

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the forthcoming Lok Sabha polls, a decision denounced by the ousted chairman as ‘capitulation’. ‘I am still the president of the NDFB to carry out the principles and ideology that are enshrined in the constitution and manifesto of the NDFB.’1 The United People’s Democratic Solidarity (UPDA), a rebel outfit driven by Karbi nationalist aspirations, meaning very broadly, greater autonomy for and integration of Karbi people, one of the hills tribes, living in Karbi Anglong and Karbi-inhabited areas outside and contiguous to that district, signed a ceasefire agreement with the union and state governments in May 2002. As sure as night follows day, an anti-talks faction of the UPDS, styling itself the Karbi Anglong North Cachar Hills Liberation Front (KLNLF), came into being two years later, with the objective of attaining the rights of self-determination to the Karbi people. The trajectory of the DHD and its clone, too, has followed similar lines. Its stated objective is the establishment of a ‘Dimaraji’, a political and territorial structure for the Dimasa, another hill tribe. The path chosen, as by similar structures, was armed struggle. However, again following the established pattern, the DHD decided to enter into negotiations with the state and union governments that led to the emergence of the anti-talks faction led by Jewel Gorlosa, though one version of this trajectory has it that factionalism on the part of Gorlosa led to the DHD suing for talks and peace. Be that as it may, both pro- and anti-talks factions have engaged in violence, declared a ceasefire ‘voluntarily’, and expressed their desire to hold talks. None of this has mitigated violence in Assam where these outfits are active. Though, barring the ULFA whose domain is the whole of the state, all outfits have a limited territorial spread defined by the dominant group (Boro, Karbi, Dimasa) identified with them. Thus, every such ethno-nationalistic mobilization involves an element of territorial assertion, with even the smallest of groups claiming territories inhabited by the other. For instance, the Naga nationalistic assertion, the oldest of such struggles, claims for the putative Nagalim territories that are inhabited or claimed to be inhabited by the Naga people outside the state of Nagaland: in Assam, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh and Myanmar. The violence and killings in the North Cachar Hills involving the majority Dimasa and the largest minority, the Zeme Nagas, also have this dimension, the inescapable fall-out of ethno-nationalistic assertions.

134 Looking Back into the Future For, integral to such assertions is the dehumanization and demonization of ‘the other’, which alone explains the periodic exercises of ‘ethnic cleansing’, integral to all such ethno-nationalistic assertions and their rationalisation by the ideologues of ethno-nationalism. Self-determination, sovereignty and independence, autonomy, territoriality, language and culture: there is no end to the buzzwords that animate such struggles. Some of these, like land and language, are matters of life and death to the people. However, as noted at the beginning, almost every such struggle has led to the emergence of structures that replicate the slogans and tactics, often even the strategic objective of the original. During the years this writer was a working journalist in the region, security officials used to gloat over the splits, seeing in them the beginning of the disintegration of such outfits. Life and experience have taught that the splits, far from weakening, have made the problem more intractable. In the beginning was the Naga National Council (NNC). Out of the NNC, and against its dominant politics, emerged the National Socialist Council of Nagaland, later Nagalim. Now there is another NSCN. The story is the same everywhere: to divide is to multiply.

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Note and Reference ∗ First published in The Hindu, 12 August 2009. 1. Sushanta Talukdar, ‘Ranjan Daimary Claims he is still NDFB President’, The Hindu, 28 December 2008.

18 The Bodoland Territorial Council: Promises and Problems∗ T

he signing of the Memorandum of Settlement (MoS) in New Delhi on 10 February (2003) on the creation of a Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC) is likely to mitigate at least for a while, if not bring to an end, the violence associated with the prolonged agitation for the creation of a ‘Bodo homeland’. The agitation for the creation of such a structure, though not necessarily under that nomenclature, spearheaded by the All-Bodo Students’ Union (ABSU) with its provocative slogan ‘Divide Assam Fifty Fifty’, began in March 1987. However, the Bodo nationalistic assertion pre-dates the ABSU agitation, manifesting itself in varied forms of struggle for greater autonomy within or total separation from Assam, over a much longer period. While the signing of the MoS may rein in Bodo militancy, as articulated in words and deeds by the ABSU and the Bodo Liberation Tigers (BLT), at least for a while, with the leaders busy in forming a political party and taking over the reins of administration, opposition to the MoS, with a potential for militancy and violence, remains alive and active within the envisaged BTC area itself. The opposition is on two fronts: one, that the MoS does not go far enough; and the other, that it gives away too much. Leading the opposition from the latter perspective is the Sanmilita Janagosthiya Sangram Samiti (SJSS), an alliance of 18 nonBodo organizations, which has for long opposed any concession to the Bodo nationalists. While the 36-hour ‘Assam Bandh’ called by the SJSS, beginning on the evening of February 12 (2003), did not draw widespread support in the state, it did evoke a response in the areas proposed to be included in the BTC. The bandh was marked by some incidents of violence, with unconfirmed reports of three youths being killed in sectarian violence.

136 Looking Back into the Future The SJSS derives its support from an important section of the Assamese people, the Koch-Rajbanshi, whose own relations with the Bodo people, to whom they bear close ‘ethnic’ links — not to speak of sharing and contending with them in a complex linkage a common physical, political and cultural space, with land being the most contentious element — is marked by both distance and closeness. This relationship is scarcely comprehensible to those outside the specific cultural milieu. Reservations and anxieties about the BTC have also been expressed by organizations representing other non-Bodo populations living in the area — the Adivasis, the Nepalis and the tea garden labour communities. Another important segment of the non-Bodo population in the envisaged BTC area, the Muslim peasantry of East Bengal ancestry, has on occasion been at loggerheads with the Bodoland agitation, ending up more often than not as victims of violence. The most significant opposition to the MoS from the other perspective, that the MoS does not go far enough, is the one articulated by the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB), an armed outfit tracing its origins to the very beginning of the ABSU agitation. The NDFB remains committed, at least in its rhetoric, to the attainment of a ‘sovereign Bodoland’. It has sent conflicting signals about its reaction to the settlement. In the days to come, other voices, yet unheard, are bound to make themselves heard on both sides of the divided perspective on the promises and prospects, the traps and pitfalls, of the envisaged BTC. More problematic, however, is the ‘constitutional conundrum’ that the MoS poses by providing for the application of the provisions of the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution to the BTC. The MoS was signed by BLT chairman Hagrama Basumatary and senior officials of the union home ministry and the Assam government. Present at the signing ceremony were deputy prime minister L.K. Advani, Assam chief minister Tarun Gogoi and other union and state government officials and political leaders. The BLT was proscribed in July 1997 on grounds of being a terrorist organization. The ban was in force for two years. The notification was not renewed at the end of the period and the BLT made an announcement that it was suspending its armed struggle. Since then it has been holding talks with the state and union governments.

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This is the fifth MoS (all the earlier ones were tripartite, involving leaders of agitating and insurgent (real or bogus) organizations and political leaders or administrators from New Delhi and various state capitals) signed in the last 17 years with a view to resolving various agitations in the NE region; and the second in respect of the Bodo agitation. The earlier ones were the Assam Accord (14 August 1985), the Mizoram Accord (30 June 1986), the Tripura Accord (12 August 1988) and the Bodoland Accord-I (20 February 1993). Of these, given the inherent limitations of such accords and the complexity of the issues involved, only the Mizoram Accord worked, bringing an end to a turbulent era and a two-decade-long insurgency. The outcomes of the rest of them have been, to say the least, mixed. One of them, the Tripura Accord, was simply dictated by the narrowest of partisan considerations on the part of the Congress (I), then in office in New Delhi, to cut the Communist Party of India (Marxist) to size in Tripura and win an impending election to the state assembly. The ABSU leaders, along with the leaders of the Bodo People’s Action Committee (BPAC), a creation of the ABSU like the BLT, signed the Bodoland Accord-I providing for the creation of a Bodoland Autonomous Council (BAC). However, ABSU and BPAC leaders, though they were present, did not sign the latest MoS. Having been signatories to an earlier accord that is yet to be annulled, they obviously could not sign another one. The BAC did not work for various reasons, especially the limitations inherent in the accord that gave birth to it. Further, the agitation of which it was a product got mired in the rivalries between the Congress (I) and the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) government, which was in office in Guwahati when the agitation began. In fact, the conviction continues to be widespread in Assam, and not merely among die-hard supporters of the AGP, that the Bodoland agitation was created, encouraged and even financed by the Congress (I) at that point of time, with a view to creating problems for the AGP government, the first seemingly coherent and viable regional political formation to challenge successfully the near-unbroken historic hegemony of the Congress party in Assam. Will this accord and its outcome, the envisaged BTC, work, unlike the BAC? ABSU and BLT leaders are confident that it will, despite the dissenting voices. A point repeatedly being emphasized

138 Looking Back into the Future by the leaders is that they have learned from their past mistakes and will not repeat them. Specifically, this means that they will neither seek nor provoke a confrontation with the broader Assamese society whose people literally surround the Bodo people, who also constitute a substantial component of the population of the BTC area. Rather, now that a measure of autonomy and self-government has been promised, they will emphasize the commonality of interests. A banner under the BLT imprint displayed at Guwahati airport welcoming the leaders returning from New Delhi said: ‘The Victory is not for Bodos only. It is for all communities living in the BTC area.’ Among other organizations that the BLT spokesperson thanked after the signing of the MoS were the AGP, the Assam Sahitya Sabha and the All-Assam Students’ Union, all representing or claiming to represent the political and cultural aspirations of the Assamese people. More important, the present MoS has secured support — in some cases, cautiously qualified — from a cross-section of political parties, though significant opposition to the very creation of the BTC remains. A positive point is that unlike the earlier accords, which were signed with both the state and central governments under the same political dispensation —Congress (I) — the present accord has been more of a bipartisan, indeed a ‘multi-partisan’, affair, with the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, itself a coalition of numerous political parties, and Congress (I) governments in Delhi and Guwahati actively cooperating in the crafting of the accord. All this, however, in no way assures that the MoS and the BTC will have a smooth passage to their implementation, let alone their future functioning. The impending problems and obstacles are still to be resolved, though a settlement has been reached.1 While the ‘political aspirations’ of the leadership of the Bodoland agitation may be met by the BTC and the powers bestowed upon it, other obstacles arising out of the ‘constitutional arrangements’ provided in the MoS deserve to be noted. The most fundamental of these is the ambiguity of the relation between the proposed BTC and the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution, described as the ‘main provision of the MoS’ in the Press Information Bureau’s press note issued on 10 February.

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The note stated: ‘The main provisions of the MoS relate to creation of an Autonomous self-governing body to be known as Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC) within the State of Assam and provision of constitutional protection under the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution of India to the said autonomous body; to fulfil economic, educational and linguistic aspirations...’ It is interesting that the passage does not unambiguously state that the BTC, referred to as an ‘autonomous self-governing body’ which, when the delimitation process is completed, is to comprise four contiguous districts, will be created under the provisions of the Sixth Schedule. Rather, what is promised is that this autonomous selfgoverning body will have the ‘provision of constitutional protection under the Sixth Schedule’. In other words, without being created specifically under the provisions of the Sixth Schedule, in which case the new body would be invested with constitutional rights, which is what other structures mentioned at the end of the Sixth Schedule have, the BTC will have the ‘provision of constitutional protection under the Sixth Schedule’. There is bound to be more verbal jugglery and legerdemain as the process evolves over the next six months, one of the two time-frames mentioned in the MoS. In another respect, however, the existing provisions of the Sixth Schedule, too, will be affected by the creation of the BTC. According to the home commissioner of the Assam government, the Sixth Schedule will be amended to enable the BTC to have a membership of 46, up from the present 30. Clearly, the linkages, such as they are envisaged, require to be clarified and fine-tuned further. One of the trickiest issues that was a constant in the demands of the Bodoland agitation related to the status of the Bodo Kacharis of Karbi Anglong in Karbi Anglong district. The ABSU’s charter of demands invariably included the demand that the Bodo Kacharis be recognized as scheduled tribes, a demand rejected with equal consistency by the leadership of the Karbi Anglong district council. The demand and its rejection are related to the curious anomaly in the position of the plains tribal people whose tribal status is not recognized if they happen to move to the hill areas. The MoS simply acknowledges this problem, promising it only ‘sympathetic consideration’. There is a genuine problem here, given the history and evolution of the provisions of the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution. As is

140 Looking Back into the Future well known, the Sixth Schedule, comprising ‘Provisions as to the administration of Tribal Areas in the States of Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram’, is in practice applicable only to the so-called hills tribes in these states, that is, tribal people inhabiting the hilly regions of the NE region, known historically under the colonial administration as ‘Excluded’, or ‘Partially Excluded’ areas. The Sixth Schedule is not applicable to the tribal people living outside these hill areas, the so-called plains tribes, who are not seen to be dwelling in any compact ‘tribal area’, but are rather loosely spread among other non-tribal people in the plains of the NE region. In other words, while an element of isolated territoriality, reinforced by other components such as difficulty of access, physical, mental and emotional distance from the plains, is integral to and inseparable from the universe of the tribal people inhabiting the hills, such an element is absent in the universe of the tribal people living in the plains, and in close proximity with the other non-tribal people of the plains. Although the Sixth Schedule has a provision — Para I (2 c) empowers the governor to ‘create a new Autonomous District’ — in practice (as was the case with the creation of the Tripura Tribal Areas District) such districts have always comprised the so-called hills tribes of the region. The three ‘Parts’ in the Table appended to the Sixth Schedule have evolved over several amendments. At present, Part I comprises the two hill districts of Assam (the North Cachar Hills and Mikir Hills, now Karbi Anglong); Part II comprises the Khasi Hills, Jaintia Hills and Garo Hills districts, all once part of Assam and now constituting Meghalaya; a sub-section under this head is the Tripura Tribal Areas District, incorporated under the forty-ninth Amendment, part of the process to provide greater autonomy to the tribal people of Tripura living in the ‘hill areas’ of the state; and Part III comprises the Chakma, Lakher and Pawi districts, all part of the erstwhile Lushai Hills district when it was a part of Assam and now part of Mizoram. This distinction between the hills tribes and the plains tribes, anchored in the geographical, indeed the topographical and altitudinal, location of the people concerned, and the administrative arrangements, was based on two related perceptions of the history, the past and the future, of these people as charted by the colonial rulers. Put simply, while both the categories of people were called

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tribal people, those living in the hill areas of the then undivided Assam were considered to have lived always in a distant and loose connection with the majority of the non-tribal people in the plains of Assam, and would continue to do so in the foreseeable future. Given the paternalistic and deeply contemptuous perceptions of the colonial rulers regarding all the subject people of their empire, tribal and non-tribal, a humanitarian and romantic gloss, deeply influenced by the disdain and revulsion for the native faiths of the majority of the subjects, Hinduism and Islam, was part of this perception. Thus, the tribal people in the hills, by virtue of their isolation from their distant non-tribal neighbours, had somehow escaped from being tainted by the more vicious and repellent beliefs and practices of those in the plains, tribal and non-tribal. This ‘innocence’ and ‘purity’ of the tribal people in the hills, ever under the danger of being swamped under by the ‘contaminated’ beliefs, superstitions and practices of the people in the plains, both tribal and non-tribal, had to be protected. The other side of this romantic and paternalistic rationale was that some of the people in these hill areas, having shown themselves to be beyond the taming or civilizing missions of the colonial rulers, and also not having proven material resources that would have justified more single-minded punitive and civilizing missions of conquest, subjugation and exploitation of their material wealth, could well be left alone, for the good of the colonial rulers themselves. Thus, the designation of these areas as ‘Excluded’ and ‘Partially Excluded’ areas, not to speak of the more candid admission regarding even more turbulent people on the periphery of this boundary as inhabiting ‘unadministered areas’. In respect of the tribal people in the plains, however, none of these considerations was found applicable. Rather, since the colonial administrators found them living with and sharing physical and spiritual space with their non-tribal neighbours, with no constraints on physical access between neighbours, it was assumed that over a period of time the differences between the tribal people and the non-tribal people would weaken and even disappear. Thus, the classic process of acculturation, given a theoretical construct and rationale as the so-called ‘Sanskritization’, supposedly influencing and informing the relations and, more crucially, the movements between higher and lower castes, with the lower castes trying to approximate themselves to the one above them. Whatever

142 Looking Back into the Future may be the rigidities of caste identities and the crudities of such a process in the rest of India, especially rural India, insofar as Assam is concerned, the movement within the caste spectrum, generally — though not always necessarily to the higher layers of the system — was an all too real one, as can be seen in the growth and expansion (and in recent times, the diminution) of caste identities, the switch and traffic between and across castes and communities among Assamese Hindus and, to some extent, also among the Assamese Muslims, who together constitute the overwhelming majority of the Assamese people. Following from this was an envisaged trajectory of the growth and development of the tribal people of the hills and the tribal people of the plains in two entirely different, parallel ways, not meeting each other. Those in the hills, the ‘simple tribal people with a unique way of life’, would continue to remain isolated, underdeveloped, and so deserving of special protection, especially against the ‘cleverer and unscrupulous’ people from the plains who, given half a chance, would overwhelm and inundate them, reducing them to insignificant non-entities in their own land. Thus, the special provisions, the Fifth and the Sixth Schedules of the Constitution, were made for them. The tribal people in the plains of Assam, however, would willynilly get absorbed, initially at the lower end, but with possibilities of incremental advancement within the caste hierarchy over a period of time, into the larger and more powerful spiritual — and though unsaid, the more materially advantageous — universe surrounding them, of which they were indeed physically an inseparable and indistinguishable part. Social reality, by and large, followed this understanding for long, but this does not hold true now. Whatever validity these assumptions and the social and economic reality underlying them may have possessed during colonial rule, these are no more valid now. The hill areas are no more isolated. The transactions between the people of the hill areas and the rest of Assam, indeed the rest of the country and the wider world, are varied, vigorous, and vibrant. Nor are the tribal people in the plains of Assam gradually, and in a process that was once considered natural and desirable, getting ‘Hinduized’. Few if any Bodo Kacharis become Saranias, the historically established first step in the process of ‘Hinduization’. Half a century of democracy,

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despite the flaws in its practice, with its powerful, even if highly compromised, component of ‘one-person, one-vote’, has put paid to these assumptions. However, other kinds of interventions, some of them driven by genuine humanitarian concerns, some dictated by market forces, others informed by a highly sophisticated agenda of re-colonization, continue to be active in this contested terrain.

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Note and Reference ∗ First published in Frontline, vol. 20, no.5, 1–14 March 2003. 1. M.S. Prabhakara, ‘The Bodo Question’, Frontline, vol. 19, no. 15, 2 August 2002.

SECTION III: ISSUES OF CULTURE AND BELIEF

19 Commitment to Identity: Cultural Dimensions of Ethnic Agitations∗ A feature common to many of the ongoing ‘ethnic’ agitations in

the NE region, be they insurgent movements with the explicit aim of achieving sovereignty, or movements for greater autonomy or separate statehood within India, or movements like the one on the foreign nationals issue led by the All-Assam Students’ Union whose proclaimed aim was to protect the Indian identity of the people, is what one may characterize as cultural fundamentalism. The political aims of these agitations are always forcefully articulated; their objectives, at least as they are spelled out, are all or none though in the final analysis some working compromises are always hammered out. But these agitations also have a broader cultural dimension, which outlasts the realization of (or compromise on) the stated objectives and in course of time achieves a vitality and relevance of its own. Historically viewed, it may be argued that these cultural dimensions are even more important and have a longer lasting impact on the society and polity than the stated political objectives. In each of these agitations, the stated objective is dictated by a sense of insecurity and anxiety about the so-called identity, underlying which is the wariness about the alien and the outsider. Such anxieties are, of course, by no means a unique feature of these patently under-developed societies of the region. Even the most advanced societies cherish such fears and their leaders routinely exploit them. The bogey of the foreign hand is routinely invoked by every political leader only because the bogey touches so many sympathetic chords. But what is of greater interest is not the specific political uses to which these anxieties are put. After all, the capture of political office by the Asom Gana Parishad is not a permanent factor in Assam,

148 Looking Back into the Future whatever the AGP leaders might think about their position as the natural party of the government in the state virtually in perpetuity; what is of greater moment and of possibly greater historical significance is the way in which the anti-foreigner agitation in Assam (and by extension, the other agitations for separate statehood or insurgencies aiming for sovereignty) not merely gave birth to the AGP, but also highlighted (and in turn influenced) some cultural mores and indeed the broader value system of the respective societies. Put simply, all these movements also seek to preserve in their (imagined) state of purity and innocence the traditional principles of ethical and moral conduct that are perceived to have been part of the heritage of these societies and which, before the contaminating contact with the hated aliens, had retained their pristine purity. As much as the stated political objectives, the restoration of these lost or compromised fundamental cultural values is also an integral part of the objectives of these movements. And strangely enough, these cultural mores and the broader value system sustaining them, which these movements seek to preserve or restore to their pure origins, are indistinguishable from the virtues traditionally extolled by the dominant cultural mores of Indian, indeed Hindu, society. This is surprising because these agitations, explicitly in the case of those that seek to secure sovereignty for some of the marginal nationalities and implicitly in the case of the non-secessionist, are all hostile to or distance themselves from ‘India’, often citing spurious or irrelevant historical evidence in support of such distancing. Thus, the ULFA, to take the example of the secessionist outfit in Assam, claims that Asom was never politically a part of India till it was conquered and annexed by the British in 1826; and the fact that Assam is not mentioned in the national anthem is cited as conclusive evidence that Assam has never been part of India. The insurgencies in Nagaland and Mizoram were animated at least in part by a fear of the large Hindu majority poised to swallow up these smaller marginal nationalities and imperil the Christian faith. Like the leaders of Naga and Mizo insurgencies, the ULFA leaders, too, have been among the most virulent critics of Hindu dominance and communalism, viewing great Hindu nationalism (and Hindu chauvinism) as the biggest enemies of the nationalist aspirations of the smaller nationalities of the region.

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And yet, the value systems held up by these outfits as the ideal for their activists to emulate and adopt are curiously similar to those most cherished by the Indian mind, indeed the Hindu mind at its most conventional and orthodox. For instance, the three taboos, no smoking, no drinking and no fornication, whose ritualistic breaking marks the virtual initiation into adulthood for the average Hindu, especially the middle-class Hindu, are increasingly being adopted by these outfits as the most desirable virtues for their own cadres. Both in Nagaland and Mizoram, the campaigns led by the church, the women’s organizations and student and youth organizations against drinking are not merely examples of populist moralism gone berserk; their ideological roots are to be traced to the very value system (Indian/Hindu) which the politics of these movements challenges and rejects. Even the hypocritical compromises and prevarications that underlie these public postures of high moralism, the indulgence on the sly by the leaders in the very ‘vices’ they loudly condemn in public, are equally a reflection of a deeply ingrained doublethink. The ULFA’s code of conduct, for instance, lays the greatest emphasis on abstinence from evil practices. Indeed, it is said no more than half jokingly, that the easiest way to spot an ULFA activist is to observe his conduct; if a young person does not smoke, does not drink, is respectful to women and stern and celibate in his ways, then surely he has to be an activist of the ULFA. Further, in each of these cases, the symbol of these cherished virtues is invariably the woman, not the man; the men are simply exhorted to live up to the ideal whose very perfect and complete realization has already been achieved by the women, or rather the symbolic Woman. The Woman thus becomes the custodian of all the virtues of the tribe, in the broadest sense of the term, and it is her responsibility to pass on these values to the future generations. This is of course elementary anthropomorphism; the female is called upon to assume the shape of the divine, the idealized Woman, who thus becomes the symbol of power and preservation, one who as Annapurna nourishes the world and who as Shakti destroys the evil in the world. Physical motherhood only intensifies the chaste image of this Woman. The male, in contrast, can only constantly aspire after but never realize the ideal already personified in this Woman figure. What is interesting is that this traditional Hindu

150 Looking Back into the Future anthropomorphism has been virtually appropriated by the leaders of the various avowedly anti-Indian agitations and insurgencies in the region. Indeed, all the agitations in the NE region project the Woman as the most precious custodian of these virtues for which the men are fighting. The Woman has also been the most potent symbol incorporating these broader cultural values in her personality, in her speech (‘Her voice was ever soft, gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman’), in her accoutrement, in her assigned role in the kitchen and in the bed and, in areas like Mizoram and Manipur where women are also active in trade, in the marketplace. The men, for instance, are not expected to cultivate the traditional dress except on ceremonial occasions; but the women are expected to and indeed conform to these expectations by always sporting the traditional dress, even on occasions when it is unpractical. It is true that the few women who have been recruited into the insurgencies do wear the more workmanlike unisex uniforms but even here the traditional dress is preferred. The political necessity underlying such cultural fundamentalism is a complex subject. Its roots are deep in history and the perceived threat to the identity of these marginal nationalities. For one situated in the relatively secure and self-assured position of an Indian who suffers few doubts or anxieties either about the Indian identity or about other parallel identities hinging on language, religion, caste and so on, such anxieties and indeed obsessions about identity among the marginal nationalities of the NE region may appear incomprehensible. Such an observer may even be tempted to dismiss these anxieties as simply an identity fetish or cynical identity-mongering by a calculating political leadership. But the anxieties, even when they are probably exploited to press more tangible political demands — a greater share of the resources of the state at the (constitutional) end of the spectrum to demands for secession — are genuine enough. For instance, no people in India have had as much of material advancement as the people of Punjab, through hard work and also because of considerable assistance through policy decisions regarding allocations of the resources of the state made by the union government over the decades. Yet the people of Punjab are now among the most alienated because the relative expectations arising out of the very advances made over the years are now so high that they simply cannot be fulfilled.

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The ongoing (1990) developments in Punjab (and the involvement of foreign powers in Jammu and Kashmir) only show how the real or manipulated anxieties about identity bear little relation to what an objective observer sees as the actual grievances. What seems an identity fetish to one is to the other simply the most precious symbol of one’s very being and existence, to be defended even unto death. There is also an element of doublethink inherent in such strong commitment to identity. This is specially so with regard to the idealized image of the Woman as the custodian of a society’s cultural values since in practice, the women in these societies, who are quite in tune with the customs in the distrusted and despised mainstream Indian society, are also among the most oppressed sections. This is the case even in societies like those of the Mizos where on the surface women appear to enjoy an equal position with men. Actual oppression, like perceived deprivation, turns out to be an equally relative factor; and the exploitation of the symbol of the idealized Woman for more material political ends is quite in tune with the doublethink vis-à-vis women in Hindu society — to be worshipped as the mother goddess, and exploited and burnt as the dependent and inadequate dowry-bringer.

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Note ∗ First published in The Hindu, 24 July 1990.

20 Process of Consolidation Assam’s Inherent Problems∗ T

he several impediments arising out of geography, history, the presence of a dominant, powerful and closely related nationality in the neighbourhood and so on, which are external to Assam and over which the people of the state have had little control in the process of the formation and consolidation of the Assamese people as one of the nationalities of India, have been the subject of debate and discussion. At the same time, other factors internal to the Assamese people themselves have also posed some unique problems which, too, have inhibited this process of nationality formation and consolidation in Assam. Regionalism in its extreme form — becoming sub-nationalism and closet secessionism — has been a near permanent feature of the politics of the state (as it is increasingly so in every state of the union) and is certainly the guiding principles of the Asom Gana Parishad and the trends associated with the anti-foreigner agitation. But the persistence of sub-regional and sub-sectional tendencies within the Brahmaputra valley, and even in areas outside those dominated by the non-Assamese ethnic tribal people, has not received sufficient notice. The area of discussion is the six former districts of the Brahmaputra valley — Goalpara, Kamrup, Darrang, Nagaon, Sibsagar and Lakhimpur — leaving aside both the Barak valley and the hill districts. Traditional politics in the state has always recognized these pulls, sub-regionally between what are broadly known as Upper Assam and Lower Assam, and sub-sectionally and in a more diffuse manner, between and among the various Assamese castes and non-Assamese tribal communities and other indigenous minority groups in the Brahmaputra valley. This, apart from the electoral

Process of Consolidation 153

compulsions of periodically striking a deal with the linguistic and religious minorities, the tea garden labour population, and those belonging to that stock but no longer engaged in tea labour, the substantial Nepali-speaking population and other smaller groups. Traditional Congress politics in the state was always dominated by high-caste Hindu politicians from Lower Assam, principally from the undivided Kamrup district with a sprinkling of other sections from other regions. One of the achievements of the AGP government (and to some extent preceding it) has been the initiation of a shift in the sub-regional balances of forces away from Lower Assam. The declining importance of high-caste Hindus in the politics of the state goes even further back in time. This shift has naturally resulted in some resentment and revival of rivalries; the yet to be resolved controversy over the location of a new capital for the state being only one of the many that reflect these tensions. These factors apart, there are other kinds of sub-regional and sub-sectional manifestations. Indeed some of these tendencies have deep cultural and political roots and no party appears to be entirely above these pulls and pressures — not even the self-confessedly revolutionary outfits currently (1990) making waves, if reports to that effect are to be relied upon. At a different level, it is not uncommon for college and university student unions to be influenced by similar calculations and prejudices — as was evident in the recent (1990) highly charged elections to the postgraduate students’ union at Guwahati University, where even the AASU writ was defied. Another area where the sub-regional pulls have repeatedly manifested themselves is the never-ending demand for upgradation of subdivisions into districts and of blocks to subdivisions and similar demands all down the line. Indeed, employment for local people, a highly popular slogan and quite legitimate, if seen as a demand for more employment of Assamese people in industries and establishments in the state, has progressively undergone such diminution that in certain areas, any aspirant for a job from beyond a radius of a couple of miles of an establishment is viewed as an outsider to be shunned in preference to a truly local candidate. Other divisions too abound. For instance, caste on the face of it, appears to play an insignificant part in the politics of the state. But under the pressure of the increasing assertiveness of the tribal minorities and other groups, there is now not merely a reassertion

154 Looking Back into the Future of caste-Hindu identity (Savarna Hindu associations have been mooted), but even within these upper-caste Hindu groups, there is a tendency towards further disaggregation. In other words, despite the assertion of a strong and overwhelming Assamese identity — most dramatically manifest during the antiforeigner agitation when this identity, based on the Assamese language and the somewhat less tangible Assamese culture united the overwhelming majority of the Assamese-speaking people in the Brahmaputra valley, transcending differences in caste, religion, region and ethnicity — the historically present (and then temporarily dormant) sub-regional and sub-sectional identities are once again coming to the fore. This is not to argue that the Assamese society is on the verge of being as hopelessly disaggregated as, for instance, the society in Karnataka where these caste/religion/region identities that are barely distinguishable from active animosities, subsume the Kannadiga identity. However, even these minor, and till now politically not very significant, manifestations of sub-regionalism or disaggregation along barely perceptible caste lines is noteworthy. This is because, unlike many other states, all these separate identities in Assam had been subsumed by the overwhelming identity of the people as Assamese, the unifying coordinates being the Assamese language and less clearly, the Assamese culture. What is remarkable about the near universal acceptance by the people inhabiting the Brahmaputra valley — barring of course, the several indigenous tribal people and sections of the latter-day immigrant population — of themselves as Assamese is that the term itself is of recent origin and, according to some scholars, is indeed a post-British appellation. Even the term ‘Assam’, about whose precise etymology and meaning there is much controversy (there are at least three separate etymologies and meanings attached to it), is a recent manufacture, the ancient name for the land being Kamarupa. However, the idea in each case preceded its articulation in current currency. The bringing together of the various people of the Brahmaputra valley — who speak a variety of tongues and follow a variety of social and religious practices that persist in some form or the other to this day — into a single composite nationality was the achievement of a dynasty of remarkable kings and queens who ruled over large parts of present-day Assam for 600 years. The credit for this

Process of Consolidation 155

situation goes to an even more remarkable religious leader and reformer, Sri Sankardeva, whose work of consolidation of the people of the state into a nationality constituted both a derivation from the achievement of the ruling dynasty and a dissenting departure from it. That process of consolidation which historically viewed took place over a remarkably short span of time, met with a setback with the collapse of the ruling dynasty because of its own enfeeblement and the emergence of new social forces inspired by Sri Sankaradeva. Soon after, it met with active disruption because of the compulsions of geography and the history of foreign occupation and the incursion of pan-Indian capital and market forces. This disruption also meant that the various other peoples who were at an even more embryonic stage of forming themselves into a nationality and who, because of force of circumstances, were themselves being rapidly absorbed into the fold of caste-Hindu Assamese society on the latter’s terms, got a breathing space, as it were, and were provided with the opportunity (and quite valid reasons) to retain and assert their own individual non-Assamese identities. That despite these impediments, the Assamese people were able to attain not merely in their view of themselves but also according to any objective criteria, the status of a distinct nationality within so short a time speaks of the tremendous unifying power and appeal of the Assamese language — the only element that binds the people together. And yet precisely because the process was in a sense telescoped it certainly did receive some fillip because of the negative impact of some policy steps taken by the British and the demonstrative ‘superior’ attitude exhibited by some of the early generation of post-British migrants into the region from the rest of India — the consolidation of the Assamese as a distinct and coherent nationality has faced some unique obstacles. Further, apart from the various hostile interventions in that process from outside forces (some of which paradoxically assisted the process) the uncertainties inherent in the Assamese society itself and the many harsh elements in the history of the people have been no less serious impediments. What is disturbing is that while the alien malevolent interventionists have been more or less taken care of and are no more a central issue in the discourse on the problem of nationality

156 Looking Back into the Future formation in Assam, the disruptive forces inherent in Assamese society itself seem to be persistent and even growing, even as, at the popular level, the assertion of an Assamese identity gets to its shrillest.

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Note ∗ First published in The Hindu, 23 October 1990.

21 A Natural Process of Transformation∗ A

peculiar aspect of the controversies about religious conversions — leaving aside the absence of any verifiable data about their extent and nature — is the axiomatic assumption that the two major minority religions in this country, Christianity and Islam, are poaching into the ‘exclusive’ territory of Hinduism. Related to this notion is another near universally held opinion that unlike revealed religions such as Christianity or Islam where proselytization is a given, Hinduism is an innate, self-contained system of beliefs, the sanatana dharma, that which is eternal, with no beginning and no end, with no prophets or texts and so does not engage in proselytization. Hinduism, as its proponents never tire of saying, is strictly speaking not a religion at all but a way of life, and so is universally applicable without its adherents making any efforts to seek converts. Because of this seeming elasticity and openness and the passive approach to proselytization, the argument goes, the faith is peculiarly vulnerable to malevolent poachers. While admitting that modern varieties of Hinduism have engaged in proselytization, especially in the West, the argument is that such converts are very few and not comparable to the ‘mass conversions’ into Islam and Christianity. Of course, what is not mentioned is that even if those who swear by sanatana dharma, of which varnashrama dharma (duties performed according to the varna or class/caste) is an integral part, would want to engage in proselytization, they simply cannot undertake such initiatives, for where would the new convert be placed in the ordained chaturvarnas (four classes/castes)? But these are mere debating points, irrelevant in an issue charged with emotions, real and manufactured. So, let us consider what

158 Looking Back into the Future merits are there in the claim that Hinduism does not enjoin conversions. I confine myself to some irrefutable facts of history in Assam and its neighbourhood in NE India. When the ancient land of Kamarupa (Assam) was conquered in the early thirteenth century by Ahoms, an offshoot of the Shan or Tai people from what is now Thailand, the conquerors had brought with them their own religious and cultural practices, and even priests. However, the land and the people they conquered were predominantly Hindu. This could be said even of the substantial sections of the people who were so-called animists, for Hinduism of its nature then as now admitted a variety of conflicting practices and paid obeisance to a variety of gods and goddesses. However, in a unique instance of the conquerors succumbing to the mores of the conquered, the Ahom rulers and even their priests, who worshipped gods of their ancestral memories even in the new land, abandoned these beliefs and accepted the gods and beliefs of the people they had conquered: put simply, they ‘Hinduized’ themselves. The Ahom kings were not bigoted adherents of their faith, and they did not force their religion on anyone ... The Hinduisation was partly the result of a number of accidental circumstances, and partly the outcome of a deliberate policy… They realised the dangers springing from their being in a hopeless minority in a kingdom where the majority were Hindus. They thought they would add to their strength if they became one with their subject by embracing the latter’s faith…1

However, despite the apparent seamlessness with which the conquerors accepted their subjects’ faith, it transpires that Brahminical influences were at work. Hindu influence first entered the Ahom court during the reign of Sudangpha Bamuni-konwar (1397–1407) who had been brought up in a Brahmin family. The influence was more marked in the reign of King Pratap Singha (1603–1641) who was personally grateful to Brahmin priests for ridding him of a ‘demon’ which had possessed him during his princehood… The first Ahom monarch to accept Hinduism formally was Jayadhwaj Singha (1648–63)…2

That this acceptance of Hinduism did not prevent conflicts between the adherents of Vaishnavism, the predominant faith in Assam at

A Natural Process of Transformation 159

that time, and Shaktism, favoured by the Ahom ruling class who considered Vaishnavism as ‘too passive and mild to be suitable for a ruling class who had to maintain their domination by force of arms’ is again of a piece with the history of other Hindu kingdoms of medieval India where, by and large, the subjects favoured Vaishnavism while the rulers favoured Shaktism. The point to note is that the role of the Brahmin clergy was crucial at every stage of the conversion of the king and the upper echelons of the Ahom court and the subsequent schisms and the prolonged conflicts of the late eighteenth century that had dimensions of caste, tribe, ethnicity, faith and belief, that historians consider was one of the factors that led to the debilitation, and finally, the defeat in war and the destruction of the Ahom kingdom in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Or, take the case of Manipur where virtually the whole population of the Imphal valley, accounting for about two-thirds of the population, became Hindu in a matter of a few years following King Pamheiba (1714–54) becoming a Hindu under the influence of Santi Das, a migrant Bengali Brahmin from Sylhet who followed Vaishavism as propagated by Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. So fanatical was the attachment of this convert to his new faith that he ordered the suppression of ancient beliefs and practices that were unacceptable to Chaitanya Vaishnavism. More unforgivably, he also suppressed the ancient language of Manipur, the Meitei Mayek, and in an act of mindless vandalism ordered the destruction of earlier literature in that script, a precious heritage. Those who did not accept this variety of Hinduism were persecuted and considered as outcasts. Their descendants are now categorized as Loi, a scheduled caste of Manipur. It is they who have kept alive memories and practices of pre-Vaishnavite Meitei religion and gods. Finally, there is a more recent (2008) instance of mass conversions. Once again, it is a historical fact that many tribal people, outside or on the peripheries of Hinduism, were converted in Assam by Assamese Brahmin missionaries. A valuable account of this process in Nowgong (now Nagaon) district, with great historical significance and contemporary relevance, is a Note cited in the Report of the Census of India, 1891 by Edward A. Gait.3 Does one catch echoes or intimations of other processes and inducements practised

160 Looking Back into the Future by or attributed to others engaged in conversions, like the abuse of the ‘other’, in more recent times in the rest of the country? The Gosein or some of his subordinates usually select certain families of the aboriginal tribes, who reside in the vicinity of Hindu villages, and at a distance from the main villages of the aboriginal tribes. These families are frequently lectured upon the purity of the Hindu religion and the easy way in which they can get salvation, and how they can get a position in the Hindu society if they give up their habits of eating pork and other forbidden food and drinking strong liquor, and conform to the Hindu methods of eating and drinking and worship. As these people frequently feel the inconvenience of their isolated position, they are easily tempted to become Hindus, and thereby be enabled to associate and move with their Hindu neighbours, by whom they are hated and looked down upon as a degraded class so long as they remain in an unconverted state… When they express a desire of entire conversion to the Hindu religion, they are made to fast for a day or two, and then to undergo a Prayaschit (atonement), for which they have to spend some 5 to 20 rupees according to their circumstances. They then receive their Saran Bhajan (religious instruction and mode of worship) from the Gosein, who from that day they look upon as their spiritual guide. These people then change all former utensils of cooking and eating and also their dwelling houses and become quite Hinduised.4

In all the three cases cited, the conversion that in some cases took place centuries earlier, have now become linked to some current grievances. The Ahoms, who became Hindus, are now seeking the status of a scheduled tribe, but within the Hindu fold. Some of the valley-based insurgent groups in Manipur trace their disenchantment with ‘India’ to the injuries done to the native faith, language and culture, by imposed Hindu practices traitorously adopted by one of their own kind. There is a conscious process of re-tribalization among many Bodos who had taken saran and had ‘become Hindus’. Such are the nuances of conversion into Hinduism among some minority groups in the peripheral region of the country. Despite claims of being an ‘eternal faith’, Hinduism in other parts of the country, too should have spread in a similar manner, securing converts through inducements, promises and threats of a spiritual and material kind. If only we knew more about such processes in the so-called mainstream areas of the country, there would be

A Natural Process of Transformation 161

less heartburn and manufactured animosities over a very natural process of social and personal transformation.

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Notes and References ∗ First published in The Hindu, 7 December 2008. 1. Surya Kumar Bhuyan, 1949, Anglo-Assamese Relations, 1771–1826, the introductory chapter, Guwahati: Department of Historical and Antiquarian Studies. 2. Ibid. 3. E.A. Gait, 1892, Census of India, 1891: Assam, Shillong: Assam Secretariat Printing Office. 4. Bhuyan, Anglo-Assamese Relations, 1771–1826, the introductory chapter.

SECTION IV: DISCONTENT AND REVOLT

22 Serviceable Memory and Persistence of the Past∗ O

ne can never do away with the past. Like the hound of heaven, it will catch up with us, even if we want to forget our own role in its construction. Consider this truism in the context of the sea change that has come about in the way in which public opinion, that amorphous and in so many ways fraudulent and self-serving thing as reflected in the media, has been responding to the seemingly never-ending saga of violence and killing that is going on in Assam (2002) in the name of insurgency and counter-insurgency. The story was rather different even a decade ago. Almost every incident involving an insurgent outfit as a perpetrator of an outrage, or a counter-insurgency operation by the security forces in which a person or persons (of whatever self-proclaimed or assigned valueloaded description — militant, insurgent, terrorist, separatist, secessionist or any other) were killed, received extensive coverage. Public figures issued statements expressing anguish or outrage, covertly commending even while publicly disapproving of individual acts of terrorism, or making indignant condemnations of the violation of human rights and the manifestations of state violence. Where have all the ideologues gone, one may well ask? And by ideologues I mean those who provided the intellectual and political rationale for the politics of individual terrorism with the conviction that only by following that path could an independent and sovereign Assam be attained. The answer is simple — one has only to look around. Those who did not get killed, that is, the more hard-headed of them, seem to have gone in for total disengagement, or rather, engagement of quite a different and materially rewarding kind. This context of both an innate and manufactured support to the concept of Swadhin Asom deeply influenced, both at the spontaneous level and at the manipulative level, the perspectives on

166 Looking Back into the Future and reactions to the incidents of individual terrorism and counterterrorism. The death of innocent civilians as hapless victims of insurgents, or of insurgent(s) in counter-insurgency operations, was covered widely, with several follow-up reports detailing the background of the victims, interviews with parents and other family members and neighbours, schoolteachers, classmates and friends, providing a rounded picture of the incident as well as of the individuals involved, as perpetrators or as victims. Given the social composition of rural Assam where the majority of such incidents took place — and are even now taking place — such detailed coverage which fed on and was in turn fed by public outrage was not merely natural, but also dictated by the most dispassionate judgement of newsworthiness of such incidents, the sheer human interest, and the drama and tragedy that they embodied. Thus, a little over 10 years ago, when a senior United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) leader was cornered by the security forces on 31 December 1991, following a ‘tip-off’, in a hideout in Guwahati and was shot dead in the encounter that followed, the incident reverberated for several days. During that period, there were many (mostly speculative and wish-fulfilling) reports and analyses, stories of betrayal and heroic defiance, of high revolutionary morality and low political cunning. The incident also had a profound political fall-out, marking the open manifestation of a split in the organization on the question of engaging in a political dialogue with the government. That the political dialogue that followed became a non-starter is neither here nor there, and is anyway not the point of discussion here. Rather more relevant is the fact that such incidents continue to this day. With this difference, though — unlike a decade ago, now there is often no more than a single sentence running to three or four lines in a single column of a newspaper. There is no curiosity or interest in the facts and events that led to the incident, even less in what the incident portends for the future. Even more tellingly, in the case of many, probably the majority, of the incidents in which ‘suspected hard-core ULFA militants’ have been killed by the security forces, the reports, invariably attributed to ‘army sources’, and actually verbatim reproductions of defence ministry handouts, also carry a tag: that the ‘identity of the dead militant is yet to be established’.

Serviceable Memory and Persistence of the Past 167

Which certainly begs the question: How can a dead person whose very name, let alone other details like family background, was presumably not known at the time of the incident, be described as an ‘ULFA militant’ whose identity moreover is ‘yet to be ascertained’? Could it be that the supposed militant is really some innocent village resident who was out in the small hours of the day to meet a natural need? Why and how does a person become a ‘suspected militant’ unless it was part of the ‘tip-off’, a notorious practice known to be part of a culture of settling scores? Almost without exception, unless described as having taken place following a ‘tip-off’ when a house is raided, the incidents take place in the open field, either late at night or in the early hours of the morning. Perhaps a few citations are in order. They begin in May this year (2002). Some of these, though purportedly describing events that happened in widely different places, appear to be recycled handouts. Every one of these reports — and several more such could be cited — begs more questions than the ones posed above. Army kills ULFA militant Guwahati, 13 May 2002: One suspected ULFA militant was killed by the troops of the Red Horns division of the Army operating in Darrang district in the wee hours of 12 May, an Army release said. The troops of the Army on specific information laid an ambush at Dalanghat village near Kalaigon. Two suspected militants were seen moving suspiciously. On being challenged by the troops, militants lobbed grenades and opened fire. Troops in retaliation killed one militant while the other managed to escape in darkness. One .22 pistol, one live cartridge, one Chinese grenade, two blank ULFA letter sheets were recovered from the slain militant. The identity of the militant is yet to be established.

ULFA cadre killed in encounter Guwahati, 3 June 2002: An ULFA militant was killed today in an encounter with a combined police and CRPF team in Goalpara district. Police said that the extremist exchanged fire with the security personnel at Pisimkoli. The slain ultra was yet to be identified.

Two militants killed by Army in Nalbari Guwahati, 8 June 2002: Two militants were killed in a joint operation launched by troops of the Red Horns Division and Assam Police in Nalbari district recently, stated an Army press release. On specific

168 Looking Back into the Future information, multiple ambushes were laid near Khograbari village during pitch darkness. Suspected militants’ movement was observed and on being challenged the militants lobbed grenades and fired at the troops and attempted to flee. In the retaliatory fire by the Army, two militants were killed. Identity of the slain militants is being ascertained.

Army kills two ULFA militants Guwahati, 10 July 2002: Troops of Red Horns Division operating in Darrang district killed two hard-core ULFA militants in an encounter on 8 July, states a press release. On receipt of specific information, an ambush was laid near village Moamari under Dalgaon police station to nab militants. Suspected militants when challenged lobbed grenade and fired at troops in an attempt to escape. In the retaliatory fire two ULFA militants whose identity is being ascertained were killed.

Two ULFA men killed Nalbari, 15 July 2002: Two unidentified ULFA militants were killed in an encounter with Army at Digheli village under Nalbari PS around 12 last night, according to police sources here.

Two hardcore ULFA militants killed Guwahati, 21 July 2002: Two hardcore ULFA militants were killed by the Army on Saturday morning at Hajo under Kamrup district. According to defence sources, acting on a tip-off, troops of Red Horns Division killed the militants in an encounter. One 9 mm Chinese pistol, a .38 revolver and one Chinese grenade were recovered from the slain ultras who are yet to be identified.

ULFA militant killed Guwahati, 24 July 2002: Troops of Red Horns Division operating in Barpeta district killed one hard-core ULFA militant in an encounter, stated an Army press release. On specific information search was conducted in village Kukapar under Chenga police station to nab ULFA militant. The militant on being challenged lobbed grenade at the troops and attempted to flee. In the retaliatory fire the militant was killed. Identity of the slain ULFA militant is being ascertained.

Two ULFA militants killed in Kamrup Guwahati, 1 August 2002: Troops of the Red Horns Division killed two ULFA militants in Rajapara village under Boko police station in Kamrup district on Tuesday morning. One AK-56, one bayonet, one

Serviceable Memory and Persistence of the Past 169 Chinese grenade and few incriminating documents were recovered from the slain militants. Their identities are yet to be ascertained.

NDFB cadre shot dead in Nalbari Nalbari, 10 August 2002: Troops of the Red Horns Division of the Army shot dead an unidentified NDFB cadre in an encounter at Dooni under Borbori police station in Nalbari district this morning.

Four ULFA cadres shot dead Guwahati, 14 August 2002: Troops of the Red Horns Division of the Army shot dead four ULFA militants in two separate incidents in the State in the wee hours today. According to a PIB release, the troops shot dead two unidentified ULFA militants near Suklapara under Hajo police station in Kamrup district. In another incident near Dudhnoi in Goalpara district, the jawans of the same Division shot dead two other ULFA cadres — Amrit Rabha and Manoj.

Army kills two ULFA militants Guwahati, 21 August 2002: Troops of the Red Horns Division on Tuesday night killed two suspected ULFA activists in Darrang district. One .35 revolver, some live ammunition and three hand grenades were recovered from the slain militants whose identities are yet to be identified.

NDFB militant killed Guwahati, 28 August 2002: An NDFB militant was killed on the spot in an encounter with the Army that took place at Rajabasti area under Udalguri police station in Darrang district around 4.30 am today. The militant is yet to be identified.

Two militants killed Guwahati, 30 August 2002: The troops of the Red Horns Division of the Army killed two unidentified ULFA militants in Suktaguri village under Sipajhar police station in Darrang district yesterday, stated an Army release.

One ULFA cadre killed at Sonitpur Guwahati, 30 August 2002: Army killed one ULFA militant at Rampur area in Sonitpur district under Behali police station on Thursday. One .303 rifle, 30 ammunition and a few other incriminating documents were recovered from the slain militant whose identity is yet to be ascertained.

170 Looking Back into the Future Army guns down ULFA militant Guwahati, 11 September 2002: Army killed one unidentified ULFA militant in an encounter at Bhebladongpar under Patacharkuchi police station in Barpeta district in the wee hours on Tuesday. Intelligence sources said that troops of the Punjab Regiment killed the militant who is yet to be identified at 3.30 in the morning.

In contrast to what used to be the case a decade ago, there is not even a ripple of reaction to similar incidents now. Public opinion, to go by what finds expression in the print media, could not care less, it seems. This is especially so in the English-language media, though even the Assamese media has been much less exercised over such killings than they used to, not so long ago. Only twice in the last five months have sections of the Assamese print media focused on incidents of this kind with some background details as well as photographs. There are several plausible explanations for this lack of concern. Almost all the killings are taking place in the rural areas, reflecting, even if in a distorted way, the changing social profile of militancy and the social composition of the new recruits joining the organization. The situation could change if such killings were to take place, say, in Guwahati. But then, this is unlikely because the protests and rage of the youth in the cities has for the most part found new ways of expression — and escape. The indifference and callousness also reflects the growing amorality, the other side of the profound depoliticization at all levels, of the very class that continues to own and propagate ideas. The situation is not unique to Assam. Corresponding tendencies are visible all around, inside and outside the country, in the most materially advanced as well as in the most materially deprived societies. Neither the cultivated nostalgia for the past overlaying all its miseries, nor the menacing future with all its promises is very much with us, consumed as we are with the present, the ‘me only’ people, the ‘up yours and the devil take the hindmost’ mindset. The world is not with us, we are with the world. It seems likely that this complacency and callousness can be sustained, if not indefinitely, at least in the short and medium run. Memory, ever so fragile, now necessarily stored away in a forgotten recess of one’s being, has become a poor and unserviceable conscience-keeper. Indeed, given the larger national and

Serviceable Memory and Persistence of the Past 171

international trends in society and politics, seemingly so wellentrenched and indeed irreversible, memory has become a dangerous part of a people’s inheritance. Perhaps in that very danger lies the hope for the future, despite all the terrors it may hold.

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Note ∗ First published in Frontline, vol. 19, no. 21, 12–25 October 2002.

23 The Search for ‘Permanent Solutions’∗ One thing that is constant in most of the struggles going on in

the NE region, be they peaceful and constitutional or violent and unconstitutional, is that every agitating group seeks a ‘permanent solution’ (sthayi samadhan) to this or that problem viewed, perhaps rightly and at any rate with passionate conviction, as a matter of life and death to the people whose interests the group claims to represent. The formulation, though not identical to the infamous search for a ‘final solution’, comes perilously close to it. Fortunately for the people in whose name such a demand is pressed, its proponents do not possess the same kind of single-minded viciousness and material resources as those who historically sought a ‘final solution’ did. The issues include the illegal influx of foreign nationals; land alienation; perceived or real threats to real or manufactured identities based on language, religion, ‘ethnicity’, caste, clan and tribal affiliations; demands for the creation of a separate subdivision or a district; demand for greater autonomy or a separate state; and separatist and secessionist struggles with demands ranging from the right to self-determination to recognition of the right to conduct armed struggles for sovereignty and independence. Each of these issues finds a resonance among people in different parts of the NE region and, according to the score or so identifiable organizations spearheading them, cries out for an ‘immediate and permanent solution’. Indeed, this is true even of more realistic and remediable grievances such as the lack of economic development, the recurrent problem of floods, the mess in education, corruption and unemployment. A unique feature of this ferment is that even if those in a position to make concessions in respect of these demands were to do so, the

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situation on the ground admits no such solution. Even a feasible solution, not to speak of a ‘permanent solution’, is nowhere in sight in most of these struggles. This is, in a sense, a happy situation for those in authority as well as those who occupy the space in the opposition, constitutional or extra-constitutional, to ignore problems to which remedies can be found within the existing framework. A telling instance of this inherent impasse is the ‘progress’ of the Assam Accord, which has not been implemented even though those who led the Assam agitation and were among its principal architects occupied the highest political positions in the state between 1985 and 1990 and again between 1996 and 2001. Equally telling is the spectacle of the leadership of the All-Assam Students’ Union (AASU) once again leading the chorus for the annulment of the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act, ignoring the fact that its erstwhile leaders, who were equally vociferous in making the demand, occupied political office over two terms without doing anything about it. To say this is not to take recourse to a so-called philosophic position that the problems posed by ‘life’ simply do not admit of any solution — a splendid rationale for rank selfishness and inaction, entirely in tune with the dominant ethos of the country. Rather, owing to factors that have an all-too-material foundation, the social reality has repeatedly defeated every search for a ‘permanent solution’, or even a workable solution, to the problems of the region. A brief exegesis on the seemingly impending resolution of the Naga nationalist struggle and the Bodo demand for greater autonomy will perhaps help to see why such ‘permanent solutions’ are at best a fetish and a mirage and at worst a calculated tactic to keep the people whose cause they claim to espouse permanently in ferment. The Naga struggle is as old as, if not older than, the history of independent India; the Bodo demand is less than a decade old. At no time in the past 50 years or so has the Naga nationalist struggle appeared closer to resolution than at present (2003). The contrast between the celebrated, some would say notorious, encounter between Angami Zapu Phizo and Morarji Desai in London in June 1977, which ended abruptly in recriminations by Phizo and threats of ‘extermination of all the Naga rebels’ by Prime Minister Morarji Desai, and the more studied deliberations that have been

174 Looking Back into the Future going on for the past three or four years between the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isak-Muivah), and emissaries/ representatives of the Government of India in several locations outside the country could not be more telling. That the NSCN (I-M) leaders are now travelling to Delhi on Indian passports for talks with the Government of India is a tacit, even if only tactical, admission by them that the settlement they hope to clinch will be ‘within the framework of the Indian Constitution’, but with a much greater degree of autonomy than is now available under the provisions of the Constitution. The guarded optimism about the prospect for peace in Nagaland would be justified but for the fact that meeting Naga nationalist aspirations as articulated by the NSCN (I-M) is inextricably entangled with competing, indeed conflicting, concerns of a corresponding kind, obviously and intractably in Manipur, and also in Assam and Arunachal Pradesh — not to speak of Naga irredentist aspirations in Myanmar. A core component of Naga nationalist aspirations is ‘Naga integration’, that is, bringing together under one political structure all ‘Naga-inhabited areas’. There was a time when the maps of Nagaland even in official publications of the Nagaland government did not demarcate the state’s eastern and southern boundaries. The idea of a ‘southern Nagaland’, which, according to its proponents, would include the whole of Manipur barring the Imphal valley and Churachandpur district, is a very powerful one and for the realization of which there is an across-the-board commitment among all Nagas. Indeed, in the political vocabulary of the erstwhile rebels, the last letter in NSCN, which once stood for ‘Nagaland’, now stands unequivocally for ‘Nagalim’, which is another word for ‘Greater Nagaland’. No wonder, then, that the political leadership in Manipur is sceptical about the possibility of a settlement that will find acceptance in Manipur also, in particular by the numerically and politically predominant population in the Imphal valley. Not to put too fine a point on it, any concession of territory to the NSCN (I-M) can spark a confrontation like one between an immovable object and an irresistible force, with unpredictable consequences, the least likely of which is a stalemate. Equally problematic is the impending resolution to the Bodo demand for greater autonomy, that is, the creation of a Bodoland

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Territorial Council (BTC), itself a comedown from the original demand for a separate state. While there is some substance to the argument put forward by many espousing Assamese regionalist/nationalist aspirations — their most acceptable voice at one time was the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) — that the Bodo nationalist aspirations are merely a malevolent invention of the Congress (I) in Assam, the fact is that Bodo nationalist history is not all mere invention. The present Congress government in Assam has found the problem as intractable as its predecessor, the AGP government, knew it to be. This is not surprising. Whatever be the political identity of the formation in office in Dispur, on issues seen to affect the core population of the Brahmaputra valley — the Assamese people, an expression which itself is full of contentious ambiguities — no government in Dispur can make concessions beyond a point. At present, an impending settlement of this issue seems to hinge on the inclusion of 93 more villages in the territory of the envisaged BTC area. In practical terms, at stake is the giant refinery and petrochemical complex at Bongaigaon, which falls just outside the BTC area under the present plan. While the BTC leaders insist that there will be no compromise on the demand for the inclusion of these villages (read Bongaigaon and the industrial complex around it) in the BTC area, the state government seems to yield a bit only to go back on it later — making it truly a case of attrition and a test of will on both sides. However, even if the state government were to concede the demand, there are far more potent forces that oppose the creation of the BTC on the grounds that they are indigenous to that stretch of territory being claimed by the Bodos as their historic (albeit drastically abbreviated) homeland. The confrontation raises complex questions about tribal–non-tribal relations, the process of tribalization/de-tribalization and re-tribalization that has been going on in Assam for centuries, and the political dimension these once ‘natural’ processes have acquired under the one-person-onevote democratic dispensation, with all its promises and perils. The most intractable of these is the organization mobilizing the resistance to the creation of a BTC, the Sanmilita Janagosthiya Sangram Samithi (SJSS), an alliance of some 18 organizations of non-Bodo people, who historically belong to the same ‘ethnic’ stock

176 Looking Back into the Future as the Bodos though they are now part of the broad caste-Hindu Assamese society. Each one of the ongoing ‘identity struggles’ in the NE region has similar or corresponding complex dimensions. The issues do not admit of permanent solutions, simply because the historical processes of which they are a part defy all formulas. Thus, the constant make-believe negotiations, deals struck which sooner rather than later come unstuck, formation of fresh alliances, formulation of a fresh charter of demands, higher forms of struggle co-existing with lower, even debased, forms of compromise and deals. Maybe, out of all this churning, something creative and liberating might emerge. However, there are no such signs on the horizon.

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Note ∗ First published in Frontline, vol. 20, no. 1, 4–17 January 2003.

24 The Fallacy of Internally Coherent Homelands∗ T

here is little doubt that many of the nationalities, big and small, of NE India, and of the rest of the country as well, deeply desire and are engaged in various forms of agitation, peaceful and constitutional as well as violent and extra-constitutional, to achieve the realization of an internally coherent ‘homeland’ where they, and only they, would ‘belong’. In such yet-to-be-realized homelands, there would be the least possible contradiction (ideally, no contradiction at all) between the territory and the political space constituting that imagined homeland and ‘ethnicity’, in terms of language, religion, racial and cultural characteristics, historical memories of ancient wrongs and smouldering revanchist grudges, or any other components that are presumed to make up that ‘ethnicity’, indeed the ‘history’ of the people inhabiting that putative homeland. Historically, in South Asia, Pakistan was the first nation-state to come into being based on an ideology of exclusivist, though at the same time also universalist, Islamic nationalism — the contradiction in the term ‘Islamic nationalism’ notwithstanding. Over half a century after its creation, that vision of an internally coherent ‘pure’ state comprising a ‘pure’ people, which was abjured at the very moment of its birth by its founding father, is yet to be realized, though successive regimes have soldiered on trying to sell that vision to an increasingly sceptical people. Sri Lanka and Myanmar, too, have tried to construct similar denominational states, with more or less the same disastrous consequences for their societies. In India, the struggle between exclusivism and pluralism, though most visible at the national level in the grave challenge posed by the Hindutva forces to the concept of a pluralistic society and polity, is going on also in the states, regions and other sub-structures down the line, at political, societal and cultural levels. This is especially so in NE India.

178 Looking Back into the Future The dream of attaining such ‘uncontaminated homelands’ is perhaps a universal phenomenon. Forces of so-called modernization, instead of tempering such seemingly atavistic and irrational urges, have only made them stronger. Even the phenomenon of so-called globalization with its concomitant transformation of the whole world into a supposedly ‘global village’ has paradoxically strengthened the tendency among various people towards defining themselves in narrower and narrower terms, and in opposition to the ‘other’. If, for instance, the internet has at one level opened up the whole world and all its intellectual inheritance, at least to those who have the wherewithal to possess or have access to the required technological gizmos, it has also encouraged (apart from spreading illiteracy and diminution of the habit of reading books and keeping written notes) with its instant websites, the manufacturing and propagation of any and every kind of ‘ethnic’ identities, with equally instant championing of such claims by an enormous number of very well-heeled non-governmental organizations (NGOs), local and foreign. Consider, for instance, the following passages from the manifesto of the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (NSCN) dealing with what it sees as the fundamental contradictions between ‘Indians’ and the ‘Nagas’. The manifesto as a whole is as typical an expression of the desire for the realization of an ‘uncontaminated homeland’ as anyone can find in the region. Adopted on 31 January 1980, the founding day of the NSCN, and revised in November 1993, the document constitutes the most explicit expression of its ideology. The involuntary influx of Indian nationals from the over-populated India into our country has set all Nagalim under constant threat of eventual submersion. In this connection, it may be recalled that before the year 1947, there was not a single Indian in Nagalim. It is now with more than two hundred thousand Indians... The spread of Hinduism and the queer noises have reached our homeland. Although as a doctrine Hinduism is not a recruiting force, it is not to be easily dismissed, since it is backed by a Hindu government. The forces of Hinduism, viz., the numberless Indian troops, the retail and wholesale dealers, the teachers and the instructors, the intelligent, the prophets of non-violence, the gamblers and the snake-charmers, Hindi songs and Hindi films, the rosogula makers and the Gita are all arrayed for the mission of supplanting the Christian God, the Eternal God of the universe. The challenge is serious; there is no hiding, no

The Fallacy of Internally Coherent Homelands 179 pretension... To join the Indian Union... is to allow ourselves to be drowned and perish in these waves of dead doctrine. Whereas to defend the Nagalim’s Independent Existence... is to assure ourselves safe from the doom of Hinduism. This is a simple logic. The failure of the Christian leaders to grasp the way the evil forces work and their failure to face them in the way they should, has indeed, placed Nagalim on a most serious trial. We are not only confronted with a war of physical force but also with more dangerous insidious war of assimilation.

Addressing those ‘Naga religious leaders’ who believe in ‘the illusion that constitutional sanction of India would safeguard the freedom of their faith’, the manifesto says: Preachers of all ranks are gone after the blessings and the ‘award’ of Indian bosses. Spiritual uprightness is pushed into the background, pliable demagogues are out, dressed in ‘dhoti’ with that queer red mark of foreign goddess in their broad foreheads, preaching reverence for cows — half absorbed, full devil! O Nagalim, whither goeth thou!... Furthermore, the abundant amenities of life accorded to them are only sinister seeds of dissension being sown in the Naga family. Whatever it may be and wherever they may be, Nagas are Nagas and we shall prove the evil of this policy before long. India’s ‘Ahimsa’, ‘All Roads Lead to Rome’ and ‘No Religion has the monopoly of righteousness’ are no doubt, masterpieces of philosophy, but the way to eternal life is not philosophy. The time has come for you and for us either to shrink back or prove through. God wants us right now to stand for him. Now is the time to hold firm our ground with Christ and face the stick and carrot policy.... O men of God, lead us to Saviour Christ for He alone is the Way, the Truth and the Life that leads to God, the Father. Our Saviour taught us saying, ‘and thou shalt be hated of all nations for My name’s sake’. Truly it is time and we hold the Moses’ question — who is on the Lord’s side? Come for Christ, come for the Nagalim’s freedom... There is no third way, because ‘he who is not with me is against me and he who does not gather with me scatter’.

Leaving aside the irony of the NSCN (Isak-Muivah) leaders with their strong commitment as much to the idea of ‘Nagaland for Christ’ as to their firm rejection, with unconcealed and ill-informed contempt, of the symbols and substance of what they see as ‘Hinduism’, holding talks with the leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led

180 Looking Back into the Future government, what comes through in the passage and in the manifesto as a whole is the passionate commitment to the realization of an ideal Nagalim, the unqualified territorial nationalism anchored in land, the land of the Naga people transcending the boundaries of the present state of Nagaland, inhabited by one people, the Nagas, following one faith, Christianity, and committed to one ideology, ‘national socialism’ or, more accurately, Naga socialism. Central to this vision is the conviction that the Naga people, never defeated or conquered even by the British colonial rulers, are not ‘seeking independence’ since they declared themselves independent a day before India attained its independence, and Nagaland (Nagalim) has therefore been an ‘independent nation’ since then. The real issue in Nagalim is to secure the removal of Indians, the armed forces as well as others, who constitute another colonial occupying force; and simultaneously also secure the integration of all Naga-inhabited areas, currently under the occupation of India and Myanmar, thus finally realizing the vision of a sovereign and independent Nagalim. The problem, as much with Nagalim as with any other corresponding aspiration in the NE region, is that no amount of restructuring of territory, either in response to agitations conducted within the framework of the Constitution or extra-constitutional struggles and insurgencies as those represented by the various factions of the so-called Naga underground and others it has spawned either in imitation or in competition, will result in the formation of such an internally coherent ‘homeland’. This would be so even if, hypothetically, a ‘sovereign Nagalim’ were to come into being, with (an even more hypothetical assumption) Arunachal Pradesh, Assam and Manipur and Myanmar acquiescing in the integration of large areas under their control into a ‘sovereign Nagalim’, and the Indian government conceding every single point to the proponents of a ‘sovereign Nagalim’. The most cursory examination of the map of Nagalim and the census figures of the areas claimed for the envisaged Nagalim will show that its population will still have a very pluralistic character, with lots and lots more Indians, lots and lots more people practising other faiths, indeed lots and lots more non-Nagas, far more pluralist than that of the present state of Nagaland. Such is the case with every one of the envisaged ‘homelands’ being pressed for by various groups in the region. For instance, consider the case of Mizoram, attained after a twodecade-long violent struggle, perhaps the most internally coherent

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political unit functioning in the NE region, where one ethnic group (Lushai/Mizo), one language (Mizo) and one religion (Christianity) overwhelmingly dominate all the rest. And yet, Mizoram also has provisions for three autonomous district councils, two of them representing people who are ethnically not different from the majority Lushai. Further, it has had to cope with a violent separatist agitation from the Hmar People’s Council (whose claimed homeland traverses Mizoram, Manipur and Assam) and is at present facing another violent agitation by the Bru (the Reang), who straddle the region traversing Mizoram, Tripura and Assam. Manipur, whose ‘dismemberment’ is a key element in the making of Nagalim, presents the classic instance of extraordinary pluralism, with about 30 recognized scheduled tribes sharing the same political and physical space with the dominant Meitei, not merely in the five non-Meitei-dominated districts surrounding the Imphal valley but in the Imphal valley as well, indeed, in Imphal city. When there were violent outbursts in the state in June 2001, following the central government’s notification extending the ceasefire, until then operating only in Nagaland, to ‘all Naga-inhabited areas’ (without any consultation, let alone the concurrence of the governments of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam and Manipur), no Naga inhabitant of Imphal was affected, though some on their own volition left the city. The situation is even more complicated in Assam, where owing to centuries of social and cultural interaction, the dividing lines between communities have become extremely blurred. Yet, even these same people are engaged in competitively raising demands of ethnic separation, constitution of a separate district or a union territory or a state, sovereignty and independence, terrorizing and killing each other (and themselves) in the process. Put simply, no people in NE India (indeed in the rest of the country as well) can reasonably aspire for, let alone attain, an exclusive political space for an ‘uncontaminated homeland’ — short of engaging in ruthless ethnic cleansing.

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Note ∗ First published in Frontline, vol. 20, no. 3, 1–14 February 2003.

25 Squeeze in Bhutan: Consequences in Assam∗ T

here was little doubt about the outcome of the military operations launched by the Royal Bhutan Army (RBA) on the morning of 15 December 2003 to clear the kingdom of three closely allied separatist militant groups from Assam and north Bengal whose fight is against India but who had entrenched themselves in wellestablished camps in Bhutan for over a decade and had clearly overstayed their welcome. Within days of the launching of the military operations, Bhutan was claiming that all the 30 camps of the organizations — the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB) and the Kamatapur Liberation Organization (KLO), with 13, 12 and five camps respectively — had been ‘smashed’. The estimated 3,000 or so inmates of the camps, some of them non-combatants, were on the run. Those who chose to fight were either killed or captured or were forced to flee, dispersing themselves into the difficult terrain of east and southern Bhutan, very broadly the theatre of operations. The process is still on. There is, however, little doubt that sooner than later, this phase too will come to an end. Despite the claims to the contrary by ULFA leaders, its chairman Arabinda Rajkhowa and commander-in-chief Paresh Barua, who are not in Bhutan but who regularly telephone correspondents over their satellite telephones, send e-mails to newspapers or give detailed interviews to Assambased websites, the organization and its allies have suffered a setback. The kind of infrastructure that the outfits had built in southern and eastern Bhutan in over a decade of open and semiclandestine work cannot be revived immediately. According to the Bhutan government, the military operations are an all-Bhutan affair, with King Jigme Singye Wangchuk himself

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leading his troops from the front. The Indian armed forces, massively present and actively engaged in anti-terrorist operations in the region, were providing only logistical support, ‘sealing the international border’ (whatever that term means, for the India– Bhutan border in the Assam sector alone runs to over 260 km), ferrying the injured to hospitals in India, capturing those militants who tried to break into Indian territory and killing those who offered a fight. These claims have not carried much conviction on the Indian side of the border. ULFA leaders maintain that the Indian armed forces are actively taking part in the fighting on the ground. There has been at least one newspaper report of the arrival of a coffin wrapped in the Indian tricolour at the helipad of 11 Garhwal at Darranga, on the Indian side of the border south of Samdrup Jongkhar, one of the districts where the dismantled camps were situated. Barring the handing over of 37 women and 27 children to the Indian army authorities, many of the women themselves militants, and of some leading captured militants like Bhimkanta Buragohain, one of the founder leaders of ULFA, whose formal surrender to the Indian army in Tezpur with a call to his comrades to follow suit was widely broadcast on 26 December 2003, there has been no official statement from Bhutan on the progress of the operation, the number of militants captured or killed and the materiel captured. The director of Bhutan’s foreign affairs ministry, accessible always on the telephone, has been speaking only in the most general terms, reiterating the points made in the official statement explaining why Bhutan was forced to act finally. With such a total news blackout successfully enforced by the Bhutan authorities, there have been only guesstimates, attributed mostly to unnamed sources, of casualties on either side, and of persons captured. These too, like all such conjectures, vary wildly. But all reports agree that over 100 militants have been killed and over 500 have surrendered or have been captured. Even allowing for a margin of 10 per cent error and augmenting by 10 per cent the guesstimates of the numbers of those killed or captured and those who surrendered, a large number of the generally cited camps’ population of about 3,000 or so militants still remain unaccounted for. This virtual blackout of all news from inside Bhutan has led to wild speculations and propagation of urban legends. It has also

184 Looking Back into the Future given a free run of the media to the leaders of the separatist organizations who are more than forthcoming with their version of what is happening, with website interviews, e-mails and personal calls over satellite telephone to select reporters. The strange case of Buragohain, affectionately called Mama, provides an instructive example of the shaping and growth of such urban legends, of myth and fantasy, deliberately constructed or merely wishful, overshadowing and taking precedence over dull but inescapable facts. Two days after the operation was launched, there were reports citing unnamed Bhutan army authorities and apparently confirmed by an Indian army officer that Buragohain had died of wounds sustained on the first day of the operations. Following this report, there was much indignation in the state, cutting across all other divides, as much over the killing of an elderly leader as over the failure of the authorities to hand over the ‘body’ to the next of kin. The issue dominated the news for nearly a week until it finally turned out that he was not dead but had surrendered. This was at a time when the authorities were not saying a word (and are even now not saying much) about the operations, leading to complaints from the media about the ‘lack of transparency’ on the part of the Bhutan authorities. Of course, the media here as elsewhere have never been exactly modest about their role in the larger affairs of the state, including the conduct of war. The United States understands such delusions about occupying the moral high ground and also knows only too well how to stoke and feed this vainglory — which explains the unique phenomenon of the ‘embedded reporters’ accompanying the invading troops in Iraq, and using them to sell the US version of the events to the rest of the world. Bhutan, being a poor country, simply did not have the wherewithal or the sophistication for such public relations exercises. So, it was again another free run for ULFA leaders who provided inputs that were promptly incorporated into media reports for nearly a week: that Buragohain was shot and killed (or more gruesomely, hacked to death) while he was leading a group of women and children holding aloft a white flag with a view to negotiating a surrender; that the RBA had ‘violated the norms of Geneva Convention by killing a prisoner of war’. All this appeared

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in an online interview given by the ULFA chairman to an Assambased website. According to Paresh Barua, the death of Buragohain would be a perennial source of inspiration to ULFA’s cadre to continue the fight. Several newspapers carried editorial comments condemning the killing of an elderly man. Poets produced adulatory and mourning poems. Much anger and revulsion was expressed over the delay in the return of the body, again leading to speculation that the body had been so badly mutilated that the authorities did not want to risk more anger by returning it. These factors certainly contributed to the substantial success of the 48-hour Assam and north Bengal bandh beginning at 5 a.m. on 20 December, called by ULFA, the NDFB and the KLO. One of the central demands behind the bandh call was the return of the bodies. While the bandh call evoked a poor response in the six districts of north Bengal which, along with Goalpara district in Assam, constitute the putative Kamatapur, the bandh was observed in Nagaland and Manipur, though the separatist organizations in these states have not been directly affected by the crackdown in Bhutan. At the level of ‘civil society’, over a dozen organizations, not all of them fronts of ULFA, issued statements condemning what they saw as lack of respect for the dead. Amnesty International (which consistently refused to recognize the South African leader Nelson Mandela as a ‘prisoner of conscience’) and the International Committee of the Red Cross wanted to get involved. The Guwahati High Court admitted a petition filed by the Manav Adhikar Sangram Samiti (MASS) and directed the army to hand over the body of Buragohain ‘if it is in its custody’ to the civil authorities. The issue also figured in the Assam Assembly where the government pleaded total ignorance. In due course, a New Delhi-based television channel, in tune with the frenetic culture of instantaneous news dissemination, whose only purpose is to score a point over rivals no less frenzied, took the process to its logical conclusion by reporting that Buragohain’s body had been taken to his village near Doomdooma, about 600 km from the scene of conflict and cremated in the presence of a large number of grieving followers. As always, reality outdid the wildest imagination of fiction. One recalled with pleasure the sardonic farce of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop,

186 Looking Back into the Future even as one reflected on the foolishness of trying to paint the lily. It is true that indignation generated throughout the state and indeed in the region about the incorrectly presumed callousness of the authorities has left a lot of red faces around. Nevertheless, the blunders will be covered up and are being covered up; punches are being pulled or converted into feints. What is more relevant is that ULFA, which had more or less disappeared from the front pages of newspapers, is back with a bang, even if for the present as an organization whose rank and file are demoralized and are on the run. One of the first things that I noticed on returning to Guwahati about two years ago after an eight-year absence was that news about ULFA, which mostly meant news about the killing of ‘unidentified suspected ULFA militants’ by the security forces, for the most part comprised bare reproduction of handouts issued by the army’s public relations officer. This was in sharp contrast to the detailed coverage of such encounters, first-hand accounts from the spot and reactions from the members of the family of the slain militants, which was the norm a decade ago.1 The fact that ULFA is now (2004) making big news does not mean that the organization’s separatist ideology will once again take centre-stage in the ideological discourse in the state. However, there is and there continues to be significant support to the call for an end to the crackdown in Bhutan and, by implication, an easing up if not an end to the anti-insurgency operations in the state as well. ‘A political solution to insurgency’ is what everyone wants. In a statement issued on 22 December 2003, 33 leading citizens of the state, led by former chief minister Saratchandra Sinha, appealed to the Royal Bhutan government to announce a ceasefire in ‘the war unleashed by it and the Indian army on non-combatants, including women and children’. Clearly, the signatories, all persons highly distinguished in their fields, do not believe that the Indian armed forces are not taking part in the operations; and most certainly believe that women and children have been targeted. Such views can hardly be seen as indicators of ULFA returning to the centre-stage, which it once occupied in Assam. In fact, a disclaimer that the signatories do not support ULFA’s separatist ideology precedes every such statement. Nevertheless, such perceptions also underline a mindset, unique to middle classes aspiring to be ruling classes everywhere, which, while not supporting

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ULFA’s separatist ideology or other varieties of extremist violence, recognizes only too well that militancy has now become a necessary condition for its own prosperity and well-being. An imagined self-introspection, rather in the manner of an honest caricature of the reality (the imagined person could be anyone, by some stretch of the contrived imagination, perhaps even this writer), would read the situation thus: ‘We would never want our children to take to the path of militancy and indeed have taken care to send them outside the state and, where we can afford, outside the country, to grow up uncontaminated by such ideas as Swadhin Asom, get a proper education and make a good life, comfortable and prosperous. But do we want ULFA to give up its struggle to attain Swadhin Asom? No. For it is only by continuing to fight for this unattainable demand, staying for years away from their homes in inhospitable foreign terrains, that we, well-entrenched in our comfortable niches, can be sure of the uninterrupted and increasingly larger and larger benefices from the more powerful and resourceful ruling classes in New Delhi. For evidence of the prosperity and well-being, even if of a kind, that two decades of your militancy has brought us, simply look around.’ It is difficult to question the legitimacy of Bhutan’s military action from the point of view of the country’s government. For over 10 years, the separatist militant groups from Assam (and later, from north Bengal) had virtually ‘invited themselves’ into the kingdom, established several bases, including what the militants themselves rather grandiloquently described as their ‘General Headquarters’ and ‘Command Headquarters’, all well supplied and very well armed, from where they ran their operations against their ‘enemy’, meaning India. However, even without Bhutan’s compulsions to be sensitive and responsive to Indian concerns in this regard, what perhaps outraged the authorities in Bhutan as it appears from the Bhutan foreign ministry statement, was the brazen assumption of the separatist leaders that their organizations were there as a matter of right. In fact, ULFA vice-chairman Pradip Gogoi, currently lodged in the Guwahati jail and freely speaking to the media on occasions when he is brought to the court in connection with the cases against him, said that Bhutan had ‘betrayed’ ULFA.

188 Looking Back into the Future The sentiments expressed in the statement issued by the Bhutan foreign ministry to explain the launching of the military operations are unexceptionable, except for a tiny bit of reservation. Even allowing for the tough terrain, it is difficult to believe that the militants had ‘clandestinely’ entered Bhutan ‘about 12 years ago’ and established the 30 camps without the knowledge of the authorities. On the contrary, it is a well-known secret that ULFA went to the kingdom with the full knowledge and, perhaps, tacit concurrence of the authorities who, at that point, found a use for the presence of these foreign militants in that area affected by an entirely internal and indigenous turbulence long before the militants from Assam began to set up camps there. In the early 1990s, about the time when, following Operation Bajrang and Operation Rhino in Assam, ULFA decided to set up camps in Bhutan, nearly 100,000 Bhutanese citizens of Nepali origin in southern Bhutan, a wild belt of territory covering seven districts, fled (or were forced to flee) to Nepal in the course of a few months. For over a decade now, they have been living in camps set up in Morang and Jhapa, two districts in eastern Nepal. The arrival of the militants from Assam and the construction of the camps and their infrastructure injected a lot of money into an area that even by Bhutan’s standards is economically underdeveloped. The economy certainly benefited though, from the very beginning, there were also tensions, exacerbated by the fact that the Lhotshampa (Bhutanese of Nepali origin) had their own problems with the other more dominant Drukpa, broadly comprising two other major national groups, the Ngalong in the west and the Sharchop in the east. The origins of these tensions go back further, to the 1980 Marriage Act, the 1985 Citizenship Act and other pieces of legislation, which made the southern Bhutanese feel discriminated against in matters relating to marriage, citizenship and language and, rather more visibly, dress. This resulted in the emergence of a militant tendency among the Lhotshampa themselves. At that point ULFA and its allies were seen as a possible buffer, a device to keep this internal and until then, mostly indigenous, turbulence under control. In short, a decade ago, the organization was seen as a serviceable ally of the kingdom. As nothing is static in the correlation of forces in human societies, this equation too has changed over the years. ‘Of particular concern,’

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the Bhutan foreign ministry statement of 15 December (2003) said, ‘are the misrepresentations surrounding their [militant’s] presence...’ It is noteworthy that the statement carefully refrains from elaborating on what these ‘misrepresentations’ are. Further, elements described by the Bhutan government as ‘Nepali terrorist movements’, but which probably represented one or another faction of the then fractured communist movement in Nepal, began to seek sanctuaries and support among the southern Bhutanese who were responsive because being of Nepali ethnic origin, they had for decades faced oppression and denial from the more dominant indigenous Drukpas. The transformation of the once weak and fractured communist movement in Nepal to the feared Communist Party of Nepal (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist) also had its impact on the southern Bhutanese, drawing to its ranks the disaffected youth. This radicalization of the southern Bhutanese has led, inevitably as it were, to the formation of a more formal political structure — the Bhutan Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist). It was founded on 22 April 2003, the birth anniversary of Lenin, at Siliguri, according to one account, or according to another ‘somewhere in the Chhattisgarh-Orissa-Jharkhand special area in India’. Another birth on the same day in 1969 (the founding of the CPI (Marxist-Leninist) on 22 April), another false flag operation, perhaps, for the agenda of recolonization is more vibrantly at work now than it was then. Official Bhutan anyway sees the BCP (MLM) as a totally ‘Made in Nepal’ product. The statement announcing the birth of BCP (MLM) and the 10-point demands announced on 1 May, along with the slogans adopted, may not immediately pose a threat to the monarchy in Bhutan. But they do hold a portent. One of the most interesting points made in the statement announcing the birth of the BCP (MLM) relates to its reading of Bhutan’s population mix, every section of which is oppressed by the feudal monarchy. According to the statement, those oppressed include ‘even the Sharchops, who are next to Nepali-origin Bhutanese...’ In other words, this remarkable formulation takes it for granted that the demographic pattern has already changed and the ‘Nepali-origin’ population constitute the largest single group. The prospect of ‘Sikkimization’ (over the years, Sikkim has become a Nepali-majority state) is an ever-present nightmare in the imagination of the Drukpas.

190 Looking Back into the Future The establishment of such a ‘Marxist-Leninist-Maoist’ party, one of whose fundamental premises is that the Drukpas are already a minority in Bhutan, whose first slogan is ‘Down with monarchy’, and given ULFA’s well-known claims of commitment to ‘scientific socialism’, the organization, once seen as a serviceable tool, had become a threat to the kingdom in the dramatically changed ground situation. The crackdown was also perhaps influenced by pressure from India. But more immediate and local factors, relevant to the internal situation in Bhutan, appear to have been the deciding factor.

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Note and Reference ∗ First published in Frontline, vol. 21, no. 1, 3–16 January 2004. 1. M.S. Prabhakara, ‘Assam’s Angst’, Frontline, vol. 19, no. 21, 25 October 2002.

26 ULFA: Talking about Talks∗ Ever since the first, hesitant initiatives were taken in September

2005 to get some sort of a dialogue going between the Government of India and the armed and proscribed separatist outfit, the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), there has been very little clarity on what the talks, or even ‘the talks about talks’, are supposed to achieve — allowing for the opaqueness and misdirection that surrounds all such initiatives. Such opaqueness was indeed a feature of the very initiation of this process. Characteristically, ULFA is even now not directly in the picture. Rather, the talks are being held, more accurately ‘facilitated’ (part of the new jargon of negotiations with separatist groups, like ‘talks about talks’, ‘confidence-building measures’ and such), by an ULFA-nominated nine-member People’s Consultative Group (PCG) that, moreover, has two ‘convenors’ over and above the nine. Their aim is to enable the eventual, perhaps direct, ‘real talks about talks’ between the government of India and ULFA. There is little ambiguity over the stated and ultimate objective of the ULFA — the attainment of a sovereign, independent Asom. Rather less clear is what the Government of India expects to achieve in these talks. Its stand has been often spelt out: that the government will hold talks with any separatist/militant/insurgent /terrorist outfit provided these first abjure violence; and agree to keep their objectives within the framework of the Constitution. In practice, however, there has been much flexibility, with the stated framework not always as rigidly defined as it is made out. Modifications have been made depending on the strength, durability and will of the opponent, as also on the perceived need to secure a settlement. This is evident both in the Kashmir talks and the talks with the National Socialist Council on Nagalim. It is to be seen whether such flexibility will also be evident when, eventually, direct talks are held with ULFA.

192 Looking Back into the Future Ever since the organization came into being over a quarter of a century ago, more or less conterminously with the onset of the Assam agitation on the issue of foreign nationals, ULFA’s objective has remained the same — the attainment of Swadhin Asom, a sovereign independent Asom. To be more precise, ULFA’s objective, as it sees it, is to regain the lost sovereignty of Asom — the correct name of the land that got corrupted by being anglicized into ‘Assam’ following British colonial occupation and that continued to be used under Indian colonial occupation. The sovereignty was lost way back in 1826 when, following the British victory over Burma in the Anglo-Burmese war, which was preceded by the invasion and occupation of the land by Burma, Britain annexed the erstwhile kingdom of Assam as part of its policy of extension and consolidation of its eastern frontiers. A little over a century and a half later, the armed struggle to regain that lost sovereignty began with the founding of ULFA in April 1979. This reading of the events and circumstances of Assam’s loss of independence and the path being charted by ULFA to redeem it might not be quite accurate and also have elements of myth, fantasy and imagination. There are certainly other narratives and perspectives of this past, present and the future. However, in matters like this, imagination and belief are more important than so-called historical facts about which there has never been any agreement. What is more material is that a certain wistfulness and nostalgia over a past when Assam was a sovereign and independent political entity has been a persistent element in the imagination of the Assamese people. This is reflected in folk memories, literature, cultural and political polemics about identity assertion, links and relations vis-à-vis the rest of India with which, like every other constituent of the modern Indian state, Assam too has an ambiguous relation, as a part and apart, an integral part as well as jealously asserting its unique identity. ULFA has till now refused to come on board for any kind of negotiations until and unless the sovereignty issue is made part of the agenda. Thus, the constitution of the ULFA-nominated PCG, one of whose takes is to persuade the government to include the issue of Assam’s sovereignty in the agenda for the talks if and when they are held. During a mass rally organized by the People’s Committee for Peace Initiative in Assam, described as a conglomeration of 21 organizations, in Guwahati on 30 January 2006, by when the PCG

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had been invited for the second round of talks, a resolution was adopted demanding that any discussion that may eventually take place between the government and ULFA must focus on finding a ‘justice-oriented solution without compromising on the dignity of the people and the demand for the restoration of sovereignty to them’. The rally was addressed by many leading public figures and intellectuals of the state, as well as some PCG members and Mamoni Goswami, the Assamese writer and one of the two conveners of the PCG. The sum total of the pursuance of this objective by ULFA through what it calls ‘armed struggle’ and the efforts of the government to suppress and defeat them by use of force over the last quarter of a century has been the death and maiming of thousands of persons and destruction of their homesteads, even though they were not actively involved and entirely unimplicated in such enterprises, by the security forces and ULFA which, despite tactical shifts, has remained firm in its objective. One is not sure if the administrative and political structures in the state and at the centre have any longterm perspective on the problem. Since the ULFA became part of the security concerns of the state in the late 1980s, its anticipated violent interventions in the run-up to the official observances of the Independence Day and Republic Day lead to a flurry of state-wide alerts and such demonstrative gestures of strengthening security. Few, least of all ULFA, take these gestures seriously, for they are forgotten when the appointed day passes. The economy of the state, despite the current appearance in urban and semi-urban enclaves of an economic boom and prosperity in the midst of an unbelievably degraded broader environment, contributed as much by the ‘reforms’ of the early 1990s as by the large inflow of unaccounted liquid cash, is marked by stagnation. However, motions of vibrancy are generated by ad hoc interventions from the top or harebrained agendas for investment, growth and diversification that seldom go beyond their initial breathless articulation. It is unlikely that the current or eventual talks about talks will even consider such issues. Howsoever unrealistic ULFA’s articulation of ideas like the restoration of the lost sovereignty of Asom and its prosecution of this objective through armed struggle may seem to the people in the rest of India, including many Assamese people, it is also true that such ideas do generate sympathetic resonances in the state,

194 Looking Back into the Future even among those who are not persuaded either of their attainability or even their desirability, given the complex international environment. This is a new dynamic of Assamese society that was not prominent when the organization was born. The reasons for such ambiguity — support to a cause that in the final analysis is not really a desirable objective and may even be suicidal — are complex and are not relevant to the context and substance of the present and prospective ‘talks about talks’. The first meeting between the Government of India and the PCG took place in Delhi on 26 October 2005 and the talks were attended by the prime minister. There were assurances that the government was willing to discuss all issues raised by the ULFA, through there was no explicit reference to the issue of sovereignty. The second meeting took place on 7 February 2006. Through the date for the second meeting had apparently been decided and also conveyed to the facilitators well in advance, the actual announcement of the date was preceded by yet another demonstration across the state by ULFA of its capacity to strike at will, in the run up to the Republic Day ceremonies. Indeed, one of the facilitators explicitly said that ULFA had resorted to such violence because its leadership felt ‘insulted and frustrated’ due to the centre’s delay in taking the peace process forward. In further demonstrations of its resentment, incidents of violence continued even after the 7 February date was announced. In the event, when the actual date was announced in the midst of the violence, the impression was created that the government would only respond to coercion. The message seems to have gone home, considering the satisfaction expressed by the PCG about the progress made in the second round of talks. Though little has been revealed about the substance of these talks, one can draw some broad inferences based on the past experience of 1991 and 1992 when ULFA, following two military operations (Bajrang and Rhino), initiated on its own talks with the centre, an initiative that fizzled out with accusations of bad faith on both sides, and on the existing reality following the setbacks it has received after the Bhutan operations. Two communications sent by Arobindra Rajkhowa (that is how Arabinda Rajkhowa, itself an assumed name, spelt his name in those communications) then as now ULFA’s chairman, to the then prime minister, Narasimha Rao, on 18 December 1991 and 1 January 1992 encapsulated ULFA’s concerns and demands as they existed then: immediate stoppage

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of army operations, withdrawal of all black laws like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act and the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (TADA) Act, as well as lifting of the ban on the organization, and release of its leaders in prison in order to facilitate the adoption and endorsement of the conditions required by the Government of India — the acceptance of a solution within the framework of the Constitution, abjuring of violence and the surrender of arms. However, those released by the government as required by the ULFA promptly disappeared. The core demands reflected in the preconditions that the ULFA then insisted on, especially suspension if not an end to army operations and release of its leaders and cadres in prison, remain the same. Apart from the release of five members of its central committee (vice-chairman Pradip Gogoi, in prison in Guwahati in the middle of a prolonged trial, publicity secretary Mithinga Daimary, Ramu Mech, Arpan Saikia, and founder-adviser Bhimkanta Buragohain), ULFA also demanded the release, or at least to know the whereabouts, of several of its leaders and cadres, including Ashanta Baghphukan, Bening Rabha, Nilu Chakravarti, Abhijit Deka and Prakash Gogoi, the last news about whom was that they had all been captured by the army during the Bhutan operations. There are reports of at least 25 children of ULFA cadres, born in jails, still languishing in prison. There is also the question of the future of Golap Baruah, another central committee member apparently still in custody in Bangladesh. At one point there were reports about persons known to be close to ULFA demanding that the Government of India should facilitate Golap Baruah’s release and return home. The most important difference between then and now is that while 15 years ago there was a formal commitment (whose sincerity was suspect even then in official circles, a suspicion that turned out to be justified) to strive for a solution to the issues raised by ULFA within the framework of the Constitution — pending, of course, endorsement by ULFA’s central executive committee, many of whose members were then in prison — such a commitment was not there, not even for form’s sake. What then are the prospects for the next round of talks? A clue can be had in the joint statement released on 7 February 2006 at the end of the second round. A sentence from the joint statement, as reported in the press, reads thus: ‘The Government of India

196 Looking Back into the Future has agreed to examine and initiate a series of confidence-building measures with regard to instance of human rights violations and examine the issue of release of certain detainees in consultation with the State government.’ However, the statement makes no reference to ULFA’s core demand — the suspension of army operations — much less to the government’s expectations that ULFA has to agree to situate its demands and grievances within the framework of the Constitution. Such issues may be taken up only when direct talks are held. There is also the little matter of the forthcoming elections. Any progress or even the appearance of progress on such issues will surely help the ruling Congress party, a key stakeholder in the ongoing process, though it has till now kept a low profile. This will not be the first time that political parties seeking to retain or regain office have played or at least tried to play, the ULFA card, though the organization itself loftily claims that it has in no manner intervened in the Indian political process and indeed wants no piece of it. Despite this appearance of deadlock, if progress were to be made on the promise to ‘initiate a series of confidence-building measures with regards to instances of human rights violations’, that would be a positive gain. Sovereignty can wait, what most people really want is peace. Indeed, even if the talks were to drag on, as they necessarily will since the issue is complex and near irresolvable, an impasse too would be welcome if only peace were to prevail, if there were to be an end to raids, arrests and disappearances, extortions and killings, violence and counter-violence. The problem is that what are seen as instances of human rights’ violations are perceived by the security forces as merely ‘unfortunate excesses’, inevitable and unavoidable in the course of legitimate anti-insurgency operations. When forces with a deeply entrenched security mindset operate in an environment about which they have no understanding, trigger-happy outbursts are bound to get more and more common. In one of the most bizarre instances of its kind, personnel of the Border Security Force recently went berserk at the Kamakhya temple in Guwahati because others in the line ahead of them objected to their trying to jump the queue to secure precedence in darshan (obeisance to the deity). Reports of less bizarre, but far more grim and tragic, incidents create a stir for a day or two and are forgotten, except when

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they involve victims in high-profile areas, as in the army raid in Jeraigaon, the village near Chabua in Tinsukia district, home to many ULFA leaders including its army chief, Paresh Baruah, that led to the blockade of NH-37 on 31 January 2006. The blockade was lifted only after the army handed over the two young men it had picked up to the state police. A few days later, in another incident in a village under the Kakopathar police station also in Tinsukia district, a young man, Ajit Mahanta supposedly an ULFA link man, was picked up by the army authorities on the night of 4–5 February 2006 from his village home. A day later he was dead. The denouement of this incident is still being played out. A prolonged blockade of NH-37 turned violent on 10 February 2006, when the police opened fire on a crowd that had earlier attacked a police station, resulting in the death of eight civilians, apart from the lynching of a policeman. The resulting rage and statewide protests took a long time to subside. It is difficult to say what impact incidents like those in Kakopathar, whose origins are controversial and whose aftermath is unclear, will have on the peace process. Interestingly, while some of the ULFA overground supporters (including some engaged as facilitators of the peace process) have demanded that the security forces should be withdrawn from the affected areas, ULFA has accused unnamed vested interests of provoking a confrontation in Kakopathar with a view to derailing the peace process, virtually endorsing the stand of chief minister Tarun Gogoi who has accused the opposition, Asom Gana Parishad, of instigating the villagers to attack the police station, leading to the police firing and the deaths. A statement issued by ULFA chairman Arabinda Rajkhowa said: ‘Those who are involved in provoking and instigating the people of Kakopathar to attack the police station do not want a political settlement to our problems and simply want to derail the peace process.’ Only one thing is clear: powerful lobbies pressing for the continuation of the talks are as active as those pressing for aborting the whole peace process. Finally, there are varieties of state violence that provoke equally varied responses by way of popular mobilization of rage. After all, such mobilization has also to be sustained by the media which, despite all pretensions to the contrary, has its own agenda, especially in a highly politically charged environment like that in Assam. Thus one notes that between 18 February and 25 February 2006,

198 Looking Back into the Future two English dailies of Guwahati carried 24 photographs (including one of a well known artist re-living on canvas the incidents at Kakopathar) highlighting the mobilization of rage. One also notes, in contrast, that the incident at Salakati railway station near Kokrajhar in the Bodoland Territorial Autonomous District area on 23 December 2005, in which three young men were shot dead by the Indian Reserve Battalion (IRB) during a fracas following an incident of the alleged molestation of local girls in the train by the IRB personnel (one of whom also died in gunfire), is now little more than a speck of smouldering rage and memory among its victims.

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Note ∗ First published in the Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 41, no. 9, 4–10 March 2006.

27 The ‘War’ against the Indian State: Real Victims and Outcome∗ Almost all movements of militant ethno-nationalistic mobilization

in Assam and its environs claim that their ultimate objective is the attainment of sovereignty and freedom for a people seen as suffering unendurable diminishment and oppression from the Indian state. The undeniable fact that this part of the country became part of British India through conquest and annexation between 1826 and 1898 and, later, became part of the modern Indian state as a consequence of the arrangements that led to the transfer of power in August 1947 is almost invariably cited as the clinching proof that the territories and the people of this region were historically never a part of India. Since the modern Indian state has never agreed to negotiate on these fundamental issues, the argument goes, the only path left for the people of the region is to wage an armed struggle to regain their lost independence and sovereignty. To put it simply, and in the rhetoric of the public pronouncements of their leaders, they are at ‘war’ with the Indian state. This inward-looking and pre-determinist reading of history ignores not merely irrelevant formulations about the ‘civilizational unity’ of all the Indian people offered as a counter to separatism by nationalists on the right, but also other more relevant facts like the living memory of the active participation in the freedom struggle and the subsequent making of the Indian Constitution by the people of the region, that the majority of these people do not seek separation from India though there is a desire for greater autonomy in matters that immediately affect them (and similar arguments). That one of the most militant of the separatist movements (Mizo) has made peace with the Indian state without in the least suffering any diminishment of a unique Mizo identity has not

200 Looking Back into the Future influenced the resolve of the separatist movements in the region to carry on, regardless. Three such movements, with several contending and sometimes cooperating factions within each, are active in the region. The Naga, the oldest, whose separatist articulation has some historical legitimacy; the struggle(s) in Manipur comprising three broad streams: the majority Meitei comprising three or four structurally separate organizations, the Naga that dovetails into the larger Naga struggle to the north, and a highly fragmented Kuki stream that is often accused by others as actually being a ‘Made in India’ project; and the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), the youngest and, in its rhetoric, the most uncompromising in its resolve to attain a sovereign and independent Asom. Despite some tactical co-ordination between these militant groups, there are important differences even in their strategic objectives, natural given their international linkages and patrons with their own agendas vis-à-vis India, though they all claim to be ‘at war’ with India. The one common factor, however, is that there is a profound disconnect between their words and actions in their prosecution of this ‘war on India’. For, despite the toll taken by these insurgencies, their confrontations with persons and institutions symbolizing the Indian state power have been surprisingly few. This note limits its analysis to this disconnect that exists between the theory and practice of ULFA’s ‘war on India’. The ULFA, the premier insurgent outfit in Assam, formally founded in April 1979, was viewed in its early stages as merely an ‘extremist wing’ of the mainstream student organization, the All-Assam Students’ Union (AASU) that had led the anti-foreigner agitation in the state and had resisted the holding of the assembly elections that were finally forced through in February 1983 with disastrous consequences. Informed as it was in its founding and early stages by some ill-digested ‘revolutionary’ catch-phrases, its initial action programmes known in the texts as ‘armed propaganda’ comprised looting of banks, attacks on remote police outposts, murder of persons who failed to respond to extortion demands, and the like. There was also an amateurish attempt on the life of Hiteswar Saikia, the ‘illegal’ chief minister, which probably had little do directly with ULFA, for the state did not seriously pursue the case even though the alleged assailant was arrested.

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ULFA, however, came into its own following the signing of the Assam Accord in August 1985 and the formation of the government by the Asom Gana Parishad, a party formed and led by the erstwhile leaders of the Assam agitation. In those days, ULFA, supposedly a clandestine outfit, was all too visible in Guwahati, summoning the media to many a ‘secret’ rendezvous, issuing long statements duly carried verbatim in the press, extorting money and when such extortions were resisted or when the chosen unwilling benefactor did not pay up, killing him. But even when ULFA had a seemingly unchallenged run even in the capital Guwahati, it targeted few symbols of Indian state; and though it did kill some political figures, they were for the most part elderly second-rank leaders with personal factors influencing the killings or, more significantly, grassroots’ level workers of Left parties, in those days the only organized group that resisted ULFA, though this correlation has now changed where some Left parties are concerned. Indeed, of the 10 officially acknowledged political killings in 1986, the first year of AGP rule, only two can be described as explicitly political killings — of Saurav Bora, a CPI (M-L) student leader at Dibrugarh University on 27 May 1986 and of Kalipada Sen, an elderly advocate who was also the chairman of the Citizens Rights Protection Committee and United Minorities Front, then in the context of the anti-foreigner agitation seen as part of a malevolent Bengali conspiracy against the interests of Assam. The other victims comprised low-level Congress workers and even their relatives, other local-level politicians and the like. However, even during this high noon of ULFA, which had a pause with the dismissal of the AGP government with the launching of Operation Bajrang (28 November 1990–18 April 1991) and a set-back later during the now-on-now-suspended-now-off-now-resumed Operation Rhino (September 1991–May 1996), few symbols of the state were successfully targeted. Indeed, this writer cannot recount more than a score of explicitly political killings during this period when ULFA challenged and was confronted with the authority of the Indian state. The story since then is all too familiar. Even those that want the Government of India to sit at talks with the ULFA, concerned about the brutalization of the society in this endless violence and counter-violence, recognize that there is more than braggadocio

202 Looking Back into the Future to its stand that it will talk to the Government of India only if its demand for sovereignty is inscribed in the agenda for talks. Indeed, the pretensions to militancy and an ideological commitment, however misguided and badly digested that ideology may have been, are now little more than tattered shreds of a ‘revolutionary’ cloak that cannot hide the stark reality that its activities now constitute little more than plain terrorism. The victims of the last major symbolic resistance to the holding of an Independence Day parade in 2004 were the schoolchildren of Dhemaji. Perversely inspired by its call to ‘fight against Indians and the Indian state’, young men have at least on two occasions attacked not merely those wanting to apply for jobs in the NF Railway, but even petty shopkeepers, manual workers and unorganized migrant labour, a truly pan-Indian community that has always provided services that the community cannot do without, and in the process, inspiring corresponding ‘militancy’ in Karnataka against ‘the other’ seeking to muscle into the Kannadiga space. Far from confronting the Indian state, let alone debilitating it and pushing it on the path to Death by a Thousand Cuts, such ‘wars against India’ have provided the rationale, and some democratic sanction, to the Indian state to vastly strengthen and refine its coercive instrumentalities. Is this what those fighting for a sovereign Asom want?

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Note ∗ First published in The Hindu, 12 June 2008.

28 Prospects for Peace in Assam∗ Some of the seniormost leaders of the outlawed United Liberation

Front of Asom (ULFA) as well as members of its central committee, who for years had been fugitives from the land of their birth, are now back in Assam. A few arrested years ago and facing trial are in judicial custody. With the return from Bangladesh and arrest in India of the ULFA foreign secretary Sashadhar Chaudhury and finance secretary Chitraban Hazarika early in November 2009 and of chairman Arabinda Rajkhowa and deputy commander-in-chief Raju Baruah early in December 2009, most of these senior ULFA leaders, barring the outfits commander-in-chief Paresh Baruah, are now back in India, and are in prison. Separated for years from each other due to the exigencies of the choices they made long ago, these ULFA leaders would, in the coming months, have an opportunity to exchange views, discuss the past, present and future of their organization and also reconsider the strategies and tactics that have, till now, taken them no closer to their stated objective — the attainment of Swadhin Asom. At one point, it looked as if the controversies over the facts and circumstances of the return to Assam from Bangladesh on 4 December 2009 of Rajkhowa and Raju Baruah had scuppered the careful preparations that had undoubtedly preceded their surfacing in Guwahati, albeit in the custody of police, and wearing handcuffs. That storm has now died down. There are reports that another senior ULFA leader, Bhimkanta Buragohain, who was arrested in the wake of the operations in Bhutan in December 2003 and presently held in Tezpur jail, may also be moved to Guwahati to enable him to join his other comrades. Clearly, the authorities, too, are keen to facilitate such an exchange of ideas among the arrested leaders, hoping that it would make them see reason, and resile from their uncompromising stated positions on the issue of Swadhin Asom.

204 Looking Back into the Future What are the chances of such reconsideration? On the face of it, they are slim. In its public rhetoric, the ULFA continues to remain uncompromising on its ‘demand for a sovereign Asom’. Equally, the central government remains firm in its stand that everything, barring sovereignty, can be discussed. The union home minister has indeed amplified this position further, by requiring that the ULFA abjure violence and lay down arms, though it is difficult to say if these requirements are fulfilled. However, the very formulation, the ‘demand for sovereignty’, is deeply problematic. Sovereignty is hardly ever demanded, let alone granted by any existing sovereign state to a part of its territory. Sovereignty is won only by fighting for it. No nation-state, even the weakest, ever concedes demands for sovereignty. India is in no sense a weak state; and yet ULFA has always conceptualized Swadhin Asom as something that can be ‘demanded’ and secured. If the ULFA has persisted in this stated objective it can only be because it is convinced that the conventional view that a nationstate disintegrates only consequent to defeat in war and foreign occupation does not apply in cases like India, which are riven by huge internal contradictions. The disintegration of the Soviet Union and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia are two recent events that have convinced the ULFA and its ideologues that India, too, is ripe for such dissolution. What is required is the application of unrelenting pressure, seeking — and hoping — to benefit from such fragmentation. Such conceptual contradictions apart, there are other impediments in the way of any possible settlement. Over the 30 years of its existence, nearly 20 years of which were as an outlawed organization, ULFA has developed deep and quite complicated linkages with a variety of other separatist outfits in Assam and in the region. To what extent these linkages will limit the initiatives that ULFA can take is not clear, especially since the character of these linkages itself has changed. Today’s friends were not friends yesterday; for that matter, the enemies of today were not yesterday’s enemies. A study of the relations between ULFA and the several Naga insurgency factions, to take one example, would illustrate the point that insurgency networks are always complicated. They are like a maze where surprises and misdirection are never ending. Equally unclear is to what extent the ULFA leaders now in custody, should they decide to embark upon talks, can carry their

Prospects for Peace in Assam 205

rank and file — fed for years on visions of a Swadhin Asom — with them. It is true that ULFA commander-in-chief Paresh Baruah has ruled out any talks unless the Government of India agrees to include sovereignty in the agenda. Recently, he has also suggested that there should be an independently supervised ‘plebiscite’ or ‘referendum’ on the issue of a Swadhin Asom to decide whether the people of the state — a fraught concept since there are huge and unresolved contradictions between the two formulations, ‘people of Assam’ and ‘Assamese people’ (and such tough contradictions apply to a lesser or greater degree to other people if India too) — really agree with ULFA’s stated objective. The ULFA leaders also need to be educated a little more on the difference between a plebiscite and a referendum, since if even the issue of Swadhin Asom were to placed before the people of the state, the people will vote in a plebiscite not a referendum. The insistence on not abandoning the demand for sovereignty and on inscribing it in the agenda may in itself not be an insurmountable impediment to holding talks. After all, the Government of India has been talking to all the three factions of the Naga rebels, one of which, the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isak-Muivah) (NSCN-IM), now claims to run the Government of the People’s Republic of Nagaland (GPRN), with a capital located within the territory of Nagaland — without any of them giving up on the demand for sovereignty. Further, none of the Naga rebel groups with which the Government of India is talking have surrendered arms. While formally there is a ceasefire, extortion and tax-collection covering all areas of economic activity, and without which the GPRN cannot be run, are facts of life familiar to everyone living in the region. In the case of the Naga rebels, such collection extends to areas claimed for a future Nagalim or Greater Nagaland, in Arunachal Pradesh, Assam and Manipur. What is more to the point is that this is probably the first time that a senior ULFA leader has even suggested that the people of the state may not go all the way with the stated objective of the organization. This indicates that ‘no-sayers’ have been keenly following developments within the state, and sending signals that they too, may come on board under certain conditions. The difference between sovereignty having to be inscribed in the agenda of any possible talks and an open mind on wanting to find out if the people of Assam do want such sovereignty is both obvious and significant.

206 Looking Back into the Future Interestingly, around the same time when he made his most recent demand for a plebiscite (or referendum), Paresh Baruah also came out with another statement that he distributed widely to the media, ‘apologizing’ for the bomb explosions that the ULFA triggered at the Independence Day celebrations on 15 August 2004 at Dhemaji in upper Assam when 19 people, including 10 children, were killed in that explosion. The act also led to widespread public revulsion against the ULFA, some of it finding expression in organized forms. While many innocent non-combatants have been killed in the past, this is the first time that a senior ULFA leader has expressed his regrets and apologized for such an act, though typically, even here, an attempt has been to attribute the outrage to ‘rogue elements’, who were also possibly agents provocateurs. There are other problems, too. Groups and individuals that at one time or another were associated with the ULFA, or in theory and in their mindsets are still drawn to the idea of a Swadhin Asom, have to be brought on board if even reasonably stable peace should return to Assam. Indeed, one cannot be certain if the ULFA leaders who have been in prison facing various charges well before the recent arrests, the two leaders who were arrested early in November (2009) and the two arrested early in December (2009), are of the same mind on the core and peripheral issues in any prospective negotiations. Given the clandestine and secretive nature of the organization, one cannot be sure if those leaders who were free till recently were in close constant contact with each other or if the attainment of Swadhin Asom was their topmost priority all the time. For self-proclaimed revolutionaries with one and only one objective, they were apparently also successful businessmen during their fugitive days in Bangladesh and elsewhere. Two other groups, one of which still considers itself as part of ULFA, have also to be taken on board if and when the talks are held. One of them is the so-called pro-talks ULFA that came out in favour of peace and talks in June 2009. The other is the so-called Surrendered ULFA (SULFA) who surrendered years ago. For all appearances, most members of the latter are leading normal lives, apparently as thriving businessmen. Their status, however, is still ambiguous because the criminal cases filed against them have not been withdrawn. These cases are only dormant and can at any time of the state’s choosing come alive. This detritus of the ULFA, too, may pose some problems.

Prospects for Peace in Assam 207

Despite all these imponderables, the promise to carve out a separate Telangana from Andhra Pradesh may in the words of that supreme master of common sense, Samuel Johnson. ‘wonderfully concentrate the minds’ of the ULFA leaders on issues even more urgent than attainment of sovereignty. Leaving aside the ever-present issue of illegal migration into the state, about which there is an across-the board national awareness though no political consensus, the demand for the creation of separate states from the existing Assam in bound to grow. The ruling party in the Bodoland Territorial Autonomous District has already formally put forth its demand for the creation of a separate full-fledged state of Bodoland. The even more ancient demand for the creation of an autonomous state comprising the two hill districts of Karbi Anglong and North Cachar Hills, in both of which insurgencies are active, may now take the shape of a demand for the creation of two separate states. This possibility is despite the fact that formally the demand is still for the creation of an autonomous state comprising both the districts within Assam. There is also a demand for the creation of a separate Kamatapur state, put forward in the name of the Koch- Rajbanshi, who are also fighting for securing the status of a scheduled tribe, as if the very nomenclature of scheduled tribe is somehow privileged. In Meghalaya, too, the Achik National Volunteer Council, a militant outfit articulating ‘Garo nationalism’ has called for the creation of a separate Garoland. The point, however, is: will these perils and challenges concentrate the minds of ULFA leaders on the very real possibility of a further truncation of Assam? Surely the Swadhin Asom envisaged by ULFA is not an Assam truncated further.

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Note ∗ First published in the Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 45, no. 1, 2 January 2010.

SECTION V: HOMELAND POLITICS

29 Land, Source of all Trouble∗ Though the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) government continues

to enjoy substantial support in its core constituency (at the time of writing, 1987), the Brahmaputra valley, and faces no serious legislative or political threat, some of its actions in the matter of implementation of the Official Language Act, its educational policy as well as its broad policy towards the state’s linguistic, religious and ethnic minorities have come under attack. Particularly noteworthy has been the criticism of the government’s policy towards the state’s truly indigenous people, the hills and plains tribes. Both these groups, the half a dozen or so of the major plains tribal people inhabiting the Brahmaputra valley and the hills tribal people inhabiting the two hill districts of Karbi Anglong and North Cachar, are in ferment. In the Brahmaputra valley, various organizations claiming to speak in the name of plains tribal people have been agitating for the creation of a separate state for them or the constitution of the areas inhabited by them into a union territory. The agitation has not made much headway because the plains tribal people do not live in homogeneous and continuous areas but are scattered all over the state. In the Karbi Anglong and North Cachar Hills districts, the agitation is for the constitution of these districts into an autonomous state within Assam under the provisions of Article 244-A of the Constitution. Two broad alliances, one called the Autonomous State Demand Committee (ASDC) and the other, the Karbi Anglong and North Cachar Hills Autonomous State Demand Committee (KANCHASDCOM) are active in this regard, the former more so. It is easy enough to see these agitations as merely yet another manifestation of the so-called feelings of ‘sub-nationalism’ in Assam. ‘Ethnicity’, after all, is now quite a modish concept and serves as a readymade explanation for any social phenomenon that

212 Looking Back into the Future is incomprehensible to mainstream political thinking. However, the present ferment among the hills and plains tribes appears to be related more fundamentally to the grievances that they, the truly indigenous people of the state, nurse as a consequence of the large-scale alienation of tribal land by successive governments and their failure to mitigate their grievances in any way. On the contrary, the leaders of the tribal people argue that the government has actively connived in the process. The land question in Assam is extremely complicated. Even more than the ‘ethnic’ dimension and the threat to identity, it was the land question that invested the Assam agitation with a measure of legitimacy. Vast areas of the state have for years, and even decades, been settled upon and cultivated by people who have no formal claims on the land. Further, the area of land under revenue lease has remained virtually static. There are also several categories of such ‘illegal’ encroachments and settlements. One category in the riverine areas poses some unique problems because the very location of the land is often a matter of dispute, land masses appearing and disappearing periodically because of the river shifting its course. Further, the encroachers and settlers in these areas being mostly of East Bengal origin, their citizenship status too is a matter of dispute at least in the view of those sections of the Assamese people who actively supported the Assam agitation and were instrumental in ensuring the AGP government’s assumption of political office. The land question insofar as it impinges upon the fate of the tribal people is even more complicated. The tribal people are spread all over the state apart from the designated 45 tribal belts and blocks demarcated formally as areas where transfer of land to non-tribal people is not permitted. But the reality on the ground is that few of these tribal belts and blocks are exclusively or even chiefly inhabited by the tribal people. Alienation of tribal land has been going on, formal legislation against it notwithstanding, thus pushing the tribal people into remoter forest areas where, of course, by virtue of existing legislation covering forests, they in turn become encroachers. So, even the slightest attempt to tackle the problem evokes the strongest opposition. Unwisely, the AGP government’s initial efforts to resolve the issue touched sections which were not merely

Land, Source of all Trouble 213

the most vulnerable but also the least deserving of its zeal for evictions — the tribal people. This was unfortunate because the AGP government claims that it, more than any other previous government in the state, articulates and defends the interests of the indigenous people, including the tribal people. The chief minister has now announced that the eviction of the tribal people has been suspended but the issues raised are not going to disappear. The dilemma of the state government is genuine; it is formally committed, according to clause 10 of the Assam Accord, to securing the removal of all encroachments from government and forest land. But the encroachers and the forces backing them are so deeply entrenched that even motions about securing their removal will create graver problems than the encroachments themselves for the government — as the retreat on the commitment by the chief minister had so tellingly demonstrated. The situation of encroachments into the forests is extremely grim. Though officially 37.17 per cent of the total geographical area of the state is supposed to be under forest cover, including 22.17 per cent of reserve forest, the actual area under such cover is much less. This fact was acknowledged by the state’s forest and revenue mini-sters (incidentally, both are from the plains tribal community) in a memorandum to central leaders, arguing that its eviction policies were not specifically anti-tribal. Some 1,745 sq. km of reserved forests have already been denuded and destroyed to facilitate settlement and cultivation by the encroachers whose total number, according to a recent mop up assessment, is 67, 575 households. Indeed over 10 per cent of the area within the reserve forests has been encroached upon. If this is the officially admitted extent of encroachment one can imagine what the reality on the ground is like. At least in respect of encroachments on forest land, the government has figures of a sort — of the settlements and encroachments in the riverine areas it has no clue. More than a year has passed since the government announced that it would make efforts to find out the extent and character of the encroachments and settlements in these areas. Barring isolated and apparently voluntary attempts to encourage settlements by the indigenous Assamese people in areas close to settlements of suspected migrants, which in the long

214 Looking Back into the Future run will only compound the confusion, there has been no progress in actually assessing the extent and character of these settlements.

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Note ∗ First published in The Hindu, 15 July 1987.

30 Bodoland Territorial Council: Going Round in Circles?∗ The Assam government’s notification enabling the creation

of the Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC) and the prompt and entirely predictable response of one of the major organizations opposed to the creation of any kind of an autonomous political structure covering areas claimed for such a council, suggests that even after nearly two decades of violent agitation on the issue of Bodoland, the confronting forces on all sides, constitutional and extra-constitutional, militant and moderate, in the government and outside the government, have learnt nothing, forgotten nothing. Such anxieties are being expressed, and threats of disruption are being held, despite the fact that the BTC, like the earlier Bodoland Autonomous Council (BAC), falls well short of the original demand for a full-fledged separate state of Bodoland, articulated way back in March 1987 when the Bodoland agitation began, with a strikingly provocative slogan, ‘Divide Assam Fifty Fifty’. Things have now moved so far ahead that it is fruitless to dwell on the rationale, or the necessity and feasibility, of a separate political structure for the Bodo people. The Bodo people are one of the largest, if not the largest, of the eight plains tribal people of the Brahmaputra valley of Assam (nine, if one includes the Barak valley districts), let alone the rest of the plains tribal people who themselves are deeply divided on the issue. The main protagonists and antagonists on the issue of Bodo nationalistic assertion, however, remain the same, though the precise nature of their roles or the names under which they operate and the alliances they have forged may have changed somewhat. The first Memorandum of Settlement was signed on 20 February 1993, with the All-Bodo Students’ Union (ABSU) as the ‘principal signatory’ representing the Bodo nationalistic aspirations. The Bodo

216 Looking Back into the Future People’s Action Committee (BPAC), a structure created by the ABSU itself in replication of the creation of the All-Assam Gana Sangram Parishad by the All-Assam Students’ Union (AASU) during the anti-foreigner agitation, with a view to maintaining the fiction that the AASU was a ‘non-political’ organization, was the co-signatory. In contrast, the latest MoS does not bear the signature of any representative of the ABSU. The principal, indeed the sole, signatory representing Bodo nationalistic aspirations is the chairman of the Bodo Liberation Tigers (BLT), formerly Bodo Liberation Tiger Force or BLTF, a once clandestine structure banned by the union government as a terrorist outfit, whose relationship with the ABSU remains tangential and obscure. The notification, issued on 31 October, came nearly nine months after the signing of the MoS on 10 February 2003, between the representatives of the union and state governments and leaders of the Bodoland agitation,1 itself a telling comment on the pace of ‘progress’ of the implementation of the BTC accord. The BTC is to come into being at a date yet to be announced, possibly after the elections to the Guwahati Municipal Corporation scheduled for 1 December, according to the chief minister, Tarun Gogoi. To no one’s surprise, and in a repetition of a pattern of reaction and resistance that has followed every stage of confrontation and compromise during the prolonged Bodoland agitation, the issuance of the notification has been promptly and predictably followed by the announcement of a programme of agitation by the Sanmilita Janagosthiya Sangram Samity (SJSS), an apex body of several nonBodo organizations opposed to the creation of political structures of any kind making concessions to Bodo autonomist/nationalistic aspirations. The SJSS has threatened to launch a 100-hour bandh from the day the interim council assumes office — to be followed by other agitational programmes in a manner that has now become the norm, following the precedents and patterns set by the Bodoland agitation leaders themselves. Pending elections to the BTC, an interim executive council is to be appointed by the governor of Assam. These elections, according to Article 14 of the MoS, are to be held within six months of the formation of the interim executive council. It is widely expected that the chairman of the BLT, Hagrama Basumatary, who signed the MoS on behalf of the BLT, will head the interim executive council — though the little problem about the cases pending against

Bodoland Territorial Council 217

him on criminal charges, part of the baggage he carried from his days as the leader of the BLTF, is to be sorted out before he can assume office. There is still some lack of clarity about the total area of the BTC, the number of villages and towns that will come within that area, its total population and, above all, the ‘ethnic mix’ of that population. Very broadly, this ‘ethnic mix’ comprises, apart from the Bodo population, the caste-Hindu Assamese who historically belong to the same ‘ethnic’ stock as the Bodos, the Adivasis and the immigrant Muslim communities, every one of whom has reason to be apprehensive of the political and economic consequences of a formal acknowledgement of Bodo hegemony in areas which they view, equally, as their home. The setting up of the BTC without clarifying these issues, and removing these apprehensions, is likely to be one of the most problematic aspects of the functioning of the BTC. First, the physical area of the BTC. The BTC, which will comprise four new contiguous districts — Kokrajhar, Baska, Udalguri and Chirang — on the north bank of the Brahmaputra, is being carved out of eight districts of Assam: Dhubri, Kokrajhar, Bongaigaon, Barpeta, Nalbari, Kamrup, Darrang and Sonitpur. The area of these eight districts is a little over 27,100 sq. km, about 35 per cent of the total area of Assam. The area of the BTC, which will comprise about 40 per cent of the total area of these eight districts, will thus fall considerably short of its original articulated demand for a separate Bodoland — 50 per cent of the total area of Assam — but will approximate to the area covered by the tribal sub-plan. Equally, there is still no finality about the number of villages that will fall within the territory of the BTC. Indeed, disagreements and prolonged wrangling over this issue was one of the factors that delayed the issuing of the notification. According to the MoS, the BTC is to comprise 3,082 villages. BLT leaders signed the MoS even though they had reservations about this number and demanded that an additional 95 villages be included in the BTC territory. In the negotiations that followed the signing of the MoS, it was agreed that a further 13 villages (or a further 25 villages, according to other reports) would be included in the BTC area, thus bringing the total number of villages in the BTC area, as of now, to 3,095 (or 4,002).

218 Looking Back into the Future Further discussions over the inclusion of the remaining 82 (or 70) villages in the BTC are to be held after the formation of the interim territorial council. Such vagueness and inaccuracy is hardly surprising given the imprecision in land revenue records, or even on the ground, regarding the classification, locational identification, or even the names of the villages in Assam, and indeed in much of rural India. However, there is less ambiguity about the major towns (though some of these are at present little more than villages) that will fall within the BTC territory. The most important of these are Kokrajhar, the Bodo heartland as it were and the home of the earliest Bodo autonomist/nationalistic assertion and the major part of Bongaigaon, including the refinery and petrochemical complex, Bijni, Sidli, Tamulpur and Udalguri, the last another historical seat of Bodo autonomist/nationalistic assertion. What about the population of the BTC area and, even more crucially, its ‘ethnic mix’? The MoS wisely, and perhaps unavoidably, remains silent on this crucial question. At the height of the Bodoland agitation in the late 1980s when only the 1971 Census was available (there was no census in Assam in 1981) its leaders claimed that in ‘Assam alone’, the Bodo population was ‘forty lakhs’, a piece of understandable rhetorical exaggeration. According to the 1991 Census, the total Bodo population in the whole state, which would include areas outside the BTC area, including cities like Guwahati, was 12, 67,015. Further, the total population, the total scheduled tribe (ST) population and the total Bodo population of the eight districts from which the BTC area is being carved out, according to the figures of the 1991 Census (the ST figures of the 2001 Census were not available at the time of writing). The figures in Table 30.1 show that the Bodo population in these eight districts amounts to a little over 11 per cent of their total population. What is less clear is whether all the 11,39,194 Bodo people enumerated in these districts in 1991 live in the areas that have been (or are being) demarcated as BTC territory — the 4,000 or so villages and the half a dozen cities and towns; and whether this population clearly constitutes more than 50 per cent of the total population of this BTC territory. Indeed, central to the yet to be resolved dispute over the inclusion of the contested 95 villages in the BTC territory is the crucial criterion (Article 3.2 of the MoS), that the ‘tribal’ (not specifically Bodo) population of these villages should be not less than 50 per cent.

Bodoland Territorial Council 219

Thus, the formal launching of the BTC and the impending assumption of office by the interim territorial council has given a fillip to the fears and anxieties of the considerable non-Bodo population in the BTC areas to mobilizes an agitational programme once again. Given the violence that marked the agitation in all its phases, a resumption of similar sectarian violence is very much on the cards. Table 30.1 Name of the district Dhubri Kokrajhar Bongaigaon Barpeta Nalbari Kamrup Darrang Sonitpur Total

Total population 13,32,475 8,00,659 8,07,523 13,85,659 10,16,390 20,00,071 12,98,860 14,24,287 1,00,65,924

Total ST population

Total Bodo population

32,260 3,29,461 1,41,542 1,10,452 1,79,641 2,14,340 2,24,957 1,52,498 13,85,151

22,628 3,18,432 1,33,904 1,03,413 1,47,690 1,12,796 1,89,962 1,02,369 11,39,194

Source: Census 1991.

For, though the confrontation has always superficially taken a so-called ‘ethnic’ dimension and the MoS speaks high-mindedly about the BTC fulfilling the ‘economic, educational and linguistic aspirations and the preservation of the land rights, socio-cultural and ethnic identity of the Bodos’, the more material issues relating primarily to land and forests, but increasingly also to other areas of ambition and aspiration, such as the shrinking job market, the thriving area of contracts, educational opportunities (such as they are), in all of which the relatively advanced sections of the non-Bodos had a virtual monopoly until now, are likely to be exploited on all sides. Finally, as an illustration of the extreme ad-hocism that has again and again characterized the piecemeal social and political engineering that has been going on in this region in response to any and every kind of agitation, the BTC has been created as an ‘autonomous and self-governing body’ under the provisions of the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution. This Schedule, as is well known, has its origins in the colonial conquest of Assam; and the discovery by the colonial rulers that there were territories beyond the boundaries that they had been able to ‘stabilize’ and about which they knew little, and were even less interested in ‘governing’, except to secure them

220 Looking Back into the Future against other predators. They had little expectation of revenue from these ‘excluded and partially excluded’ territories, anyway. Thus, the identification of the ‘hill areas’ of Assam and the outlying lands took place as difficult-to-access (locational uniqueness) areas inhabited by a people markedly different culturally and socially, who maintained a distance from the more numerous and relatively materially advanced people of the ‘plains’, principally the Hindus and the Muslims. When the Constitution of independent India was drawn up, this distinction was further legitimized, with the broad support of the members of the constituent assembly from the region (though there were some dissenting voices) by the provision of a measure of autonomy, guaranteed under the Sixth Schedule. For over 50 years, the Sixth Schedule has been applicable only to the hill areas of Assam; and even when the states of Nagaland and Meghalaya were created, the provisions of the Sixth Schedule continued to be applicable to them — and only to them. The only other area of the state where its provisions are applicable are Karbi Anglong and the North Cachar Hills, the two residual hill districts of Assam that refused to become part of Meghalaya. For the first time, the ‘locational uniqueness’ of the territories and the people coming under the provisions of the Sixth Schedule has been modified, with the amendment of the Sixth Schedule to satisfy and accommodate the autonomist/nationalistic aspirations of the Bodo people, a people self-defined as ‘plains tribes’. It is yet to be seen whether this concession will be challenged by the people and the political structures of Karbi Anglong and the North Cachar Hills; until now they were the only ones in the state to come under the umbrella of the Sixth Schedule.

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Note and Reference ∗ First published in Frontline, vol. 20, no. 24, 22 November–5 December 2003. 1. Kalyan Chaudhuri, ‘Turning to Peace’, Frontline, vol. 20, no. 5, 1–14 March 2003.

SECTION VI: FROM THE BORDERS OF A BORDERLAND

31 Who Owns History?∗ Questions about the ownership of a people’s history have always

exercised the passions and imagination of people, especially those who for various reasons have become objects of history instead of being in control of their history. The description fits the majority of the people. The same is the case with the felt passions too, though these are not always articulated cogently. Recently (2003), the Naga Students’ Federation (NSF), a body whose support to Naga nationalistic aspirations and Naga sovereignty is well known, issued a directive and a warning requiring non-Naga scholars to secure its permission and clearance before undertaking any academic research pertaining to the Naga people, in particular their history. Maintaining that the history of the Naga people had been distorted by such research by non-Naga scholars, the president of the NSF said that ‘people from outside the Naga community’ would not be allowed to undertake any research on Naga history without the organization’s permission. The immediate provocation for this directive is, apparently, the ‘genome project’ that has been undertaken at Nagaland University. The project, initiated by some scholars of the university, both Naga and non-Naga, has been going on for the last two years (2001, 2002). Among other things, the project requires the collection of blood samples from every Naga tribe. The purpose of such research, with its obvious bearing on aspects of the physical anthropology of the objects of the research, it was felt, could well be to establish — if there is any need to do so — that the various Naga people of Nagaland (and of neighbouring states) who claim historic memories of being one people and who, as both the cause and consequence of the Naga insurgency, are in the process of constructing themselves into Nagas, transcending all tribal divisions, are actually discrete and separate people, not one ‘nation’ as Naga nationalist discourse insists they are.

224 Looking Back into the Future Historically, the Naga people are divided into various tribal communities (the term ‘tribe’ and its derivatives have not yet become politically incorrect usage in these parts, though they will doubtless become so soon) whose numbers as well as nomenclatures have undergone some interesting changes over the years. Official records of the state government at present identify 14 separate tribal groups; however, there can be no finality about this number. At least one of these, the Zeliang-Kuki, is a self-evidently artificial construct, while another, the Chakesang, is a sort of portmanteau construct whose members were not so long ago categorized under three different denominations. Such a process of deconstruction of communities with a seeming internal coherence to reconstruct other identities is not, after all, a unique phenomenon. The concern about ‘genome research’, such as it is (which is how sceptical scholars in the region view the programme), though perhaps ill-informed, is understandable. Those espousing Naga nationalistic aspirations and Naga sovereignty are at present on a high, having got the Government of India to get off its high horse and engage in talks with the leaders of the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (NSCN) on terms laid down by the latter. So, any research at this stage, whose implications might be to provide legitimacy to what Naga nationalists maintain were ‘colonialist constructs’, the atomization of the Naga people into mutually antagonistic tribes, is automatically suspect and could well be seen as a setback to the gains made by the Naga nationalists. While such suspicions might appear utterly ahistorical in any dispassionate consideration of the ‘Naga national question’, the fact is that in these harsh times, history has more or less lost any claims — if indeed it had at any time — of being a detached study of a people’s past and present. Other recent NSF directives that are, in fact, renewals of initiatives undertaken periodically are stricter enforcement of the existing Inner Line Regulations and warnings to non-Naga men residing in the state not to acquire immovable assets or marry Naga women. Interestingly, admonishments against Naga men marrying non-Naga women are seldom issued, consistent with the cultural norms in the rest of the country that see a woman as the custodian of a people’s history and heritage and whose ‘purity’ has to be maintained. In the immediate context, however, the injunction against non-Naga men marrying Naga women is related to

Who Owns History? 225

the widely held conviction that many illegal migrants in the state, overwhelmingly male, have entered into such marriages of convenience with a view to legitimizing their status as permanent residents. On the face of it, such directives that are not enforceable, except through coercion, appear rather silly. For instance, the growth of Dimapur, the ancient capital of the Dimasa kings and now the largest city in Nagaland where the Inner Line Regulations do not apply, has been influenced by considerations that have little to do with Naga nationalism, non-Naga men marrying Naga girls or similar issues. Indeed, the very ownership of the city is contested by Dimasa nationalist organizations fighting for a separate Dimasaland (Dimaraji), with its envisaged territory, as always, including claims across existing state/district boundaries. But then, this is not the first initiative of its kind by the NSF, or indeed by other self-appointed guardians of a people’s history, heritage and culture, terms that can be interpreted elastically. One recalls that during the height of the Assam agitation against foreign nationals, there were calls that Assamese women, in particular students in colleges and universities, should wear only the traditional Assamese dress, which is strikingly beautiful (and quite expensive) but hardly the most practical kind of dress that a young woman could wear every day to work or to college. Again, interestingly, corresponding directives were never issued for the male Assamese youth simply because, as leaders of the antiforeigner agitation, clad in trousers, safari suits or jeans and such accoutrements, it was they who issued such prescriptions and proscriptions. These norms, and the underlying romanticization, fear of and anxieties about female sexuality, continue even to this day, evident in any public function where the mandatory opening song is sung by a chorus of boys and girls, the girls all dressed in traditional finery while the boys are in more casual clothes. Given its origins, which are deeply rooted in the very beginnings of the Naga nationalist struggle, the NSF clearly considers itself as having rather more legitimacy in claiming the ownership of history and issuing more directives than many other corresponding ‘student’ organizations in the region. Indeed, disapproval of, if an not outright ban on, research by ‘outsiders’ on tribal societies of the NE region is becoming the norm.

226 Looking Back into the Future While structures calling for such an exclusion or outright ban are yet in no position to enforce the proscription, they can certainly be an inhibiting factor. ‘We will study our societies ourselves, we will not allow outsiders to study them’ is now a fairly commonplace sentiment among many tribal groups. However, while such a self-appointed gate-keeping role in the sphere of academic research (or modes of social conduct) by student organizations is rather laughable and certainly deserves to be condemned — who gave the authority to the NSF to lay down the law, one may question with all the indignation one can muster — one also has to admit that these new censors have modelled themselves after very respectable and powerful precedents — states and governments — with greater legitimacy. One laughs at (or quails at) such diktats, depending on the muscle that those who issue such orders muster. But academic gate-keeping as a method to control free intellectual activity has perfectly legitimate precedents. The point hardly needs to be pressed in respect of academic research, or even the much less exalted profession of journalism, the routine reporting and analysis of news and events, in NE India. Several ‘sensitive’ areas of study and, in some cases, whole physical spaces, have been demarcated as out of bounds, not solely to foreign scholars but to locals as well. Foreign scholars interested in the region are required to submit details of their proposed research before they get a visa to travel to India, not to speak of further hurdles like the Restricted Area Permit and the Inner Line Permit they have to cross if they visit the area of their study in the region. Their host institutions in the region, too, sometimes come under scrutiny. The rationale for such restrictions and monitoring is that India is now viewed by those in authority as a besieged state; that much of the academic research by foreign scholars and their Indian collaborators relating to the problems in the NE region, very broadly issues of ethnicity, insurgency and unresolved national questions (though much criminality, too, masquerades under such high-sounding problematique), is driven not by academic interest or democratic instincts but by more malignant considerations. Perhaps the kind of restrictions imposed by the Indian state is not unique. Even more likely, they are not being strictly implemented, given the huge internal contradictions that affect every aspect of governance in India, including issues of national security. And what

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has one to make of the reports of stricter monitoring in the United States and other prosperous Western countries of research into ‘sensitive areas’ with a bearing on national security by scholars of the third world, certainly by Arab and Muslim scholars, following the attack on symbols of American authority and power on 11 September 2001? Indeed, even journalists from the third world whose passports clearly identify their profession, are finding it hard to get a visa across the counter; applications for visas that would allow one to work, as different from tourist visas, will in many cases have to be cleared by the authorities in the capital of the country that one plans to visit as part of one’s work. In other words, suspicion and disapproval of ‘foreign’ influences on the subjects of history while those tasked with shaping that history revel in absorbing every aspect of that very same pernicious ‘foreign’ culture is a near universal phenomenon. For instance, the ‘traditional kings and princes’ and ‘traditional leaders’ in South Africa, some of whom are among the richest and most Westernized South Africans, nevertheless mobilize their supporters on the most parochial issues, demand the most feudal of loyalties, routinely admonishing them against succumbing to corrupt Western influence, in the process demarcating vast areas as their exclusive fiefdoms where no political challenge is allowed. Coming closer home, those leaders of the freedom movement in India who had the advantages of a Western education and were highly Westernized in their lifestyles routinely pandered to and promoted ‘traditional’ values for their adoring followers, though not for their own progeny. There is no need to press the point about the advantages that such prohibitions and admonitions have brought to the owners of history.

.

Note ∗ First published in Frontline, vol. 20, no. 19, 13–26 September 2003.

32 Manipur: Burdens of the Past∗ T

he immediate focus of the unrest in Manipur, now in its second month (2004), is a truly nasty and terrifying piece of legislation called the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 (AFSPA). The protests spurred by the alleged rape, torture and murder in the small hours of 11 July (2004) of a young woman, Thangjam Manorama, within hours of her being arrested and taken away from her home by personnel of the Assam Rifles, have taken the appearance of a near mass uprising. The authorities allege, almost as if in extenuation of the killing, that Manorama was an active cadre of the banned People’s Liberation Army (PLA), one of the dozen or so terrorist/militant organizations active in the state, and was killed when she tried to flee from custody. That she could be taken away from her house in the dead of night and killed within hours of being taken into custody, with impunity and without any fear of possible legal or administrative action against such arbitrary conduct, is entirely because of the total immunity that the AFSPA provides perpetrators of such actions in areas notified as ‘disturbed’. Not a day has passed since that dramatic and visceral intervention on the morning of 15 July (2004) by a group of women who appeared naked in front of Kangla Fort, the headquarters of the Assam Rifles in Manipur, holding up banners shaming the authorities and indeed the Indian state, without some manifestation of strident protest and resistance. Although initially women groups took the lead, the protests have now become a more generalized phenomenon with the leadership being provided by Apunba Lup, a loose alliance of some 32 socio-cultural and political organizations. Concessions from the state government, such as the decision to de-notify the Greater Imphal area, which accounts for seven assembly segments, and take it out from the purview of the AFSPA, have had little impact on the mass protests. Indeed, these

Manipur: Burdens of the Past 229

seeming concessions, in particular the announcement of the denotification of the Greater Imphal area from the ambit of the AFSPA, appear to have caused much consternation in New Delhi where the authorities are poised to repeal the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), even though that nasty law, benignity personified when compared to the AFSPA, has only a few weeks to run before it becomes defunct, but are stubbornly refusing to do anything about the demand to repeal the AFSPA. Quite simply, the political constituency adversely affected by the POTA is numerically larger and politically more powerful. In contrast, those affected by the AFSPA, potentially the whole population of the seven states of the NE region, account for less than 40 million, a mere drop in the bucket in the broader Indian electoral context. Size does matter. Another interesting feature of the reaction, such as it is, of the union government is the contrary voices heard about the situation in Manipur from the union home minister and the defence minister. These can perhaps be explained by the fact that while the Assam Rifles is under the administrative control of the home ministry, operationally it is under the defence ministry. This is a small turf war, though perhaps reflecting the larger battles going on in Delhi. But it is the people of Manipur who suffer the consequences. The death by immolation of a youth in Bishenpur, voyeuristically filmed by a television channel and continuously broadcast, and the cremation of his body (which his family refused to receive) by the authorities has further inflamed passions. Clearly, Imphal and the rest of the valley, as much as the rest of the state, is suffering from grievous hurt and wounds, inflicted as much by the state as by a people outraged beyond reason by the damage done to their lives and inner selves by a state and a system that they no longer seem to comprehend, except as abhorrent structures. The irreducible minimum demand is now for the de-notification of the whole state from the purview of the AFSPA — nothing more, nothing less. This was indeed the response of Jagat Thoundam, the spokesperson of the Apunba Lup, to the union government’s offer to ‘hold talks’. ‘We do not have a long list of demands. We are just asking for the withdrawal of the Act and for that there is no need for talks,’ a news agency report on 20 August quoted him as saying. Allied to this is the demand, a longstanding one, that the Assam Rifles should move out of Kangla, a site and a monument with

230 Looking Back into the Future profound spiritual and historical significance for the people of the state, in particular for the people of the Imphal valley. The Assam Rifles authorities have announced several times that they have taken a decision to move out. Even dates for vacating the premises have been announced more than once. But all to no avail; the Assam Rifles remains entrenched in the heart of the city. Indeed this is the situation in every state of the region where the Assam Rifles continues to occupy a prominent salient overlooking the cities. The opposition to this menacing piece of legislation is not new. The demand for the withdrawal of the AFSPA was the central point of a long conversation that this writer had with the late Nameirakpam Bisheshar Singh of the PLA nearly 20 years ago.1 ‘Civil society’ in the state has consistently opposed this Act and demanded its repeal, though this, like so many other aspects of political mobilization and expression in the state, has inescapably been region-specific. Even now, the ferment in the Imphal valley does stand in contrast with the relative indifference to the issue in the hill districts surrounding the valley; the AFSPA has been in force for much longer in some of them, though there have been instances of participation in these protests by groups of tribal women in Imphal, a symbolic unity in opposition to the demand for the withdrawal of the AFSPA, even among those who cherish hostilities or indifference of quite another kind towards each other. The legislation, originally named the Armed Forces (Assam and Manipur) Special Powers Act, was passed in 1958. Two minor verbal amendments later (in 1972, when Manipur became a full-fledged state, and in 1987, when Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh also became states), it is now known as the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958, with the substance of the legislation remaining unaltered. The immediate predecessor to this legislation was the Assam Disturbed Areas Act, 1955, passed by the Assam assembly to meet the exigencies of the Naga insurgency, then under the leadership of the late Angami Zapu Phizo. This state Act was followed three years later by the Armed Forces (Assam and Manipur) Special Powers Act, 1958, a piece of central legislation, identical to the state legislation in all essential respects, ostensibly to deal with the disturbed conditions in the Naga-inhabited areas of Manipur, then a union territory. Incidentally, the Assam Disturbed Areas Act,

Manipur: Burdens of the Past 231

1955, is very much a ‘living’ piece of legislation, with the required notifications designating the ‘disturbed areas’ (in this case, the reserve forests on the Assam–Nagaland border) renewed every six months and duly published in the Assam Gazette. Since those who control and manipulate even protest movements view these areas as ‘remote’, there is hardly a ripple of protest in the state about the continuing application of the Disturbed Areas Act in a part of the state. It is true that the Assam Disturbed Areas Act, 1955, in turn, followed the ‘guidelines’ set by an ordinance passed by the colonial government in August 1942, to counter the opposition to the war effort by the Congress, then leading the freedom movement. However, credit for replicating this terrifying colonial invention legitimizing murder to meet the perceived security concerns of independent India should properly go to Jawaharlal Nehru. In Assam itself, of which the present-day Nagaland was then just a district (and a bit more), another well-known Gandhian leader, Bishnuram Medhi, was then at the helm. Both these leaders, for quite different reasons closely related to their personalities and backgrounds and, in Nehru’s case, an unfortunate first, and only firsthand, exposure to Naga political astuteness, became profoundly unsympathetic to Naga nationalistic aspirations. In due course, another piece of legislation, again replicating in all its substantial aspects the earlier Ordinance (1942), the State Act (1955) and the Central Act (1958), was passed by parliament, covering the state of Jammu and Kashmir. When the AFSPA was passed, the Naga-inhabited Ukhrul district was straightway notified under the Act, to be joined later by other Naga-inhabited areas of the then union territory where, it was judged, the Naga insurgency needed such severe measures for its control. However, there was then little opposition to these notifications in the politically important Imphal valley, inhabited predominantly by the Meitei who constitute about 65 per cent of Manipur’s population. The indifference in the rest of the country when the legislation was passed, or even among the members of parliament who passed the legislation, was more than matched by the bland hypocrisy and the circular reasoning with which assurances were given — and accepted by the MPs, barring the late Jaipal Singh, the tribal leader from Ranchi who insisted on

232 Looking Back into the Future recording his ‘No’ vote — that the legislation was benevolence itself. Thus, Govind Ballabh Pant, then the union home minister, while piloting the Bill said: ‘This is a very simple measure. It only seeks to protect the steps the armed forces might have to take in the disturbed areas... It will be applied only to such parts as have been declared by the administrations concerned as being disturbed... After such a declaration has been made, then alone the provisions of this Bill will be applicable to that particular area. I do not think it is necessary for me to say more in this connection. It is a simple measure.’2

However, when, following widespread unrest in the Imphal valley in 1979–80, coinciding and to some extent inspired by the antiforeigner agitation in Assam, which has had an impact in every state of the region, the majority Meitei people woke up to the terrifying implications of the AFSPA. The official view of these disturbances are best summed up in the governor’s address to the Manipur assembly on 18 February 1981, the first session after the whole state was notified as a ‘disturbed area’ under the AFSPA, which began with a reference to the ‘firm security measures’ taken by the government to contain the activities of extremists. The governor, in his address, said: ‘You are already aware that violent activities of the extremists had occasionally disrupted normal life, especially in the valley areas in the year gone by. The situation deteriorated to such a degree that it was difficult to tackle it with the normal law-enforcing agencies. As a result, the entire State had to be declared as Disturbed Area from the month of September 1980 and the Army called in to assist the civil administration in counter-Insurgency measures. The combined forces of police, army and paramilitary units have since launched vigorous drives with the help and co-operation of the people against the insurgents. As a result, a number of extremists including some hardcore leaders have been apprehended and unauthorized arms and ammunitions seized from them. A number of them had also surrendered with arms and ammunitions and they are being suitably rehabilitated.’3

For good measure, the governor also noted that ‘the law and order situation was further complicated due to widespread students’ unrest in the North-East, especially Assam’. For over

Manipur: Burdens of the Past 233

20 years since then, the whole state of Manipur, and not merely the ‘outlying’ Naga-inhabited areas has remained under the shadow of the AFSPA. It would, however, be facile to attribute the outburst of this rage merely to the killing of a young woman, or even to the AFSPA as such. The nearly-half-a-century-old legislation and its operation in the Imphal valley since September 1980, and the cruelties perpetrated under its protective cover, are proximate causes, mere symptoms of a prolonged social and political crisis, that have catalysed and given a sharp edge to the rage, the roots of which are complex, and lie very deep. Almost every account of modern Manipur written by Manipuri scholars begins with a recital of the circumstances under which the territory lost its independent status and was merged into the union of India. The thrust of these accounts is that the merger of Manipur was accomplished with a combination of cajolement, promises that were not kept, and plain trickery. Such a view of the past is shared by many of the princes and princelings of feudal India as well. However, in the case of Manipur there is a little more substance to such grievances. An account of the constitutional and legal history of Manipur by M. Ibohal Singh begins thus: ‘We find the regular history of Manipur only from the 33 AD.’4 Another scholar exhorts that Manipur’s political history should be read ‘from 24 AD’. These may sound suspiciously close to the first sentence of a history of Ethiopia mockingly quoted by Evelyn Waugh. ‘The first certain knowledge we have of Ethiopian history is when Cush ascended on the throne immediately after the Deluge’.5 But history in Manipur is not mere myth and legend and folk memory; it is also elaborately recorded with an unbroken continuity into modern times, through all the vicissitudes of two millennia, by royal chroniclers. The first written constitution of Manipur, promulgated during the reign of King Loyiamba in the eleventh century, was in force up to 1891. Lest we forget (though the people in Manipur will never let us do so), another written constitution was adopted in March 1947, well before India formally became independent. Underlying the present unrest is the very strong conviction, widely shared in the Imphal valley, that the provisions of this

234 Looking Back into the Future constitution were ignored, if not violated, when the Merger Agreement was forced upon a weak and apparently reluctant monarch (Maharaja Budhachandra Singh) on 21 September 1949. Strictly speaking, the status of Manipur as an independent kingdom came to an end following the Anglo-Manipur conflict of 1891 with the British government, ‘illegally and improperly confiscating the kingdom’, though for form’s sake, the infant prince, Churachand, was installed as the future king. Though Manipur survived the trauma of that misadventure and the harsh penalties that followed, and the prince evolved into a progressive and forward-looking monarch, the kingdom was even then set on the path that led inescapably to the present. Developments taking place outside the territory over which the kingdom had no control, like the World War in which Manipur was an important theatre, only hastened this process. The last straw was the decision of the colonial power to ‘cut and quit’. In the scramble that followed in the princely orders seeking an accommodation with the new rulers, Manipur, dim and remote, got a raw deal. Indeed, most people in Manipur, in particular in the Imphal valley, even now believe that the state and its people were sold short in the Merger Agreement signed on 21 September 1949, with the formal transfer of jurisdiction taking place on 15 October 1949, incidentally the same day on which Tripura too merged with the new dominion of India. This is how Ibohal Singh summarizes this perspective: ‘[S]ome say that the Merger Agreement was undemocratic and inequitable, on these grounds: First, there was no plebiscite of the then people of Manipur on the merger issue. Second, the Merger Agreement violated the Manipur State Constitution, 1947, under which a form of responsible government had started functioning in the State of Manipur. In this respect, it may be pointed out that the power to cede the State of Manipur to the Dominion of India must have been exercised by the Maharaja in accordance with the Manipur State Constitution, 1947.’6

To put it simply, the reason why over a dozen organizations, the oldest of which are also intensely political, are even now actively pushing the line for an independent and sovereign Manipur lies in what continues to be seen as the shabby history of Manipur’s merger with India. This urge to regain sovereignty, though remnants of

Manipur: Burdens of the Past 235

the old royalty are unlikely to have any role in the envisaged sovereign Manipur, animates all these organizations. Being highly intelligent, the leadership also knows that a sovereign Manipur is neither desirable nor feasible, given the correlation of forces between Manipur on the one hand and the states on its borders. Nevertheless, exploitation of these ancient resentments is also an important tool to mobilize support from sections of the population who are both sceptical of, and fascinated by, such an ideology of revivalist nationalism. Ignorance and indifference from Delhi has also helped. One even now wonders why Manipur, with such an ancient history and civilization (that has nothing to do with the puranic history hoisted on its people by a pan-Indian elite), had to wait for a quarter of a century before it could be constituted as one of the states of the Indian union in 1972, after putting up an apprenticeship as a Part-C state and a union territory. In contrast, the Naga Hills, a mere district of Assam, became a full-fledged state in December 1963. One can scarcely miss the object lesson that the two examples offer. Since rage and violence have become so embedded in the daily experience of most people in the NE region (and perhaps in many other parts of the country as well), and with an amoral and inordinately ravenous visual media feeding and being fed by the frenzy that it creates, one overlooks the fact that ordinary life goes on, even in Imphal. As always, the ancient poets spoke the most profound truths using the simplest language: That passed, this too will pass. However, it is impossible to be so glib and phlegmatic about the cumulative impact of such marginalization and rejection on a people so richly endowed in their past, and enveloped in so depressing a present and a future. That is the real fear for the future.

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Note and Reference ∗ First published in the Frontline, vol. 21, no. 18, 28 August–10 September 2004. 1. M.S. Prabhakara, ‘From Insurgency to Legislative Politics’, The Hindu, 21 March 1985.

236 Looking Back into the Future 2. Luingam Luithui and Nandita Haksar, 1984, ‘Debate in Parliament’ in Nagaland File, Lancer, New Delhi, pp. 160–71. 3. Address of the governor to the Manipur Legislative Assembly on 18 February 1981. 4. Ibohal M. Singh, 1986, Constitutional and Legal History of Manipur, Samurau, Imphal: Samurau Lakpa Mayai Lambu Law College. 5. Evelyn Waugh, 1946, When the Going was Good, London: Duckworth (London: Penguin Books, 1951, reprint). The passage is: ‘We looked up the royal family in the Almanach de Gotha and traced their descent from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba; we found a history which began: ‘The first certain knowledge we have of Ethiopian history is when Cush ascended the throne immediately after the Deluge…’ 6. Ibohal M. Singh, Constitutional and Legal History of Manipur.

33 Naga Talks: Territory First, Sovereignty Later∗ One of the positive features of the prolonged talks between the

Government of India and the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (NSCN) currently (the year was 2005) going on in Delhi — nine rounds held, not taking into account the courtesy calls, and the next one scheduled for 9 May (2005) — is that there has been a near total media blackout on what is actually happening during these talks. Such a view may appear strange, coming from a media person. However, given the breathlessness of the Indian media while reporting on conflicts inside the country (in particular of the visual media, which is endlessly caught in the frenzy it creates and exploits in search for higher and then even higher ratings and has, therefore, to manufacture news as excitement every moment of the day and night), this virtual blackout on the progress of the talks whose outcome will affect millions of people in the region by the participants on all sides, barring brief statements about ‘progress being made’, suggested that the talks were perhaps going on well. This was shown to be untrue by the interview Thuingaleng Muivah, the NSCN general secretary, gave to BBC World. Taking part in its Hardtalk India programme, Muivah made some important points about the two crucial and interlinked issues, Naga national sovereignty and Naga territorial imperative, both equally compelling and causally related to the constantly refrained ‘uniqueness of Naga history and situation’, and are, therefore, central to any settlement of the Naga political question. Indeed, this is a constant refrain in almost all the statements of the NSCN leaders: the Government of India should understand the ‘the uniqueness of Naga history and situation’. Two aspects of this ‘uniqueness’ are, one, that the Nagas were never defeated or conquered by India; and two, that the Nagas everywhere have always lived on their own land;

238 Looking Back into the Future what is historically Naga territory has been cut up and parcelled out to neighbouring territories when the whole area was under colonial occupation. While officially, the area of Nagaland as it exists is 16,579 sq. km and the population of the state, Naga as well as non-Naga, is 19,88,636 (India 2002), NSCN accounts of the history of Nagaland claim that ‘the present population of 3.5 million Nagas are spread out in several thousand villages over a 120,000 sq. km land area’. In other words, the construction of the history and territoriality of the people in their neighbourhood has involved, without the consent of the Naga people, a diminution of their own history and territory, indeed of their selves. Thus, in his speech made at the ‘Naga Consultative Conference’ that preceded the formal talks in Delhi, NSCN chairman Isak Swu did not even refer to the issue of sovereignty directly, though that issue still remains central: ‘Unless the Nagas’ aspiration for unification of all Naga-inhabited areas is fully realized no negotiated settlement with the Government of India is possible.’ ‘No permanent and honourable solution can be hammered out to the decades-old political conflict without bringing all Naga-inhabited areas of North-East together.’ On both these issues, Muivah is categorical and uncompromising. And yet, the interview also provides some tantalizing glimpses of possible arrangements and compromises falling short of these minimalist/maximalist objectives. Predictably, both the Khaplang faction of the NSCN and the Adino faction of the Phizoist Naga National Council have accused Muivah and other leaders of having already reached a tacit agreement on such a trade-off diluting if not abandoning the more fundamental issue of Naga national sovereignty, though this is not exactly the case. However, it is also a matter of common knowledge and has been so for some time that the NSCN leaders would agree, as part of a tactical incremental approach to securing a settlement with the Government of India, to something less than absolute national sovereignty as a first step if there were to be a firm commitment by the Government of India on the integration of all Naga-inhabited areas into Nagalim. Viewed historically and in the context of Indian political reality, Naga integration, though a highly complex issue necessitating the consent of the three states concerned as well as a national consensus, is at least in theory less problematic than concessions on the issue of Naga sovereignty. After all, the Indian

Naga Talks: Territory First, Sovereignty Later 239

Constitution does provide for the redrawing of the boundaries of the constituent states. Muivah also makes some distinctions on the nature of the Naga territorial imperative in so far as this would impinge on the territories of Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh and Assam, as well as the opposition within these states to an enlarged Nagalim. Two passages in the interview are indicative of possible compromises, though these are all the time qualified. Even while ruling out that the envisaged Nagalim could be part of the Indian union, with constitutional safeguards against any dilution of sovereignty, Muivah also concedes that this unqualified sovereignty could still allow for a diminution of that sovereignty by sharing, though not surrendering, control over crucial issues like defence, foreign affairs, currency and communications. However, this admission about the possibility of a ‘shared sovereignty’, a concept popularized and propagated by several ‘civil society’ groups sympathetic to secessionist movements in third world countries, is immediately qualified: ‘It’s in the process of being worked out. It may be a little bit too early on my part to make pronouncements on that.’ This, in respect of external affairs and defence, is later clarified thus: ‘So far as our external affairs is concerned primarily Government of India should have them. But whenever the interest of the Nagas is affected Nagas should also be represented.’ The joint defence arrangement envisaged by the NSCN would entail India defending Nagaland in the event of external threat (‘because if Nagaland would be in danger naturally the security of India would also be threatened’) but rules out Nagaland offering help were India to come under attack — this part almost certainly a tongue-in-cheek clarification. However, on the issue of the integration of Naga-inhabited areas outside Nagaland into Nagalim, the interview is far less accommodating, though here, too, there are some interesting nuances. Muivah who is not merely a Naga from Manipur but is a Tangkhul Naga, a people with historically shared links to some of the most intimate and profound aspects of Manipur’s, indeed Meitei, culture and history, is surprisingly quite dismissive of Manipur’s opposition to Nagalim/Greater Nagaland and even suggests that the violent repercussions in Imphal in June–July 2001 to the extension of the ceasefire to all Naga-inhabited areas of the region was essentially manipulated by ‘Meiteis backed by the

240 Looking Back into the Future Indian government’. The fact, however, is that the Nagalim envisaged by NSCN, four districts of Manipur constituting over three-fourths of the state’s territory would be integrated into Nagalim; and the residual Manipur would be entirely surrounded by Nagalim, to be squeezed further when, eventually, Nagalim would be a sovereign country. In the NSCN’s priorities in the matter of integration, Manipur comes first, followed by Arunachal Pradesh (Tirap and Changlang districts, which he believes the political leaders of Arunachal would be ‘willing to cede’) and last, the areas on the Assam–Nagaland border. In the case of areas of Assam claimed for Nagalim, the ground reality is that a substantial part of this area is already under the effective occupation of Nagaland. The territorial imperative of the putative Nagalim of NSCN neatly dovetails into the present reality of the encroachment, consolidation and extension of such encroachment of the eleven reserve forests in what is presently the territory of Assam by the state of Nagaland. Given the complexity of the issues involved and the prolonged preparation that has preceded the formal talks, these are still early days; the states’ positions (on both sides) need not necessarily be the final, take it or leave it, positions. And yet, if the NSCN general secretary has chosen to ‘put his cards on the table’, it could be to emphasize both his understanding of the complexity of the issues involved and the urgency of arriving at a settlement. Federalism and autonomy versus unqualified sovereignty; contending territorial imperatives; and a constantly fluid political situation from which no structure, not even the NSCN, can escape — the interview provides some glimpses of how a beginning could be made, if not in resolving, at least in reconciling these contradictions in matters of sovereignty and territoriality. But concepts like ‘shared sovereignty’, or ‘cross-territorial nationalism’, while sounding profound, do not always work in societies that are driven by exclusivist nationalist passions. Naga history, as articulated across the political spectrum by the Naga people, including interestingly, by the state government in Kohima that has a BJP component, provides a telling example of the strength of such nationalism. Finally, and irrespective of the NSCN leadership’s calculations, a settlement, or even a substantive progress towards a settlement, is unlikely with the fragile coalition in office in Delhi. The coalition

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headed by the ‘right-wing Hindu nationalist’ BJP would have had less problems making and selling a deal to its constituency than the United Progressive Alliance of ‘secular and progressive’ parties. The various rebel groups in contention with the Indian state instinctively understand this seeming contradiction, at least in the NE region.

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Note ∗ First published in The Hindu, 10 May 2005.

34 Insurgencies in Manipur: Politics and Ideology∗ E

very time one travels to Manipur, one returns humbled. This has been the case since my first visit in the late 1960s, long before becoming a journalist. Active insurgency was not even on the horizon then though some resentment against ‘India’ was evident. Between 1983 when I joined The Hindu and mid-1994, I visited the state at least once every year — more than once during some years. In the last eight years I have returned four times. The feeling of inadequacy to confront and understand the complex situation in Manipur, the whys and wherefores of the insurgencies (the plural is advisedly used), the resilience of the ordinary people whose amazing creative energies thrive in the midst of all the pain and violence manifest in every walk of life, has only increased. Thirty-eight years ago, on 21 January 1972, Manipur became a full-fledged state of the Indian union. The status was conferred belatedly and grudgingly, a most underwhelming gift. In the popular perception, this was no big deal. Manipur in its historical imagination was an ‘independent kingdom’ since the first century AD. Its people had ‘histories’ and ‘memories’, longer and deeper than those of most other Indian people when India attained independence. The use of the plurals is necessary, for this historical imagination is not commonly and equally cherished by all the peoples of Manipur. While the Meiteis, the majority inhabiting the Imphal valley, shares these histories and memories, the peoples in the outlying hills cherish other memories, other histories. In reality, Manipur ceased to be an ‘independent kingdom’ in 1891 when, following the killing of some officials — who were part of the British official presence — with the connivance of the Manipur court, Britain took over the kingdom after a brief war. The Battle of Khongjam, a major battle in the conflict, is even now officially

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commemorated every year on 23 April. Another day connected with the war, 13 August 1891, when two leading participants, Thangal General and Tikendrajit Juvaraj, were hanged in public in the heart of Imphal, is commemorated every year as Patriots’ Day. This is only one instance of the appropriation of one kind of historical imagination by the modern state of Manipur whose very legitimacy is challenged by persons and organizations that claim to be the true inheritors of that history and cherish another kind of historical imagination — the insurgencies in the Imphal valley that seek to restore the sovereign status of Manipur. The defeat at the hands of Britain came to be accepted as part of British India’s expansion to secure its eastern frontier in which the independence of Manipur became an inescapable casualty. The fact that Britain did not annex the kingdom, as was done in the case of Assam in 1826 after defeating Burma, which had invaded and ravaged Assam, also helped in the acceptance of the fiction that Manipur remained an independent kingdom, albeit under British protection. The reality was that Manipur was, for all practical purposes, just another native state with its administrative and political control limited to the valley, with Britain administering the outlying hill areas inhabited by tribal people. The subordinate status of the ‘independent kingdom’ was further underlined by the presence of a British Resident. At the time of independence, however, some of the resentment that had remained dormant came to the fore, now that a local elite with the potential to intervene more actively was to become the successor authority in Delhi. Two developments added to this renewed resentment, while the cherry on the top has been the virtual militarization of the administration whose defining element is the terrifying Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA). First, the circumstances under which the annexation/merger of Manipur into the Indian union was achieved — or manipulated. These did little credit to any of the participants in that squalid drama. Following the anti-feudal struggle led by the Manipur Mahasabha, among whose leaders was the legendary communist Hijam Irabot Singh, Maharaja Bodhi Singh set up a committee to draft a constitution in March 1947. The constitution was adopted in July 1947. Thus when the transfer of power took place in Delhi, Manipur became an independent country under a constitutional monarchy, with a constitution of its own that provided for universal adult franchise.

244 Looking Back into the Future Indeed, the developments between the adoption of that constitution and the annexation/integration of Manipur into the Indian union on 15 October 1949 — as part of the process of the integration of Indian states — even now rankle in the historical imagination of the people, in particular the Meiteis. The resentment has been a crucial element in the ideology and politics that have animated the insurgencies in the state, though quite different perspectives of sovereignty linked to the Naga national imagination, whose first eloquent articulator was Angami Zapu Phizo, lie at the root of the Naga insurgency in the Naga-inhabited areas in the hills. There is a sub-text to this anti-feudal struggle that has contributed to the resentment as articulated by the more ‘radical’ of the insurgents. In parts of India, especially in those states where feudalism was most oppressive, the Communist Party of India (CPI) was engaged before and after the transfer of power in militant anti-feudal struggles which in some instances, as in Telangana in Hyderabad state, became armed struggles. The participation of Irabot Singh in the anti-feudal struggle in Manipur, which never became an explicit armed struggle though the authorities were apprehensive over such a possibility, has to be seen against the larger background in which the CPI was a leading player. When the CPI-led armed struggle persisted in Telangana even after the transfer of power, it was ruthlessly crushed. Eventually, the CPI abandoned the line and approach adopted by it, followed by significant changes in its leadership to indicate that the party had forsworn its earlier view. In Irabot’s case it was never clear if he saw the struggle against feudalism in Manipur as part of a larger ‘armed struggle’ to secure ‘independence’ for Manipur. According to Noorul Huda, veteran communist leader of Assam who was closely involved in the political developments of those days in Manipur, ‘there was no evidence of Irabot opposing the merger agreement of 15 October 1949.’ However, in a strange reconstruction of historical imagination, Irabot is being appropriated as an icon of the separatist armed struggles for Manipur’s independence. Two, the formalization of ceding the Kabaw valley to Burma. The valley was always viewed as an integral part of Manipur, though Burma had been in de facto control of the territory as part of the truce negotiated after the Anglo-Burmese war of 1826.

Insurgencies in Manipur 245

The final humiliation was the ‘gifting away’ of the territory to Burma by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1953, during Prime Minister U Nu’s visit to India. The resentment over the formalization of an arrangement that had been in existence since 1834 — when the territory of the Kabaw valley was leased to Burma — 120 years later, may seem strange. However, it was natural when viewed in the context of anxieties over the ‘territorial integrity’ of the state, most dramatically demonstrated by the ‘18 June 2001 uprising’ in the valley to protest against the extension of the ceasefire agreement with the NSCN (I-M) to Manipur. This again is an issue that evokes quite different responses among the majority and the minority population of tribal people inhabiting the five ‘outlying’ districts — Chandel, Churachandpur, Senapati, Tamenglong and Ukhrul. While the historical imagination as evoked by the valley-based insurgencies sees Manipur as an independent state, with its present territory intact, and with the Kabaw valley at some point in the future incorporated into the motherland, the historical imagination and the territorial imperative of the Naga insurgency necessarily involves the disintegration of the present territory of Manipur. The totality of these perspectives, involving conflicting constructions of the historical imagination covering the last 60 years, animates the ideology and politics of the valley-based insurgencies in Manipur, that its people have been ‘at war with India’ since 1949.

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Note ∗ First published in The Hindu, 28 January 2010.

35 Going Around the Mulberry Bush∗ One has lost count but the present round of talks between the

centre and the National Socialist Council of Nagaland led by Isak Swu and Thuingaleng Muivah (NSCN-IM) must be the sixty-sixth or sixty-seventh, not taking into account the informal contacts that began way back in 1967. Perhaps not even during the momentous negotiations for transfer of power that led to the emergence of India and Pakistan as two sovereign nation-states were so many rounds of talks held. This is not surprising. The issues raised by the Naga nationalists, rooted in their conviction that the Naga people simply recovered their independence with the transfer of power in August 1947 and are now seeking only a de jure recognition of that de facto reality, are so complex that some of the earlier parleys too — dating back to the days before India formally attained independence, from the Nine-Point Agreement of June 1947 to the Shillong Accord of November 1975 — were equally prolonged. However, while the centre seems to have become adept at stonewalling demands during these negotiations, the Naga nationalists who, above all, want a solution, are left floundering. The Shillong Accord that was supposed to have brought peace to Nagaland marked the beginning of divisions within the Naga nationalist movement, reflecting the divide in Naga society. However, the emergence of the NSCN in January 1980 was no less divisive, leading eight years later to another split, this time in the NSCN, resulting in the formation of the faction that views itself as the legitimate standard-bearer of Naga nationalism. It is using the initials of its principal office-bearers to distinguish itself from the other faction, NSCN-K (for Khaplang) — a tribute, indeed, to the factionalism of despised India’s mainstream political culture.

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Nor has the emergence of professedly militant and uncompromising, and contending, Naga nationalist factions meant the total political demise of the Phizoist Naga Nationalist Council. The result is that though the NSCN-IM claims with some legitimacy and the media too, even more than the Government of India, project the organization as the structure with which an agreement has to be sealed for a ‘lasting peace in Nagaland’, there are several other actors who cannot be ignored. First, there is the state government which, irrespective of its political persuasion, has always been in a symbiotic relationship with militant Naga nationalism of every complexion and persuasion. Then, there is the NSCN-K, with which too, the GOI has a ceasefire agreement and is holding talks, though with less visibility. Of late, the NNC under the daughter of Angami Zapu Phizo has been demanding that it also be heard for a ‘lasting peace’. The similarities to the situation with the United Liberation Front of Asom in Assam are striking. Any prospective talks between the government and the ULFA will necessarily include, irrespective of the outfit’s claims that it is the sole representative of Assamese nationalist aspirations, the real and constructed clones of the ULFA claiming the same legitimacy, as well as the state government. Formally, there is a ceasefire agreement between the government and both NSCN factions. Negotiations for ‘a lasting peace in Nagaland’ are also on with both factions, each of which claims it is the ‘sole representative’ of the Naga nationalist aspirations. This fiction has given tremendous leeway to the government while tying the other side in knots. This was evident in the prolonged talks held in New Delhi over several weeks in early 2005, when Muivah gave vent to both his hopes and frustrations over the seemingly never-ending negotiations in his April 2005 interview on the Hardtalk programme of the BBC. Indeed, even before that interview, he seemed quite reconciled to and even ready for the collapse of the peace process — ready to ‘walk away’. Addressing the Naga People’s Consultative Conference (20–21 January 2005) in ‘Hebron’, the headquarters of the Government of the People’s Republic of Nagalim (GPRN) near Dimapur, Muivah said the NSCN-IM would never compromise on its ‘core demands’: Naga sovereignty and the integration of the Naga-inhabited areas at present outside Nagaland into one territorial unit. ‘Bhangile bhangibo (if the talks break down, so be it),’

248 Looking Back into the Future he said, using the expressive Assamese idiom to communicate to a predominantly Nagaland-based audience whose lingua franca is a form of Assamese. National sovereignty and the territorial imperative: these are the cutting edges of Naga nationalism. They are also the very essence of Indian nationalism, the bottom line on which no political formation can even appear to compromise. There is the even more problematic issue of Manipuri nationalism with a political programme of attaining a sovereign Manipur. The political map of ‘southern Nagalim’ includes four districts of Manipur: Senapati, Ukhrul, Tamenglong and Chandel. It is true that Naga insurgency derived much support from these areas in its early years. However, such is not the case now. Half-a-century down the line, the very Naga character of a once totally homogenous Ukhrul district has changed. The demographic changes in other areas claimed for ‘southern Nagalim’ are even more far-reaching. They are also, like all demographic changes, irreversible. This probably explains the efforts of the NSCN-IM to mobilize public opinion in the Ukhrul and Senapati districts in its support. Even a trade-off between territoriality and sovereignty as a special case applicable only to the Naga nationalist struggle, retaining the substance of one and a compromise on the other, is not possible. The maximum concession the government is prepared to make is an unspecified assurance of ‘greater autonomy’. Both sides know this. And yet every round of talks so far has ended in a stalemate or impasse or deadlock, only to be resumed at another time, perhaps in another venue. The fact is that despite its frustrations and threats of ‘walking away’, the NSCN-IM, no less than other Naga nationalist organizations, simply cannot afford to do so. Walking away would only mean walking away into oblivion. While the structures of the state and the government represented by ‘India’ may be corrupt, a mixed bag as in every other component of the Indian state, the people of the state have had uninterrupted peace. The dramatic changes that began in the 1990s and their seamy underbelly, which are now a feature not merely of urban India but also evident in small towns and villages, have not bypassed the Naga-inhabited areas. Nagaland and the Nagas may be terra incognita and persona incognita to much of the rest of India; but the Naga people have discovered India in massive numbers.

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The NSCN-IM, too, has made many gains. It runs what amounts to a parallel government in the state, collects taxes, and sometimes dispenses justice as it sees fit. When in February 2005, a popular non-Naga official working in Ukhrul was killed apparently by persons linked to the NSCN-IM, the arrest of one of the suspects was ‘facilitated’ by the NSCN-IM. Ukhrul at the height of the Naga insurgency was virtually dead by dusk; now shops, some of them owned and run by non-Nagas, are open late into the night. This writer was recently able to send an e-mail and speak to a friend in Johannesburg well past 10 p.m. from a cybercafé in Ukhrul. Life in Dimapur in Nagaland, the only city where the Inner Line Regulations do not apply and has consequently become an ‘open city’, is now more orderly, secure. These are not small gains. The other side of peace is the spread and consolidation of the presence of the armed forces. Two corps, 3 and 4, of the armed forces are now headquartered in the NE region — in Tezpur and Dimapur. There is no need to press the point, or press the implications of such a massive presence of the armed forces for any attempt to resurrect insurgency. Unlike till late into the 1990s, the armed forces are now well equipped with the most sophisticated weapons. They are familiar with the region’s social and political landscape, including those represented by the powerful and resourceful NGO sector. They are conversant with the theories and practice of insurgency and counter-insurgency as well as theories of development as a tactic to counter insurgency. So, talk the two sides will, talk they must, though a satisfactory convergence of the stands taken by them is nowhere in sight.

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Note ∗ First published in The Hindu, 20 March 2010.

SECTION VII: THEORETICAL UNDERPINNINGS

36 Varieties of Separatism∗ A

bout 30 organizations described variously as terrorist or militant or insurgent are active in Asom (formerly Assam) and other states in North-East India. The South Asia Terrorism Portal actually identifies over a hundred ‘terrorist/insurgent groups’ in the region.1 Most of these are admittedly little more than names and signboards with poorly written constitutions, manifestoes and charters of demand, engaged principally in extortion and racketeering; many are very nearly moribund. Others, rather more active and with a little more substance to them and with a demonstrated capacity for violence, having a ‘greater autonomy’ agenda that falls short of sovereignty assertion, are sporadically engaged in violent activities alternating with some kind of negotiations with the state/central governments. However, about a dozen of the 30 odd ‘active’ organizations, while engaged like the rest of the signboard organizations in extortion, are also engaged in ‘armed propaganda’ that over the years has evolved into an ‘armed struggle’ against the Indian state. While they may differ from each other in their immediate and ultimate stated objectives, in their operational methods and organizational structures, they also share some common features. All of them claim to represent the people in whose name, and to advance whose interests, they have come into being, often being founded specifically with such an objective. They are all, in varying degrees, separatist, indeed secessionist. They are dissatisfied with their present position and status in the larger structure called the Indian state, or for that matter, the state or states where they operate, and want to force the Indian government, against which they are engaged in an ‘armed struggle’, to renegotiate their position vis-à-vis these larger structures. All of them have clearly or vaguely spelt out agendas of attaining sovereignty, or (in their perspective) restoration of sovereignty that has been lost as part of the process of the transfer of power and the subsequent consolidation of the Indian state.

254 Looking Back into the Future The most notable of these are: the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) that seeks to restore the lost sovereignty of Assam, lost after the annexation of the territory by the British in the wake of the defeat of the Burmese invasion of Assam and the signing of the Treaty of Yandabo on 24 February 1826; and the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (NSCN) led by Isak Swu and Thuingaleng Muivah, as well as two other Naga nationalist formations, all offshoots of the same Naga sovereignty assertion initiated by the late Angami Zapu Phizo at the very dawn of Indian independence. In this perspective, the Naga people ‘declared their independence’ on 14 August 1947, on the eve of India’s independence. The oldest organization of this kind engaged in ‘armed struggle’ in Manipur is the United National Liberation Front (UNLF), though similar aspirations for the restoration (or winning back through armed struggle) of Manipur’s lost sovereignty (‘the undemocratic and inequitable Merger Agreement of 15 October 1949) are being actively canvassed through similar struggles by three or four other organizations. In other words, in three of the seven states of the NE region, Assam, Nagaland and Manipur, about half a dozen organizations are seriously in business, with the stated objective of restoring to the people they claim to represent their lost sovereignty by engaging in ‘armed struggle’ against the Indian state. The history and geography of the territories involved being what they are, there are inescapably conflicting territorial issues involved in and indeed integral to the sovereignty aspirations. An ironic aspect of this interface between sovereignty and territoriality is that it impinges on all the states where these organizations are active, highlighting some of the fundamental contradictions of these sovereignty struggles against their common adversary — the Indian state. This is especially so with the Naga sovereignty struggle that, were it to succeed in the way envisaged by the Naga nationalist organizations, would have the gravest implications for both Assam and Manipur as well as Arunachal Pradesh, as they presently exist and, potentially, to Myanmar as well. How seriously do these organizations believe that they can attain sovereignty, considering that their adversary in their struggles is the Indian state that, despite its many infirmities and internal contradictions, is no pushover, and is certainly not ripe for disintegration? The leadership of these organizations, sophisticated

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and well informed about history, know full well that their ‘armed struggles’ have, in the larger Indian context, had very little impact on Indian polity. Nearly half a century of ‘armed struggle’ has not really advanced Naga aspirations for sovereignty. One may well ask whether six or seven years of talks of every variety — direct and indirect, through emissaries and interlocutors and face-to-face meetings with representatives of the government including three or four prime ministers, in Delhi and in foreign lands — has advanced these sovereignty aspirations. The only gain, a major gain, made in these long years of talks is the legitimacy that the de facto government of Nagalim has acquired, though the existence of such a government owes little to the protracted negotiations. The fact is that the defeat of the Indian state by the ‘armed struggles’ being waged by the various separatist groups is not even envisaged by the most belligerent of these groups. And yet, they press on, unrelenting in their desire to secure their lost sovereignty. According to received wisdom, a nation-state, even a very weak one, does not break up except under two conditions: defeat in war and occupation by a foreign enemy. There are numerous instances of extremely fragile nation-states continuing to remain united despite serious internal contradictions marked by conflicts related to ethnicity, language, religion and such other coordinates of classic disintegration of nation-states. To take an instance close to home, but for Indian intervention, it is arguable whether the seemingly unviable state of Pakistan would have disintegrated, despite the intense internal contradictions exacerbated further by the lack of statesmanship of its leaders in both West and East Pakistan. India is simply too big and too powerful a country to be defeated in war, or allow for foreign occupation, which are the two historically acknowledged and demonstrated requirements, for a nation-state to disintegrate. Such disintegration is a necessary precondition for any of the sovereignty struggles in the NE region to succeed, since the defeat of India by any of the insurgent groups (or all of them acting unitedly, a most inconceivable scenario), in armed confrontation is simply not on the cards. Knowing these simple facts as well as the next person, the leaderships of these organizations persist in their ‘armed struggles’. On the other hand, there is also the example of the Soviet Union, as strong and centralized a state as one can imagine, collapsing without foreign intervention, defeat in war and occupation by

256 Looking Back into the Future enemy forces. While the subsequent disintegration of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was considerably assisted by foreign intervention, even in this case developments internal to the country were, in the final analysis, the decisive factor that contributed to the destruction of the Federal Republic. The modest and continuing gains being made by the Catalonian autonomy movement in Spain and the rather more dramatic developments in Montenegro, which in May 2006 narrowly voted in a national referendum for secession and independence from Serbia, hold promises for the separatist movements in the region. It is interesting that the current campaign in Manipur (as always receiving very little notice nationally) for a plebiscite on the issue of Manipur’s independence — proposed initially by the UNLF and since then taken up enthusiastically by several ‘civil society’ organizations — followed closely, indeed almost conterminously, in the wake of the referendum in Montenegro. Among those who addressed such a plebiscite meeting in Imphal on 6 June 2006 was the titular king of Manipur, apart from several other dignitaries like a former Lok Sabha member, a former human rights commissioner, president of the Manipur Working Journalist’s Union, leaders of some political parties and several women leaders – always a potent force in Manipur. An old song had this refrain: ‘Tell Me What You Want and I’ll Tell You What You Get’. It would be tempting to see in these words a neat summary of the opacity that characterizes the stated stands of these separatist organizations and the Indian government. However, an organization like ULFA has never minced its words in saying what it wants. The only problem is that it is impossible to accept this stated objective, the attainment of Swadhin Asom, as a realizable objective, or that even ULFA really believes that such an objective is attainable through armed struggle, unless the kind of extraordinary circumstances that prevailed in the instances cited above can be replicated in this country. This is not on the cards. Moreover, the sole superpower for the present would be loth to see India disintegrate, unlike when the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia broke up. However, the persistence in the face of ‘proven facts to contrary’ is not in the least irrational. Rather, such persistence can be understood if one realizes that ULFA and, even more so, its ideologues within Assam, or spread out in metropolitan centres

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in the rest of India and abroad, a most influential lobby of nonresident Asomiya who are not necessarily part of the organization (a complex dynamic that will take too long to explain), and an even more amorphous ‘civil society’ network entrenched for the most part in the developed countries of the West, are of the view that such conventional notions about the durability, indeed the very viability of the nation-state (even of a strong nation-state that is internally coherent, fair and just in its governance, which is hardly the case with India), are no more valid in the brave new world of globalized and wired — or ‘wirelessed’ — twenty-first century. Thus, notions of the nation-state, national sovereignty and citizenship rights derived from a country’s Constitution, indeed, the very distinction between a citizen and migrant who is not yet a citizen, securely demarcated borders and such things need to be turned upside down in this new dispensation of borderless territories and shared sovereignties. Such ideas, never canvassed in respect of the nationality problems and struggles in first world countries, are prevalent in every part of the region and animate every nationality struggle. Seen in this perspective, the arguments about whether the separatist struggles — even when these become active insurgencies (till now only the Naga struggle and the resolved Mizo struggle have attained the status of active insurgencies) — can ever defeat the might of the Indian state are utterly irrelevant. Indeed, the neverending talks and talks about talks, the unending hair-splitting over procedures and protocols, about whether the government should first release the five imprisoned ULFA leaders or whether ULFA should first give it in writing that it will attend the talks in the event of these leaders being released, are all sideshows. They are mere exercises in sleight-of-hand and prestidigitation intended to obscure the real agenda, part of the games that people at the top play even when the issues are one of life and death for the ordinary people, who are mere objects of history. The Indian state, in this perspective, is getting more and more enfeebled, unable to resolve the larger contradictions besetting it nationally. What the struggles of these marginalized nationalities in the marginal regions of the country need to do is to keep up the pressure, keep on chipping away. With the received ideas of the nation-state themselves losing their legitimacy, such ‘unviable’ entities like the Indian state are

258 Looking Back into the Future bound to crack up and collapse, even without external aggression, defeat in war and foreign occupation. Such a reading of history informs the resolve of separate organizations to carry on their struggles over generations, the reality that underlies the rhetoric: ‘We have fought for fifty years; we are prepared to fight for fifty more years,’ as Muivah was reported to have said at a moment of great frustration over the lack of progress in the ‘Indo-Naga dialogue’.

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Note and Reference ∗ First published in Frontline, vol. 23, no. 18, 9–22 September 2006. 1. http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/site.htm

37 Separatist Movements in the North-East: Rhetoric and Reality∗ I

A

feature of the current political volatility and tensions in the region imprecisely but conveniently referred to as the ‘North-East’ is that while the nation-state that is India is strengthening and extending its instrumentalities, in particular its coercive instrumentalities, while its effectiveness and relevance is getting marginalized, there is a corresponding move, in some cases almost a generalized movement, among several communities in the region to assert their separateness from their historical, social and political environment, the first step in the long and hard process of securing some sort of official recognition of this separateness. This process, which may conveniently be denoted by the rather ungainly expression, ‘ethno-nationalistic assertion’, is not limited to communities with a historically or self-defined identity with fears of being subsumed by the larger Indian nationalist assertion. It is evident even among numerically very small communities who too, want to define themselves in politically, culturally and, necessarily, also territorially, larger terms, investing themselves with a more self-defined political identity than the factors that defined them till recently. This trend is by no means unique to this region. The tensions between (and within) the states and the union are a constant in the Indian system where the federalist, not to speak of autonomist, separatist, disintegrationist and secessionist tendencies, have always been in contention with the unitary, centralizing tendencies. This is perhaps seen in sharp focus in this region and, in a situation marked by different historical factors, in Jammu and Kashmir. But the autonomist assertion itself, an expression of such separatism

260 Looking Back into the Future in its most legitimate form, is an all too common feature of the Indian federal system that is federal in theory (India is a union of states) but highly unitary and centralized in practice. For the sake of convenience, this article uses the term ‘separatist’ throughout to qualify these movements though some of them are potentially also secessionist. While the Indian state has allowed some space for movements of autonomist assertion and even separatist assertions that are not explicitly secessionist (though potentially so), such assertions explicitly articulating disintegrationist and secessionist tendencies clearly pose a radical challenge to the internal coherence and political unity of the Indian state. Instances of such challenge abound and the state has been peculiarly assisted as well as shackled by the very instrumentalities it has at its disposal in tackling and resolving this challenge, while trying to remain true to its democratic pretensions. The consolidation of the Indian state in so far as its coercive instrumentalities are concerned, along with its increasing indifference to and marginalization in matters of development benefiting all sections of the people, is a fact that is blazingly evident. This, though profoundly important and is indeed central to the persistence, and the emergence of newer varieties of autonomist/separatist assertions in the region, is too large a subject and is not being considered here. What is more problematic, which is the subject of this article, is the tendency of the component units of the region, and of groups that do not have any ‘official recognition’ either as a community or as inhabitants of a defined territory within such component units, to see themselves as nations or incipient nations and go on to assert, not always peacefully or in a constitutional manner, their respective separatist identities as a caste, a tribe, a nationality or even a potential nation. Every one of these separatist assertions is predicated on the affirmation of an ‘ethno-nationalist identity’, supposedly a unique, one-of-a-kind identity, that as a political construct may seem in many cases to be an invention. However, even if there is an element of fiction in the ‘historical memories’ — real or false, it does not matter — underlying such inventive identity assertions, the fictiveness does not mitigate the passion or virulence of such affirmations.

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Such identity inventions and constructions are by and large a post-independence phenomenon, closely related to the space that democracy, even of the flawed kind as in India, offers. The Naga people, to take the most striking example of national sovereignty assertion in this region, have had a strong sense of their collective being, divided as much as united within and among themselves, though the material underpinnings of such inter- and intra-tribal conflict and co-existence are yet to be seriously studied. This was the case even under colonial rule when these segmental identifications became formalized and virtually codified in studies by colonial ethnographers. The social and political rubric of Naganess, a commonality marked by a politically articulated territorial identity, the sovereignty of Naga nationhood animated by Naga nationalist aspirations, distancing itself from and in opposition to Indian nationalism and prosecuted through armed struggle is, however a post-independence phenomenon. There have been corresponding assertions among several other communities. Some, like the Mizos, have made peace and come to terms with being part of the larger Indian nation-state. Other varieties of such separatist assertion explicitly seeking sovereignty have emerged from within communities (like the Assamese) who are in no way peripheral communities in terms of their language, religion, caste, ethnicity and so on; indeed, they are very much part of the pan-Indian nationalist assertion that animated the freedom movement. Yet others appear to have made tactical concessions while not abandoning their strategic objective. On the other hand are separatist assertions that do not aspire to anything more than a political acknowledgement of the uniqueness of their identity, or a more clearly defined identity in consonance with the community’s sense of its historical self. Such recognition and acknowledgement is the first step to secure a well-defined political and territorial space, if possible exclusive, within the structures of which they are a part.

II A brief account of how the Bodo assertion of separateness from the people in and around their environs (with whom they historically shared a common or a non-adversarial identity) took shape over a period of time, could help understand the demand that may well

262 Looking Back into the Future become a movement by six non-tribal communities of Assam, classified as other backward classes (OBC), for recognition as scheduled tribes, and its likely shape and direction. The communities making this demand for ‘upgradation’ to ST status are the Ahom (also known as Tai-Ahom), the Chutiya, the Matak (Motok), the Moran, the Koch-Rajbanshi (also known as Sarania Kachari) and the tea garden and ex-tea garden labour. Altogether 28 communities are listed as OBC in Assam, including the tea garden and ex-tea garden labour that collectively are now known as Adivasis. This category (No. 26 in the official list of OBC, under the head, ‘Tea Garden Labourers, Tea Garden Tribes, Ex-Tea Garden Labourers and ex-Tea Garden Tribes) has 96 sub-categories, some of whom clearly have or have had a tribal status. These are the descendants over several generations of the largely tribal population from central and eastern India, indentured in the nineteenth century to work in the tea plantations of Assam and Bengal. Since OBC communities are not separately enumerated in the census, precise figures of their numbers are not available, enabling an open season for the most exaggerated estimates and guesstimates. Numerical strength being a highly political issue, complaints of under-enumeration and exaggerated claims of their numbers are made even by communities that are regularly enumerated in censuses. Since the tea plantation labour has always been organized and ex-tea plantation labour lives in proximity to the plantations, estimates of their population, at about twenty lakh, may be a close approximation to reality. They thus constitute the third numerically largest community in the state, after the Hindus and the Muslims. Overwhelmingly drawn from tribal communities of middle and eastern India to which their ancestors belonged, their descendants, however, do not have a tribal status because of the ‘locational specificity’ of such recognition.1 The case of the Koch-Rajbanshi (also known as Sarania Kachari) presents its own unique features. This community, as is evident in its other nomenclature, is historically part of the Bodo Kachari stock. It moved out of the Bodo Kachari fold over a period of time, and through a complex process of conversion and acculturation into the Vaishanvite variety of Hinduism in the Brahmaputra valley of Assam, and came to occupy one of the lower rings of caste Hindu Assamese society. For a brief period less of than one year in 1996,

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the Koch-Rajbangshi community, by a gazette notification, was included in the list of scheduled tribes and taken out of the OBC list. However, this notification was never formally legislated and the community is now once again classified as OBC. The case of the four other communities, the Ahom, the Chutiya, the Motok and the Moran, also has some unique features. The lines between these communities, in particular the Ahom, the Motak and the Moran, are blurred; and in some historical accounts they are clubbed together.2 While the Ahoms ruled Assam for six centuries, the others, too, had their minor kingdoms, subservient to and on occasion challenging the Ahom state. Their classification as OBC and the demand for recognition as a scheduled tribe does sit oddly with a people who ruled Assam for centuries. Such demands from non-tribal communities for their ‘upgradation’ to scheduled tribe status or the movements for ‘retribalization’ perversely privilege the tribal status, ignoring the harsh realities of tribal deprivation. They also reflect the envy and resentment of many non-tribal communities over what they see as the ‘undue benefits’ enjoyed by the small minority of tribal people under the provisions for protective discrimination. Representative tribal organizations like the Assam Tribal Sangha have strongly opposed such demands and movements.

III The trajectory of the Bodo (also known as Bodo Kachari) separatist identity articulation and assertion, the beginnings of which can be traced to the days before independence, presents a useful case study and a model that may help in understanding the newer varieties of separatism and their strategies of mobilization. The mobilization, necessarily in that historical context against ‘Assamese domination’ (land, jobs, matters relating to language and culture and ‘ethnicity’, the very same resentments articulated by the hills tribes of the composite state of Assam) also presents perhaps the clearest instance of an incremental evolution of the Bodo ‘national’ consciousness. Identity assertions of this kind generally have three components complementing each other in this articulation: education, culture and politics. In practice, however, students have been at the forefront of all such mobilization. The Bodo Chhatra Sanmilini (Bodo Students’ Conference) founded in 1919, the first Bodo student organization,

264 Looking Back into the Future is now part of the archives of Bodo separatism, overtaken by the All-Bodo Students’ Union founded in February 1967. Almost two decades after it was founded, Upendranath Brahma was elected president with a mandate to launch the struggle for Bodoland, with an all or nothing slogan: ‘Divide Assam Fifty Fifty’. He died young, at the height of the agitation, and is venerated by his political heirs as Bodofa, father of the Bodo nationalist assertion. The present stage of this assertion, whose original aspiration for a separate Bodoland is yet to be realized, is the territorial structure, with little political and financial powers, called Bodoland Territorial Autonomous District (BTAD), seen by its proponents as merely a transit point in the struggle for the attainment of a full-fledged Bodoland state. Militant factions that emerged out of the Bodoland struggle still hope, peacefully or through other means, to transform this achievement to a sovereign Bodoland. The premier cultural organization of this assertion is the Bodo Sahitya Sabha (1952) which played a seminal role in the agitation in the mid-1970s (in which the ABSU as well as the Plains Tribal Council of Assam were active) for the adoption of the Roman script for the Bodo language, in preference to the Assamese script that had till then been used.3 The state government, which had only recently come to terms with the reorganization of the composite state of Assam (1970–72) that had led to the creation of the state of Meghalaya and the union territory of Mizoram (later to be elevated into a full-fledged state following the Mizo Accord) saw the agitation as the thin end of the wedge of Udayachal that was being demanded by the Plains Tribal Council of Assam (PTCA), a separate union territory comprising Bodo-inhabited areas of Assam, tried to suppress the agitation and later yielded with bad grace, ‘compromising’ on the Devanagari script. The first attempt at separatist Bodo political mobilization goes back to the days before independence when various Bodo Kachari youth organizations under the Kachari Jubok Sanmilini (Kachari Youth Association) resolved to cooperate with the Indian Statutory Commission (Simon Commission). Affirming the loyalty of the Kachari community to the ‘King and Emperor’, the memorandums (there were four separate district-wise memorandums) demanded separate electorates for the community. This demand was attained under the All-Assam Plains Tribal League, founded in 1933, enabling the Bodo community to vote

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on the basis of a separate electorate in the election held under the Government of India Act, 1935.4 Interestingly, the memorandum submitted on behalf of the Bodo community of Goalpara district also explicitly asserted that ‘We Bodos can by no means call us other than Assamese’, this assertion being related to the apprehensions that the district might be transferred to Bengal.5 The distancing in this first manifestation of Bodo separatism from Indian nationalist opinion that had called for a boycott of the Commission while affirming the commonality with Assam and Assamese underlines the contradictions and cross-currents in Bodo separatism vis-à-vis India and Assam. Thanks to its achievement and also to the complexities of ministry formation in the pre-independence province of Assam, the All-Assam Plains Tribal League was for brief periods part of two Muslim League-led ministries under Muhammad Sadullah as premier. It, however, lost its political clout after independence. Other political parties that tried to mobilize tribal separatism (if only from Assam) since independence were the Plains Tribal Council of Assam, founded in 1968, with the demand for the constitution of the Bodo-inhabited areas of the state as a union territory under the name, Udayachal, later toned down to a demand for an autonomous regional council, which for a brief period was part of the coalition headed by the Janata Party; and the United Tribal Nationalist Liberation Front, founded in 1984, supposedly articulating militant forms of Bodo separatism. However, with the launching of the Bodoland agitation, all these were marginalized or have simply disappeared. The Bodo political landscape is presently dominated by the inheritors of the Bodoland agitation who head the BTAD headquartered in Kokrajhar. They also share power in Dispur through an electoral pact with the Congress party in the last assembly elections. Given the nature of the beast, this alliance is not exactly stable; indeed, those in power in Kokrajhar are also deeply divided on how to consolidate what has been attained and how and where to go further, in fully realizing the aspirations of Bodo separatist assertion — from territorial autonomous districts to a full-fledged state of Bodoland. Waiting in the wings is the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB), again a child of the Bodoland agitation, but with an explicit sovereignty agenda.

266 Looking Back into the Future The similarities with the Assamese separatist and nationalist assertion, at points within the Indian nation-state framework and at other points outside that framework, are obvious. What is less obvious is whether this trajectory will allure and inspire as a model to other far more modest separatist identity affirmations, of which there seem to be no end; and whether they will also take a similar direction, driven by sovereignty rhetoric to violence and despair.

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Notes and References ∗ First published in Frontline, vol. 24, no. 10, 19 May–1 June 2007. 1. See Chapter 11 ‘Reinventing Identities’ in this book; and M.S. Prabhakara, 2005. ‘Tribes New and Old’, Frontline, vol. 22, no. 1, 1–14 January. 2. Lakshmi Devi, Ahom-Tribal Relations: A Political Study, Guwahati: Lawyer’s Book Stall; Sristidhar Dutta, 1985; The Mataks and their Kingdom, Allahabad: Chugh Publications. 3. See Chapter 1, ‘Politics of a Script’ in this book. 4. See Jadav Pegu, 2004, Reclaiming Identity: A Discourse on Bodo History, Kokrajhar: Jwngsar Narzary. 5. See Binai Khungur Basumatari (ed), n.d. Plains Tribals Before the Simon Commission, Harisinga, Darrang, Assam: The Beacons.

38 Agenda for Recolonization?∗ The May 2006 referendum in Montenegro that led to its emergence

as an independent republic had some interesting resonances among the leaders and supporters of the separatist and secessionist insurgencies in Assam and its neighbourhood. The idea of a referendum under international supervision on these sovereignty struggles has always held an appeal to these. Indeed, in the wake of the Montenegro referendum, civil society organizations in Manipur revived the plebiscite call in a public meeting held in Imphal. The meeting was addressed, among others, by the titular king of Manipur, a former Lok Sabha member from the state, a former human rights commissioner, the President of the Journalists’ Union, leaders of political parties and women leaders. The more recent declaration of independence by Kosovo, and the prompt announcement of its recognition by President George Bush, also has had a similar resonance. With equal promptitude, Isak Swu, chairman of the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (NSCN-IM), the dominant faction of the Naga insurgency which is holding talks with the Government of India since June 1997, wrote to Fatmir Sejdiu congratulating the people of Kosovo on the ‘historic independence declaration on 17 February 2008’. The statement, as reported on the NSCN website, reads thus: ‘The bold decision of Kosovo and its victory is a clear message sent to all over the world that the rights of the nation, big or small, weak or strong must be acknowledged. As one among the co-constituent members of the Parliamentarians for National Self-Determination (PNSD) and as a struggling nation, Nagalim fully supports the newly achieved status of Kosovo and feel overwhelmed at the triumph of the people’s will.’1 Further, the PNSD statement signed by its chairman and vicechairman, Lord Ahmed and Elfyn Llwyd, has this interesting passage with a message to India: ‘We have been asked to convey

268 Looking Back into the Future to the Kosova people the congratulations and best wishes of all of PNSD’s Advisory Panels — Kurdish, Naga, Kashmir and Sikh. The destiny of those and many other peoples and nations who also aspire to self-determination (in whatever form they freely decide) will rest upon the will of the international community to live up to its moral and legal obligations.’ There is little doubt that the Kosovo development will spur the ideologues of these struggles in India to further refine the foundational and theoretical framework of separatism. All these struggles share a perspective of a past, real or imagined, when the people and the land they claim to represent were sovereign and independent, and were never a part of what their ideologues inside and outside the country call ‘the colonial construct’ that was, and continues to be, ‘India’. In this perspective, the modern Indian state, and everything that flows from this, such as citizenship, territoriality, boundaries and borders, indeed the very concept of national sovereignty, are little more than ‘colonial constructs’; and the separatist and secessionist outfits are performing a necessary and historically valid task, indeed even a ‘progressive’ task, in their struggle to unravel this despised ‘colonial construct’. The attainment of sovereignty by the constituent units of the modern Indian state will mark the beginning of the inevitable, indeed necessary, unravelling of this ‘colonial construct’. What is, however, being sought to be put in its place is very much a ‘neo-colonial construct’, crafted by forces driven by an agenda of recolonization and rank reaction. Consider the facts. Insurgencies, separatist movements, autonomy struggles and similar enterprises of one kind or the other have been a fact of life in Assam and its neighbourhood in NE India for over half a century. The oldest of such enterprises is the sovereignty struggle in Nagaland. This, according to its proponents, began with the declaration of independence by the Naga people on the eve of Indian independence, though the armed insurgency, along with the counter-insurgency measures began, only in mid-1954. An important instrument of counter-insurgency was the Assam Disturbed Areas Act, 1955, a state legislation (the present state of Nagaland was little more than a district of Assam then) that inspired the Armed Forces (Special Powers Act), 1958, later the Armed Forces (Assam and Manipur) Special Powers Act, 1972, with further minor

Agenda for Recolonization? 269

verbal amendments to enable the extension of the Act to the fullfledged states of Arunachal Pradesh and Mizoram in 1986. While the trajectory of the Naga insurgency has followed a complex course with bitter internecine struggles and splits and shifting alliances within the insurgency, the objective has remained the same — the attainment of a sovereign and independent Nagalim (in the vocabulary of the NSCN-IM) that would include the present Nagaland and other Naga-inhabited areas in Assam, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh (and across the international border, in Myanmar). Since the announcement by the government of a ceasefire and the beginning of unconditional talks in June 1997 with the NSCN-IM, and the simultaneous approaches made to other Naga nationalist factions, peace, of a kind, has prevailed in Nagaland. The ceasefire does not, however, cover areas in the neighbouring Arunachal Pradesh, Assam and Manipur claimed for the sovereign Nagaland. During this period, as indeed during the years of active insurgency, elections have been periodically held in the state — indeed have just been held (2008). Elected governments have been defeated in a subsequent election. There was a time when the insurgency leadership scoffed at this democratic process; this is not the case now. Without formally acknowledging the legitimacy of the elected government in Kohima, the insurgency had learnt to live with it even before the ceasefire. However, the stated objective of a sovereign Nagalim remains intact, uncompromised. A similar disconnect exists between the public pronouncements of the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), whose objective, too, is the attainment of a sovereign, independent Asom, and the reality. ULFA which was founded in April 1979 and came to public and official notice after the bloodstained elections in Assam in February 1983, had a virtually free run in the state till the central intervention in 1990. Since then, successive military operations, as well as splits, defections and surrenders have severely hobbled the organization. However, its rhetoric about striving for a sovereign, independent Asom through armed struggle remains intact — and strident. Much the same points may be made about the insurgencies in Manipur. The oldest of these is the United National Liberation Front (UNLF), founded in November 1964. Other insurgent groups active in the state are the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), People’s

270 Looking Back into the Future Revolutionary Party of Kangleipak (PREPAK) and Kangleipak Communist Party (KCP), all bespeaking a ‘Marxist/Maoist’ orientation, with the stated objective of restoring the state’s lost sovereignty. Other, more legitimate grievances against India include the ceding of Kabaw valley to Burma, the events and circumstances surrounding the state’s accession/integration into independent India, the indifference about recognizing Meitei and including it in the Eighth Schedule. When the recognition came later, it had lost any grace it may have had, after the long period of apprenticeship as a union territory before Manipur became a full-fledged state, apprehensions that the government may make another deal, as it did with Burma when Jawaharlal Nehru was prime minister, this time with Naga nationalists, at the expense of Manipur’s territory and territorial integrity. These issues have for long fed and sustained the secessionist mindset. How seriously do these organizations believe they can attain sovereignty, considering that their adversary is the Indian state? Half a century of ‘armed struggle’ and nearly a decade of direct and indirect talks in foreign lands and in Delhi has not really advanced Naga aspirations for sovereignty. The de facto legitimacy that ‘Nagalim’ has acquired owes little to the protracted negotiations. Even allowing for unpredictability in the international correlation of forces, the Indian state is too big and too powerful to allow it to be defeated in war and occupied by a foreign power — the historically necessary conditions for the disintegration of a nation-state. The persistence and resilience of these insurgencies may perhaps be explained in the context of their reading of the seemingly neverending break-up of former Yugoslavia and, the earlier collapse of the Soviet Union which, unlike Yugoslavia, collapsed without any overt foreign intervention. The Indian state, in this perspective, is getting more and more enfeebled, unable to resolve the larger contradictions besetting it nationally. What the struggles of these marginalized nationalities in the marginal regions of the country need to do is to keep up the pressure, keep on chipping away, if necessary over generations. With the received ideas of the nation-state losing their legitimacy, such ‘colonial constructs’ as the Indian state are bound to crack up and collapse even without external aggression, defeat in war and foreign occupation.

Agenda for Recolonization? 271

Such ideas and ideologies may not have any immediate material impact on the ground situation. What is less clear is the long-term impact, especially in the context of the US support to and recognition of Kosovo’s ‘independence’, a lead that may be followed by the countries of the European Union. The apparent reluctance of the government of India to unambiguously condemn these ongoing US-made agendas to go on dismembering existing nation-states with material resources or having a strategic significance will further embolden the separatist and secessionist movements in the region, confirming their reading that time, and the big battalions, are on their side. Nothing else can explain the persistence of these movements in face of the blindingly obvious fact that they can never win their ‘armed struggles’.

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Note and Reference ∗ First published in The Hindu, 12 March 2008. 1. http://www.nscnonline.org.; http://naganation.com/archives/62.

Epilogue In my end is my beginning

Towards the Denominational State?∗

A feature of the present situation in Assam and other areas of the

NE region, as indeed in many other parts of the country, is the increasing concern on the part of the various groups that go to make the Indian nation about a perceived threat to their ‘identity’. It is from this concern that demands for protective safeguards, special consideration, and so on flow, which in some extreme cases have also taken shape as demands for the ‘right of self-determination’ and outright secessionist struggles. Historically speaking, such tendencies may appear as merely the birth-throes of any modern nation-state, emerging and consolidating itself from the debris of feudal and pre-feudal formations. The Indian civilization may be several millennia old as its more zealous partisans claim; but the Indian nation-state is less than half a century old and is still in the process of consolidating itself as a political, economic and administrative entity. Considering that as recently as the post-French Revolution period, the nation-states of modern Europe had not even properly emerged — it was not unusual for the people, who only decades later were to become distinct and identifiable parts of modern nation-states of Europe, to fight on opposite sides purely in a mercenary capacity, often even against kings and princes ruling over their territories — the Indian dilemma is neither unique nor especially acute. However, the situation in India where the various Indian people, split horizontally and vertically along religious, language, caste and ethnic lines (to note the major divisions) are still in the process of welding a common Indian identity, possesses certain dimensions which invest the nation-formation process with some peculiar problems. The consolidation of an Indian identity transcending

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these divisions has been considerably assisted by the mobility of a section of the professional classes and the migrant labour population, trade and commerce, the administrative apparatus, popular manifestations of mass communication and entertainment such as cinema, music and sports and, to a very limited extent, by the spread of the English language into the remotest parts of the country. But there is also a simultaneous trend, almost everywhere stronger than the unifying trends, towards greater and greater segmentization of the people along lines that were inconceivable at the time of independence. Indeed, the increasing assertion of the ‘nationality question’ in India has another face to it, overriding the essentially democratic content of the demand for recognition of the fact that India is a multi-nationality country. The logical consequence of this reluctance to acknowledge the plurality of Indian — indeed, Hindu society — is likely to be the emergence of the denominational state. Every self-perceived caste, tribe, language and religion, is likely to split further along fresh lines, seeking a little political homeland of its own. The trend towards the denominationalization of the Indian state has to be traced directly to its failure to democratically acknowledge and shape state policies by recognizing the numerous strands that have gone into the making of the Indian people; that due to historical reasons as well as because of the obvious reality of numbers, many of the numerically small groups had the dice loaded against them in the overall arrangement of things from the very beginning. If the votaries of the Hindutva platform (not limited to its noisy proponents like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and its offshoots) have tried to incorporate (till now unsuccessfully) these various strands making up the pluralistic Indian people — and indeed, the even more healthily pluralistic Hindu society itself — into a professedly purer Hindutva identity. as a derivation from such ‘path-breaking’ initiatives to denominationalize the Indian state, paradoxically, and also as a reaction against it, are the efforts of various segmentally distinct formations to forcefully assert their so-called ‘identities’ along caste, language, community, sect and language lines — and proceed from there to make political demands. The situation in the NE region provides some of the most explicit instances of this trend towards the denominationalization of Indian

274 Looking Back into the Future society and eventually, the Indian state system itself. The United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), for instance, stands according to its programme, its published views and conversations with its spokesmen, for the ‘people of Asom’, in which category the organization includes not merely every one of the indigenous people of the state (and indeed of the NE region as a whole), but also the various streams of post-British-conquest migrants into the region from the rest of India. But this attempt to assert the ‘national’ character of the ‘people of Asom’ is organically related to other attempts, along perfectly constitutional paths, of the Assamese-speaking people to delimit a territory of their own, without any ambiguity, and rid themselves of ‘foreigners’ who at some points of time also stood for nonAssamese-speaking people.The issues that provided legitimacy to this concept of the Assamese people (later modified by the ULFA into the ‘people of Asom’) was undoubtedly the Assamese language and, rather more amorphously, what was perceived as ‘Assamese culture’, restricted and even demeaned during the AGP rule to its most superficial symbols. This attempt to locate the people of the state within a specific and strictly defined Assamese context, lingually and culturally, is just the most glaring example of trying to modify (and if possible, eventually replace) the national state that is India by a denominational state that Assam was expected to become. The demand for Bodoland, like the already realized states of Nagaland and Mizoram, the closest approximations to the denominational state that has already been achieved in the NE region, is just another extreme example of this apparently inexorable move towards yet another denominational state. Indeed, even smaller segments of the population of Assam are now seeking a separate ‘national’ identity, based entirely on notionally objective but, in fact, entirely subjective perceptions of themselves as a separate and unique people, with even more restricted perceptions of themselves as a goshti (community) or sampradaya (sect) being the defining parameters allegedly determining their status as a separate people. The major responsibility for this trend towards the increasing fragmentation of the Indian people has to be laid at the door of the Indian state. Under every dispensation it has been governed by, it has refused to acknowledge that the people of the country

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do constitute a still indeterminate number of fairly well-defined groups who are yet in the process of becoming a nation, and shape its policies accordingly. The process is necessarily a slow, complex and even painful one and can in no way be hustled. No amount of hectoring lectures from the top or centralizing legislations by parliament will alter the reality. The people are distinct, separate and in some respects, even unique in that they have a history and memories, a language and literature, a culture and an ethos that is their own, though not necessarily in contradiction with and opposition to the larger pan-Indian identity. To acknowledge this, indeed to nurse and nurture these perceptions and be sensitive about them and patiently allow them to be incorporated at their own pace into the larger concept of the Indian nation requires patience, a larger vision of the pluralistic, diverse and highly differentiated Indian — even Hindu — society. But official policy since independence has been to curb and curtail these pluralistic tendencies, subsume them into an enforced-fromthe top Indian identity. The results, as is evident in the progressive escalation of demands from safeguards to preserve identity to the right of self-determination to openly secessionist armed struggles, are there for all to see. It is perhaps necessary to touch at this point upon the most hectoring and oppressive of this centralizing tendency — the efforts to inculcate ‘Hindutva’ on each and every segment of the Indian people. This task, which was being done in a rather half-hearted and furtive manner by the Congress (I), has now been taken over in a more purposeful and aggressive manner by the VHP, its political associates and more innocent votaries. Fortunately for the country, these Hindutva enthusiasts are meeting with resistance from various Hindu people themselves, reflecting the actual character of Hinduism, which legitimately sanctions the most extreme, even anarchic, freedom and diversity in its practice. For instance, not all Hindus recognize the divinehood of Rama. One can off-hand think of a community like the Lingayats of Karnataka who do not acknowledge the divine status of Rama but are no less authentic Hindus. Many Hindu communities in the south do not cremate their dead — the sine qua non of Hindu religious practice in most parts of upper India.

276 Looking Back into the Future The most disturbing aspect of this tendency towards enforcing highly centralized, uniform and Hindutva-dominated mores over the whole population of the country is that in provoking a section of the Indian people to take the path of extreme assertion of denominational tendencies, it also militates against the unity of India. Thus the proponents of unitarianism and majoritarianism are actually serving the interests of those who have been consistently seeking to undermine and indeed establish the unworkability of the Indian experiment. It is no great secret that a variety of political, economic and ideological forces have been striving ever since Indian independence to establish that there had never been a country called ‘India’; that the concept of the ‘Indian’ people itself is a myth. Tremendous material and intellectual resources have been directed to sedulously spread and establish the legitimacy of these notions whose ideological and political aim is to subvert, in the most fundamental sense of the term, the concept of ‘India’ and the ‘Indian people’, and thus stigmatize the whole Indian freedom struggle as an illegitimate fraud. Brilliant minds operating both from within the country and from abroad have marshalled highly sophisticated arguments based on intelligent and selective use of source material to ‘prove’ that there was nothing Indian about the freedom struggle, that resistance movements in various parts of the country (the concept of a country called India itself is negated) were sectional, based on local grievances, and had no common thread of anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism running through them. Thus, the martyrdom of Kanakalata in Gohpur in Assam and of the rebels in Kayyur in Kerala are seen not as a part of the Indian freedom struggle but as manifestations of local grievances of small groups of people in isolated communities. The victories that these intellectual subversives did not win through polemical discourses may yet be granted to them in the emergence of the denominational state. Paradoxically, the votaries of Hindutva and of a highly centralized Bharatavarsha on the one hand and the sectarians who want to transform the country into countless mutually exclusive, narrowly confined, caste/sect/ language/religion/ethnicity based structures enclosed within narrower and narrower walls are on the same side of the fence, the

Epilogue 277

former contributing to the ‘identity’ anxieties of the latter who in turn react by retreating into smaller and smaller shells.

.

Note ∗ First published in The Hindu, 23 January 1991.

Select Bibliography An Account of Kamarupa Anusandhana Samiti, Guwahati: Kamarupa Anusandhana Samiti, 1993. Assam Land Revenue Manual, Shillong: Government of Assam, eighth edition, 1970. Barpujari, S.K. and A.C. Bhuyan et al (eds), Political History of Assam, vol. 1 (1826–1919), 1977; vol. 2, (1920–39), 1978; vol. 3 (1940–47), 1980, Guwahati: Department for the Preparation of the Political History of Assam, Government of Assam. Barua, Birinchi Kumar, A Cultural History of Assam: Early Period, vol. I, Guwahati: Lawyer’s Book Stall, 1951. Barua, Hemchandra, Hemkosh, Gauhati: Hemkosh Printers, 1900. Basumatari, Binai Khungur (ed.), Plains Tribals Before the Simon Commission, Harisinga, Darrang, Assam: The Beacons, n.d. Bhuyan, Surya Kumar, Anglo-Assamese Relations, 1771–1826, Guwahati: Department of Historical and Antiquarian Studies, 1949. Bronson, Miles, A Dictionary in Assamese and English, Sibsagar: American Baptist Mission Press, 1867. (A new edition of the dictionary was published by the Assam Sahitya Sabha in collaboration with Omsons in Guwahati, 1983). Chakravarti, Mahadev, The Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council and the Tribal Problems, Agartala: Government of Tripura, 1986. Chaliha, Devesvara (chief ed.), Chandrakanta Abhidhan: A Comprehensive Dictionary of the Assamese Language with Etymology and Illustrations of Words with their Meanings both in Assamese and English, Jorhat: Assam Sahitya Sabha, 1933. Chatterji, Suniti Kumar, Kirata-Jana-Kriti, Calcutta: Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1951. Chaudhuri, Kalyan, ‘Turning to Peace’, Frontline, vol. 20, no. 5, 1–14 March 2003. Chaudhury, M.M., Tribes of Assam Plains, Gauhati: Director, Welfare of Plains Tribes and Backward Classes, Government of Assam, 1980. Das, Susanta Krishna, ‘Immigration and Demographic Transformation of Assam, 1891–1981’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 25, no. 19, 10 May 1980. ‘Documents Regarding the Movement Launched by the Bodo Sahitya Sabha, etc.,’ Kokrajhar, Assam: Bodo Sahitya Sabha (typed copy).

Select Bibliography 279 Downs, Frederick S, The Mighty Works of God: A Brief History of the Council of the Baptist Churches of North East India: The Mission Period 1836–1950, Guwahati: Christian Literature Centre, 1971. Devi, Lakshmi Devi, Ahom-Tribal Relations: A Political Study, Guwahati: Lawyer’s Book Stall, 1968. Dutta, Sristidhar, The Mataks and their Kingdom, Allahabad: Chugh Publications, 1985. Endle, Sidney, The Kacharis. London: Macmillan, 1911. Gait, E.A., Census of India 1891, Assam, Shillong: Assam Secretariat Press, 1892. Gait. E.A., A History of Assam, Calcutta: Thomas Spink, third edition, 1963. Guha, Amalendu, Planter-Raj to Swaraj, New Delhi: Indian Council of Historical Research, 1977 (third edition, Delhi: Tulika Books, 2006). Kar, Bodhisattva, ‘What is in a Name? Politics of Spatial Imagination in Colonial Assam’, CINISEAS Papers 5. Guwahati: Centre for Northeast India, South and Southeast Asia Studies, Omeo Kumar Das Institute for Social Change and Development, 2004. ‘Janajati Krishak Samasya,’ (Problems of Tribal Peasantry), unsigned editorial comment and analysis, Natun Prithivi (quarterly magazine in Assamese), vol. 2, no. 3, Guwahati, May, 1973. Luithui, Luingam and Nandita Haksar, ‘Debate in Parliament’ in Nagaland File, Lancer, New Delhi, 1984. Mills, A.J. Moffatt, Report on the Province of Assam, Calcutta, 1854 (reprinted [second edition] by the Publication Board, Guwahati, Assam, 1984). Pegu, Jadav, Reclaiming Identity: A Discourse on Bodo History, Kokrajhar: Jwngsar Narzary, 2004. Prabhakara, M.S., ‘From Insurgency to Legislative Politics’, The Hindu, 21 March 1985. Prabhakara, M.S., ‘Assam: Hot in the Hills’, Frontline, vol. 6, no. 20, 30 September–13 October 1989. Prabhakara, M.S., ‘Border Brinkmanship: Blowing Hot and Cold in Assam’, Frontline, vol. 8. no. 14, 4–17 July, 1992. Prabhakara, M.S., ‘North Cachar Conundrum: A Tribe’s Anxieties over Identity’, Frontline, vol. 9, no. 23, 7–20 November 1992. Prabhakara, M.S., ‘The Bodo Question’, Frontline, vol. 19, no. 15, 2 August 2002. Prabhakara, M.S., ‘Assam’s Angst’, Frontline, vol. 19, no. 21, 25 October 2002. Prabhakara, M.S., ‘Tribes New and Old’, Frontline, vol. 22, no. 1, 1–14 January, 2005. Saikia, A.K., Census of India 1971: Assam series 3, New Delhi: Manager of Publications, Office of the Registrar General, 1972.

280 Looking Back into the Future Singh, Ibohal M., Constitutional and Legal History of Manipur, Samurau, Imphal: Samurau Lakpa Mayai Lambi Law College, 1986. Singh, Iboongohal, L., Introduction to Manipur, Imphal: Students Store, 1963. Singh, K.S., B.K. Bardolai, R.K. Athaparia (eds), People of India: Assam, vol. XV, part 2, Calcutta: Seagull Books Pvt. Ltd., 2003 (published on behalf of the Anthropological Survey of India). Talukdar, Sushanta, ‘Ranjan Daimary Claims He is Still NDFB President’, The Hindu, 28 December 2008. Waugh, Evelyn, When the Going was Good, London: Duckworth, 1946 (London: Penguin Books, 1951, reprint). Yule, Henry and Arthur Coke Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive, London: J. Murray, 1886 (new edition edited by William Crooke, 1903; Indian reprint, 1986, Delhi: Rupa & Co.).

About the Author M.S. Prabhakara taught English language and literature for about 18 years (1957–75) in Bangalore, Dharwad and Guwahati, before turning to journalism. He was a member of the editorial staff of the Economic and Political Weekly, Bombay (1979–83); later, he joined The Hindu as the newspaper’s special correspondent in Guwahati reporting on developments in Assam and northeast India. Between 1994 and 2002, he was The Hindu’s Special Correspondent in South Africa, based in Johannesburg and Cape Town. He retired in April 2002 but continues to be associated with The Hindu and Frontline. M.S. Prabhakara has written two novels and a collection of short stories in Kannada. Words and Ideas, a collection of his essays, was published in 2008.

282 Looking Back into the Future

Index Adivasi, 67; unrest in Assam, 123–26 Advani, L. K., 136 Ahmad, Khan Chaudhuri Amanatullah, 3 All India Radio, 71 All-Assam Gana Sangram Parishad, 28 All-Assam Minority Students’ Union (AAMSU), 37 All-Assam Plains Tribal League, 264 All-Assam Students’ Union (AASU), 28, 31, 37, 79, 200 All-Assam Tiwa Association, 89 All-Assam Tribal Students’ Union (AATSU), 57 All-Bodo Students’ Union (ABSU), 57, 264; agitation by, 58 All-Party Hill Leaders’ Conference (APHLC), 61, 104 All-Rabha Students’ Union, 85 American Baptist Mission: Sibsagar, in, 25 Amnesty International, 185 Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 (AFSPA), 228–29, 231–32 Armed Forces Special Powers Act, 195 Asamiya jati, 65 Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) government, 32, 64, 147–48, 211; sub-regional balances, 153 Asom Sahitya Sabha: Miles Bronson dictionary, reissue of, 28 Assam: 1951, of, 32; 1991, of, 32; impact of military operations, in Bhutan, 182–90; inherent

problems of: consolidation process, 152–56; land question in, 212; prospects for peace in, 203–7; Scheduled Tribes (STs) population in (see Scheduled Tribes (STs), population in Assam); social composition, of rural, 166; Sylhet district, 32–33 Assam Accord, 79–80, 173 Assam Act XV of 1947, 62 Assam Bandh, 135 Assam Disturbed Areas Act, 1955, 230–31, 268 Assam government: decision on name of state, from Assam to Asom, 43 Assam Jatiyatabadi Yuva Chhatra Parishad (AJYCP), 97 Assam Plains Tribal League, 60 Assam Research Society: branch in Rangpur, 3; founding members, 2; initiative for foundation, 1–2; objective of, 1, 6 Assam Rifles, 229–30 Assam–Nagaland boundary: clashes in 1985, 51; encroachments, in reserve forests, 52 Assamese: segmentation along caste lines, 65 Assamese Brahmin missionaries, 159 Assamese–Bengali controversy: history of, 26 Assamese–Bihari clashes, 101; victims of, 95 Autonomous State Demand Committee (ASDC), 72, 100

Index 283 Bangali jati, 65 Bangladeshis: illegal settlement, in Assam, 78 Barua, Birinchi Kumar, 44 Barua, Hemchandra, 30 Basumatary, Hagrama, 136 Bengal: history and culture of, 3 Bengali nationalism, 1 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 96 Biharis, 94 bilingualism: among plains tribes, in Assam, 36 Bishnupuriya: Manipur, in, 73 Bithorai, 19 Black Widow see Dima Halam Daogah (DHD-J) Bodo Chhatra Sanmilini, 263 Bodo Kachari, 109 Bodo Kiratas, 12 Bodo Liberation Tigers (BLT), 135 Bodo People’s Action Committee (BPAC), 215–16 Bodo Sahitya Sabha, 47, 264; Bithorai introduction by activists, 19; agitation for adoption, of Roman script for Bodo language, 11 Bodoland Autonomous Council, 88 Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC), 85, 88, 215–20; problems faced by, 135–43; promises by, 135–43 Bodos: alienation from Assamese society, 21; connection with Nagas, 13; leadership of, 19; Mongoloid people, 11; plains tribal people, 12; denial of constitutional protection, 18; problems faced by, 17 Brahma, Upendranath, 57–58, 264 Bronson, Miles, 25–26, 28 Brown, Nathan, 25–26 Caste: weapon for, political mobilization, 127

Catalonian autonomy movement: Spain, in, 256 Census Report of 1891, 14 Census Report of 1971, 35–36 census, in Assam: question of mother tongue, 31–37 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), 20 Charter Act of 1793, 26 Choudhury, Samar Brahma, 52 Communist Party of India (CPI), 88 Congress (I), 76 Daimari, Ranjan, 132 Department of Historical and Antiquarian Studies (DHAS), 5 Desai, Morarji, 173 Deuri tribe: Assam, in, 12, 117 Devanagari scripts, 39 Dima Halam Daogah (DHD-J): ban on, 131 Eighth Schedule of Constitution: agitation for inclusion, of Manipuri, 73; languages and mother tongues, use by hill and plain tribes, 116 ethnic agitations, in North East region: feature of, 147; political aim of, 147 ethnic identities, in Assam: features of, 70 ethnicity, 127 Excluded and Partially Excluded Areas Order, 1936, 59 Foreigners Act, 1946, 82 Gait, Edward A., 159–60 Gandhi, Rajiv, 79 Genome project, 223 Ghose, Bhaskar, 101 Gogoi, Pradip, 187

284 Looking Back into the Future Gogoi, Tarun, 96, 99, 136 Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF), 63 Gorlosa, Jewel, 131 Goseins: conversion into Hinduism, 14–15 Government of India Act of 1935, 59 Guha, Amalendu, 31 Hajong, 12 Hemkosh, 30 Hindu elite: conflict between Bodo elite and, 18 Hojai tribe, 12 Huda, Noorul, 244 identity: anxiety about, 127; Assam search for, 65–69 Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act (IM [DT]), 1983, 75–76, 78, 82 Indian nationalism, 1 internally coherent homelands: fallacy of, 177–81 Islamic nationalism, 177 Jamaat-i-Islami, 37 Jamait Ulema-e-Hind, 37 Jamir, S. C., 51 Jatiya Swahid, 37 Kamarupa, 4 Kamarupa Anusandhana Samiti (KAS) see Assam Research Society Karbi Anglong: Kuki regional council (see Kuki regional council); violence in, 84–86 Karbi Anglong and North Cachar Hills Autonomous State Demand Committee (KANCHASDC), 211

Karbi Anglong North Cachar Hills Liberation Front (KLNLF), 133 khels, 15 Koch-Rajbanshis, 53, 66 Kuki regional council, 93 Kuki Revolutionary Army, 84 Lalung tribe, 12 language: break-up of population, in Assam, 33 linguistic reorganization, of India: post-independence, 127 ‘Made in India’ project, 200 Manav Adhikar Sangram Samiti (MASS), 185 Mandela, Nelson, 185 Manipur: insurgency in: politics and ideology, 242–45; unrest in, 228 Manipuri language: controversy over script, 40 Manipuri nationalism, 40 Marxist-Leninist-Maoist’ party, 190 mass conversion(s): Assam, in, 159–60 Meitei anagram: meaning of, 41 Meitei Mayek script, 40 Meitei population: impact of decision on script, 41 Merger Agreement, 234 Montenegro referendum, 267 More Other Backward Castes (MOBCs), 67 Mukherjee, Jadu Gopal, 4 Munda community: Jharkhand, in, 124 Muslim peasantry, of East Bengal: Assam, in, 36 Naga National Council (NNC), 134

Index 285 Naga nationalism, 246–48 Naga people: division of, 224 Naga Students’ Federation (NSF), 223–25 National Democratic Alliance (NDA), 138 National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB), 95, 130; action by army, 169; ban on, 131 National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isak-Muivah) (NSCNIM), 174, 179, 205; Kosovo independence impact, 267 National Socialist Council of Nagalim (NSCN), 174, 178, 246, 254; talks between Indian government and, 237; priority to Manipur, 240 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 245 North East (NE) region: permanent solutions, search for, 172–76; separatist movements in (see Separatist movements, in North East (NE) region); towards denominational state, 272–77 North-Eastern Areas (Reorganization) Act, 1971, 59 Northeast Frontier Railway (NFR), 97; confrontation between locals and outsiders, 94 Northern Bengal Literary Council, 1 Operation Bajrang, 132, 188 Operation Rhino, 132, 188 Orunodai, 47 Other Backward Classes (OBC), 53 Parliamentarians for National SelfDetermination (PNSD), 267 People’s Liberation Army (PLA), 228

Phizo, Angami Zapu, 173 Phizoist Naga Nationalist Council, 247 Plains Miri tribe, 12 Plains Tribal Council of Assam (PTCA), 18, 51, 53; demand for: appointment of special subdeputy collectors (SDCs), 54; relocation of plains tribal people, 52; separation of Assam, 59 Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), 229 Rabha Hashong Committee, 85 Rabha tribe, 12 Rahman, Sheikh Mujibur, 75 Rajkhowa, Arabinda, 182 Rao, Narasimha, 194 Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), 96 regionalism, 152 Roman script: Bodo Sahitya Sabha agitation, for adoption in Bodo language, 11 Royal Bhutan Army (RBA): impact of military operations, 182 Saikia, Hiteswar, 51 sanatana dharma, 157 Sanmilita Janagosthiya Sangram Samithi (SJSS), 88, 135–36 Scheduled Castes (SCs), 70 Scheduled Districts Act of 1874, 91 Scheduled Tribes (STs), 70; Assam: opposition of extension, 125; population in, 87, 112–15 separatist movements: North East (NE) region, in, 259–66 Shillong Accord, 246 Sinhasan hills: clashes in, 99–100 Sixth Schedule of Constitution, 91; Bodo Kachari recognition, 109; Bodos under, 85; denial of

286 Looking Back into the Future constitutional protections, to plain tribal people, 18; Excluded and Partially Excluded Areas Order,1936 (see Excluded and Partially Excluded Areas Order, 1936); Governor powers under, 140; North Cachar Hills district, provisions for, 99 Sonowal Kachari tribe, 12, 119; Assam, in, 117 Surrendered ULFA (SULFA), 132, 206 Swadhin Asom concept, 165, 207 Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (TADA) Act, 195 terrorists: movement from Bengal, 4 Thakur, C. P., 96 Thengal Kachari Autonomous Council (TKAC): objective of, 103 Tiwa Autonomous Council (TAC), 89 tribal communities: Assam, in, 124 tribal ferment: Assam, in, 57–64 tribal people, of India: problems faced by, 63 Udayachal: demand for, 23 Ujani Assam state: demand for, 23 United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), 7, 77, 130, 148, 166, 190,

254; action by army, 167–70; ban on, 131; code of conduct, 149; demands of, 195; Hindispeaking people, reaction on, 95; objective of, 191–92; Operation Bajrang (see Operation Bajrang); Operation Rhino (see Operation Rhino); origin of, 200; People’s Consultative Group (PCG): meeting with Government of India, 194; nomination of, 191; signing of Assam Accord, 201; violent interventions by, 193 United National Liberation Front (UNLF), 254, 256 United People’s Democratic Solidarity (UPDS), 111; raid at Kuki-inhabited village, 84 United Tribal Nationalist Liberation Front (UTNLF), 55, 59 Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, 1967, 111 Urdu scripts, 39 Uttara Vangiya Sahitya Parishad see Northern Bengal Literary Council Vaishnavite Hinduism, 28 varnashrama dharma, 157 Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), 76, 273 Voice of Kamatapura, 129 Yadav, Laloo Prasad, 96