The complexity of the recent ethnic violence in
Assam has its roots going as far back as the early 20th century. With
the various ethnic militant outfits having no clear-cut policy regarding
the other groups, while some demonstrate a knee-jerk reaction leading
to horrendous acts of ethnic cleansing, there seems to be no other
thought than domination of the Other. A democratic perspective is
singularly missing. What is the centre's outlook on these contentious
issues?
In the last quarter of 2013, in fact, soon after the announcement of
the formation of a separate Telangana state, violence erupted in several
regions of Assam with significant tribal populations, almost as if on
cue. In the Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC) area, thousands of tribal
youth – both men and women – decked out in warpaint and Apache
haircuts, sat down on rail tracks threatening to cut off communications
with the rest of the country unless their demand for a separate state
was met. Almost all organised Bodo groups supported them vocally.
The All Koch-Rajbangshi Students’ Union (AKRSU), the militant
students’ organisation of the Koch-Rajbangshis, who have nursed a long
grievance for having been cut out of a deal between the government and
the Bodos in the accord forming the BTC, in spite of being as
indubitably autochthonous as the Bodos, also began to breathe fire and
raise vehement demands for a separate state of their own, scissored out
of areas of West Bengal and Assam, not excluding the BTC. Panicking at
their own prospects, immigrant Muslims, adivasis transplanted in the
19th century from Chota Nagpur by the British, and the Assamese (new
settlers or people who had been there for ages), banded together on a
common platform to voice their own opposition to such demands.
In the Karbi Anglong Autonomous District, furious Karbis too blocked
roads and shouted angry slogans, with women in an equally war-like mood,
insisting that their long-standing demand for a Karbi autonomous state
be met at once, and then went on to burn down, one after another,
government offices that were rumoured to have been stacked with files
containing massive evidence of corruption by the Karbi political elite
in association largely with Assamese officials. The local Assamese
residents of Diphu were in a state of shock, and curfew had to be
declared and maintained for days to bring the situation under control.
The air was thick with accusations and counter-accusations, with the
tribals growling against long-standing oppression and deprivation by the
Assamese ruling class, and the Assamese bitterly denouncing the
political ambitions and greed for lucre among the emerging tribal elite,
forgetful of their own record. There are a few sane voices pleading for
reason, a democratic attitude and accommodation, but their voices seem
lost in this wilderness. History, genuine and mythical, is quarried
selectively to prop up each side’s argument, though it is difficult to
understand what relevance events from two millennia ago can have on what
is happening today.
The Assam chief minister has deployed the army and the Central
Reserve Police Force (CRPF) in Karbi Anglong, but did not care (dare?)
to take a tough line with the tough-talking Bodos and Koch-Rajbangshis,
who have not yet resorted to violent methods, but have broadly hinted
that that option was not closed. In reaction, the long-suffering and now
desperate non-Bodos also murmured about resisting violence to the
bitter end. The chief minister had a series of talks with leaders of
these movements and assured them that he would convey their views to the
centre. What is the centre’s outlook on these contentious issues?
To the central leaders, tribal demands for autonomy and Assamese
anxieties about dissolution of a historic nationality with its rich
culture and literature are mere law and order issues, and not matters of
crucial moment to Indian democracy. They are given to finding stopgap
solutions that carry in their wake dangers that become full-blown later
on. The new ideal of “least government” that came in with neo-liberalism
has allowed them to scatter inadvertently seeds of further tensions and
conflicts. All that matters now for their friends, big multinationals
and national monopoly capital, is a reasonably stable condition with
various ethnic groups hostile to one another, but not engaging in
internecine feuds, so that rich natural resources of the region, like
precious minerals, oil, natural gas, hydropower and rare medicinal
plants can be plundered in a matter of a few decades, leaving the
indigenous tribes and later immigrants to fight it out among themselves
in the end.
The Karbi Agitation
When Meghalaya was formed, initially by amending the Constitution to
insert Article 244A in 1969, the Karbi leaders clearly said that they
did not want any such arrangement and were quite happy to remain in
Assam. But the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution had been drawn up with
a primitive tribe in mind, and when education and consciousness spread,
however slowly, the new educated Karbi elite realised the rudimentary
nature of powers conferred for self-government and started agitating for
a separate state, which received extensive support among the Karbis.
But, the Congress, with its own Karbi leaders and their following,
succeeded in keeping things within control. Over the years, however,
more and more powers were delegated to the Karbi Anglong Autonomous
Council in order to mollify the restless ones; but that dream never
quite disappeared. One of the grievances of the Karbis was that even the
annual budget of the autonomous council was prepared in Dispur, capital
of Assam. Under Jayanta Rangpi’s leadership, the movement, though
massive, never slid into violence against non-Karbis. But, as things
have dragged on, Jayanta Rangpi fell out of favour and more militant and
reckless leaders took over, and inter-community relationships have
suffered a serious setback. It became common wisdom that only such
“direct action” could yield results. Such misadventures were not dealt
with a firm hand by the centre, the ultimate centre of power.
A ghastly incident took place on 15 July 2013 at Diphu, headquarters
of the Karbi Anglong Autonomous District, which many consider a prelude
to the later outbreaks of violence. An Assamese resident of Diphu had
hired an autorickshaw driven by a Karbi youth, perhaps representing a
more impatient and intolerant Karbi generation, to take him and his
young son to the market. Upon arrival at the destination an altercation
ensued over the fare, a minor everyday occurrence. Suddenly, the driver
shouted in rage: “Are you Karbi or Assamese?”. At this, several other
young men among the bystanders drew near and started belabouring the
Assamese youth who had just reached 20 years.
The father, who had been in Diphu for a long 23 years, tried
desperately to save him, but to no avail. He phoned the nearby police
station and a police jeep arrived soon after. By that time, passions had
been inflamed, and the police also lost their nerve in the presence of a
huge gathering on the spot, and left the place in a hurry. The father’s
wails had no effect. His young son, Jhankar Saikia, was beaten to death
before his eyes, and nobody intervened to save him. Yet, he was a
familiar figure in the market and called every shopkeeper by his name.
Condemnation by the press and public in Assam reached such a pitch that
the chief minister of Assam was forced to order stricter management of
law and order. But the culprits were not brought to book.
The Bodo Case
The Bodo case has its own history. From the early 20th century,
educated Bodos led other tribal communities against the dominant castes
of Assam (not the colonial masters who backed the privileged castes),
accusing them of caste-based discrimination, mistreatment, and
suppression of their rights. In 1933, under the banner of the Tribal
League, the Bodos, the most numerous and advanced among the indigenous
tribals, fought to wrest from an apathetic government the guarantee of
land rights to people accustomed to shifting cultivation, facilities for
education of their children, and reservation of jobs in government
service.
The fight against colonialism became a little obscure as caste Hindu
Assamese, backward castes, scheduled castes and tribals fought among one
another for a share in the pittance offered by the colonial rulers in
the name of public welfare. The caste Hindu leaders of the freedom
struggle promised action on such matters once Independence was attained,
but the tribal leaders openly expressed doubt, that it was but a ploy
to delay and deny them the right to a decent and dignified life, and
condemn them forever to poverty and backwardness. However, just before
Independence, a deal was struck between Bhimbar Deuri, charismatic
leader of the Tribal League, and Gopinath Bordoloi, the undisputed
leader of the Assam Pradesh Congress Committee, which assured tribals of
reservation of land under tribal belts and blocks, reservation of seats
in educational institutions and government service, and reservation of
certain assembly seats.
Accordingly, the Assam state assembly passed certain Acts creating
such belts and blocks where land will be inalienable, save under certain
conditions. However, even though after Independence the tribals could
take a few steps forward, and some progressed far enough to form a small
middle class, implementation of these Acts was insincere and patchy.
Parts of such belts and blocks were de-reserved for settling refugees
from Pakistan and immigrant Muslims left high and dry by erosion of
riverbanks and
chars, and starting industrial projects without consent of tribals.
The tribal elite now reviewed the earlier decision of the Tribal
League and formed a Plains Tribal Council of Assam (PTCA) to mobilise
people for pressing their demands and eliminate injustices. Started in
the late 1960s, it soon assumed a stormy character, with demand for a
separate tribal state in the plains filling the Assamese elite and their
compatriots with anxiety. But, soon, dissension among leaders of
various communities heading the PTCA left the Bodos as the predominant
group in the council. They demanded and won the right to teach their
children in the Bodo language instead of the prevalent Assamese. In
1973, they raised the demand that the textbooks should be in the Roman
script as Assamese phonetics could not properly articulate Bodo sounds.
It was a plausible scientific theory, though, as is well known, a script
and its sound system may vary widely. The real intention was to
insulate the Bodos from Assamese influence.
The degree of mistrust and hatred reflected in the move revealed the
bitterness of the Bodos at the complacent assumption of the Assamese
that they were doing well enough under Assamese tutelage. In the
Mangaldoi subdivision (now a district), the police opened fire on a Bodo
demonstration demanding introduction of the Roman script, killing 13
people and deeply embittering the Bodos. The PTCA movement lost its
momentum by the late 1970s, and its leaders became ministers briefly in a
Janata government. Its place was taken by the All Bodo Students’ Union
(ABSU), which, for some time, even came under leftist influence. The
Bodo Sahitya Sabha had also become an influential body, and along with
ABSU, it began to echo the demands and aspirations of the Bodos,
especially its middle class.
Anti-Foreigner Assam Movement
The Bodo peasantry was particularly handicapped by the loss of their
land to hard-working immigrant Muslims, better trained to manipulate
land-tenure regulations and the officials managing them. Many had been
reduced to being landless labourers. Therefore, they joined en masse in
the anti-foreigner Assam movement (1979-85) in the hope of recovering
land. When the leaders of the All Assam Students Union (AASU), with whom
ABSU leaders like Upen Brahma, who had become a charismatic leader in
his teens, had collaborated with zeal, came to power, they let them down
by neglecting their concerns. They then raised the slogan for a
separate Bodoland with catchy and stirring sentences like “Divide Assam
50-50”, “No Bodoland, No Rest”, and so on.
Unfortunately, the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) government, drunk with
the illusion of power and die-hard Assamese nationalism, decided to
crush the movement by force when small concessions did not satisfy the
Bodos. This period is a little murky. The United Liberation Front of
Assam (ULFA) had arisen with a resolve to carve out an independent
Assamese state, and the Government of India (GoI) had reportedly sent
experienced Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) officers to Bodo-majority
areas to train Bodos in the use of modern arms, presumably with the hope
of countering Assamese chauvinism. The repressive measures taken by the
AGP government were crass and brutal, including indiscriminate
shooting, and rape of Bodo women by the police and the CRPF. A place
called Bhumka saw rape and murder of as many as seven women, filling not
only Bodos, but also most Assamese with horror. (The present author
wrote about those incidents in his column in EPW during the 1980s.)
Slowly, Bodos began arming themselves, but turned their guns against
other communities in the neighbourhood. A Bodo Security Force inspired
terror among non-Bodos with its intemperate violence. The Bodoland
Autonomous Council (BAC) was formed in 1993 by Hiteswar Saikia, then
chief minister of Assam, in precipitate haste. It did not work out as
the leaders of the administration of BAC allegedly indulged in massive
corruption, ultimately yielding place to the fearsome Bodo Liberation
Tigers (BLT), who used terror tactics on defenceless and helpless common
Assamese people of the region to force the government’s hand. Primary
schoolteachers, postal peons, and small businessmen were hunted down.
Certain national political parties in the opposition encouraged Bodo
aspirations in the hope of electoral gains. The BLT cadre struck terror
with unimaginable acts of brutality, such as surrounding a family of
ordinary Assamese villagers and their kinsmen, without any interest in
politics, as they sat down to an annual
Bihu feast in the
courtyard of their house, and mercilessly gunning them down. Many such
incidents were a sort of misguided retaliation against the sufferings of
the Bodos at the hands of the Assam Police and the CRPF in the past.
But they did not even spare moderate Bodo leaders if they questioned
their methods. Quite a few lost their lives under the BLT fire.
The Population Argument
One serious argument against granting of a separate state to the
Bodos was the fact that over the extensive region where the Bodos
demanded their state, there has been since the distant past a mixed
population, with mixed settlements of Bodos and non-Bodos (largely
Assamese). In certain villages, Bodos were in a majority, but in many
other villages their proportion was at best a little over a third. But
the Bodos claimed that they had been reduced to a minority by the influx
of outsiders.
In order to empirically test the veracity of this strongly-held idea
in the early 1990s, I started examining the records found in Census
Reports from 1901 onwards. To my surprise, I found that if the region
was considered as a whole, the Bodos never could have been a
preponderant community there. In most of the police station areas, they
were not in a majority. The situation has not changed much over the
decades, though there has been a spurt in the population, both among
Bodos and non-Bodos. Then how did such an idea take such deep roots
among the Bodos? The ABSU, during a phase of militancy, undertook a
self-operated census in the region they claimed as their own, their
native land, and showed that it had a 97% Bodo population!
There may be two reasons for such a subjective idea taking a firm
hold in their minds as being the truth. First, it is a fact that Bodos
were natives of the region and have identified themselves with it.
Second, there were sizeable numbers of people from outside who had
settled there. But, this is no reason to hold that all non-Bodos were
outsiders who had robbed the Bodos of their inherited land. A few years
back, I came to the conclusion that the reason for the numerically
weaker position of the Bodos lay in their way of life. They depended for
their livelihood on shifting cultivation with primitive tools.
Production at that level, therefore, could not support a substantial
population. My own memories of a childhood spent close to a Bodo
community were that the incidence of infant mortality was quite high.
Modern medicine was also not familiar to them. Now that they have access
to more dependable sources of livelihood and modern medicine, the
growth in their population today is fairly high.
1
The Centre’s Decisions
Now comes the role of the centre as a decisive factor. When Assam,
especially western Assam was in the throes of a campaign of terror by
Bodo extremists, the Congress government in Delhi sought a hurried
answer through the mediation of Rajesh Pilot, who then served as the
government’s troubleshooter. He initiated a tripartite conference and
offered the Bodos the present dispensation of the BTC with substantive
powers and covering a very large area of three different districts. On
10 February 2003 the Bodo leadership accepted it with alacrity and
declared that, henceforth, they would live in peace and friendship with
the Assamese. It was a package hastily made up, with Bodos being given
30 seats in a council of 46, with only five seats reserved for the
non-Bodos. The then chief minister of Assam, Hiteswar Saikia, pointed
out that the arrangement was patently unrealistic and unfair to the
non-Bodo majority, but was overruled. Thus, the BTC was by no means an
extension of democracy, but of Congress realpolitik. The Bodo
leadership, however, nursed a grievance that while the Assamese
ministers and officials spent money at will, the expenditure of sums
given to BTC was strictly monitored. There was further a grouch that the
home department, and thus control over law and order and the police,
was exclusively in the hands of the state government.
Apart from the Assamese, the Koch-Rajbangshis, who were as
indubitably indigenous to the region as the Bodos, and who had a line of
powerful kings there in the late middle ages, were deeply aggrieved. So
far, they were as passionately and patriotically Assamese as any other
Assamese community. But, this bitter blow, which disempowered them in
their ancestral land under the very nose of the Assamese rulers, made
them turn to other ways of finding justice, and they also claimed their
right to a separate state comprising areas from both Assam and north
Bengal. At first, there was some hope that by gaining the status of
scheduled tribe, they would be able to free themselves from the
constraints imposed by the BTC provisions, but the hope faded when on
academic grounds the GoI rejected their demand time after time. The
decision of New Delhi to form Telangana has stiffened their resolve to
serve an ultimatum, with the implied threat that they too would take to
arms if the demand is not fulfilled.
The situation is not worrisome to the centre. It is as though this is
the concrete exemplification of the theory of so-called “circulation of
elites”; all very nice and comfortable. Perhaps, the motive is to keep
the north-east permanently on the boil to the advantage of big capital,
native and foreign, like certain regions of Africa haunted by poverty,
massive displacement, wars and epidemics. There will also be certain
foreign-funded agencies given a free hand by the GoI to offer their
support and assistance to such machinations.
Addendum
I had jotted down these points in July 2013. Since then there have
been other developments that further indicate the confused and
intractable nature of the problem with its horrifying impact on the
lives of common men and women. The earlier mass hysteria has simmered
down to a state of uneasy quiet, broken by sporadic disturbances.
The original Bodo secessionist outfit, the National Democratic Front
of Bodoland (NDFB), formed under the leadership of Ranjan Daimary in the
early 1990s, split into two in 2009 with one group opting for talks
with the centre, and the other, led by Daimary, vowing to continue their
armed struggle. There have been bloody clashes between the two groups,
with entire villages loyal to one group or the other bearing the brunt
of this bloody rivalry. In 2011, Ranjan Daimary was caught, probably
with the connivance of the Government of Bangladesh, where he had taken
shelter. Under unceasing pressure from P C Haldar, the centre’s
facilitator for negotiations with the militants, Daimary too retreated
from his earlier stance of uncompromising resistance and has become
agreeable to unconditional talks. At this juncture, another group under a
new leader, known as the NDFB (Songbijit group), parted company with
Ranjan Daimary, refusing to lay down arms. This Songbijit faction of the
NDFB has been indulging in sporadic acts of terror. In January 2014, a
group of their cadre stopped a night bus coming from Siliguri in north
Bengal, at Athiabari of Kokrajhar district of the BTC, identified and
dragged out five Hindi-speakers and shot them dead. Elsewhere in the BTC
too, Hindi-speakers are in fear of their lives owing to this new
approach of the Songbijit group to the question of “liberation”.
Further south, in the Karbi Anglong Autonomous District, mistrust and
friction among various ethnic groups settled there have become common.
The National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Isak-Muivah) – NSCN(IM) has
claimed a part of Karbi Anglong as part of their “Nagalim” (bigger
Nagaland), and this has raised suspicion against the Rengma Naga tribe
among the Karbi militants loath to part with territory of the district.
In December 2013, nine Rengma Nagas had been gunned down by suspected
Karbi militants, and the Rengmas also retaliated by killing four Karbi
youths, in turn triggering a wholesale attack by Karbis on Rengma
villages, marked by widespread arson, setting fire to standing crops and
granaries, and physical assaults on the fleeing Rengma Nagas. Soon, the
situation got out of hand and 3,100 terror-stricken Karbis and Rengmas
sought shelter in refugee camps. While calm is slowly returning, many
inmates in the camps are too terrified to return home.
No one knows where terror will strike next and find victims among
innocent unsuspecting folk. It is clear that the empathy of many
academics and social activists from mainland India for the aspirations
for national liberation of ethnic groups and tribes of Assam is
uninformed of the complexity of the situation. For instance, many of the
ethnic militant outfits have no firm and clear-cut policy regarding the
other groups settled among their compatriots or in their immediate
neighbourhood. Some demonstrate a knee-jerk reaction leading to
horrendous acts of ethnic cleansing. In any case, there is no other
thought than domination, and a democratic outlook is singularly missing.
To make the confusion worse, the shadowy agencies of the Home
department of the centre, with a section of the Church in collusion, and
suspected foreign agents coming as tourists, non-governmental
organisations and journalists, chronically work in the disturbed region
to widen differences and shore up crumbling isolationist traditions. As
far as one can see, the authorities in power are in no hurry to
establish permanent and stable peace on the basis of democratic and
liberal sharing of space and rights.
