Assam’s Nationality Question
By: No Author
Vol XLVI No.9 February 26, 2011
Severe military repression over a long period of time does weaken one’s resolve, leading to repudiation of the very raison d’être of one’s existence in a national liberation organisation. Finally, after 30 years, an important faction of the leaders of the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), the one headed by Arabinda Rajkhowa, the organisation’s chairman, now out of prison on bail, initiated talks with the government on 10 February, in effect dropping the question of the sovereignty of the people of Assam from the agenda. Surely the union government views this development as a breakthrough of sorts. It seemed to be in a great haste to flag off the talks before the coming state assembly elections. But what will all the talk of autonomy – yet to be articulated in concrete terms – mean if the Indian state continues to be undemocratic as far as the nationality question is concerned? Is the government genuinely interested in reaching an honourable settlement in Assam? And with ULFA itself divided over the question of giving up its original raison d’être, is an “honourable settlement” in storefor it?
Operation Bajrang and Operation Rhino led to atrocities in Assam’s countryside, including murder by the army and/or the paramilitary forces backed by the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, which, in effect, did away with the rule of law to allow the killing of suspects without fear of prosecution. The national media looked the other way, and it did not report to the rest of the country the genuine grievances and demands of the people of Assam, which the ULFA articulated. The Bhutan campaign of the Indian Army, and later, with the change of regime in Bangladesh, the handing over of the main leaders of the ULFA to the Indian security forces by the Sheikh Hasina regime and their incarceration seem to have broken ULFA’s resolve to continue the struggle for “national liberation”. At the same time, ULFA’s support in the larger population had ebbed after the “armed struggle” had degenerated into terror bombing of civilian groups, most notably but not only in the event on 15 August 2004 in Dhemaji when 18 people, mainly schoolchildren and their parents, were killed.
The British had annexed Assam and the other parts of the north-east in 1826. They imposed a colonial economy dominated by tea plantations and the extraction of crude oil, and encouraged the immigration of east Bengal Muslim peasants to extend the cultivation of jute for supply as raw material to the Calcutta jute mills. With this came the feeling among the Assamese of a threat to their distinct cultural identity. Independence in 1947 raised great hopes but these were dashed when the people of Assam found that they had to launch a mass agitation even to get the crude oil that was being extracted and then refined within the state itself. The dominance of non-Assamese mercantile capital in the stagnant economy even as large sections of local youth remained unemployed, the administrative, political and military supremacy of New Delhi, and a sense of helplessness at not being able to redress the situation sowed the seeds of frustration and alienation, and, in turn, led to the germination of national aspirations. How else does one explain the fact that Assamese youth have been drawn towards ULFA over three decades?
New Delhi’s rather indifferent attitude to in-migration even in the wake of the 1971 war and its aftermath, of course, deepened the simmering discontent leading to the Assam movement. But the leaders of the movement and the party they formed (the Asom Gana Parishad) that came to power let down the Assamese masses, including the various tribal peoples and ethnic communities. Their patriotic slogans, just like those of the Congress Party in the movement for India’s independence, ultimately proved hollow. With this the ULFA came to the fore, backed by youth coming from peasant backgrounds, taking to the path of armed struggle, which was accompanied by extortion by ULFA in order to procure arms and pay for the training of its fighters. The iron fist of the state ultimately put paid to “Swadhin Asom”. But will the present aspirations of an “honourable settlement” fare any better?
For one, Paresh Baruah, the head of ULFA’s military wing, commands a large following, especially of armed cadre, and he still stands by the original aims of the organisation, that of a Swadhin Asom. So it is incumbent upon both the Rajkhowa faction of ULFA and the government to bring the Baruah camp into the talks, without which a negotiated settlement would not count for much. The Sanmilita Jatiya Abhibartan (SJA) and its steering committee, headed by the well-known litterateur Hiren Gohain, have done a lot to get the two sides to the negotiating table. They can possibly now help in bringing Baruah around only if New Delhi is willing to send strong feelers that it will no longer conflate the state and the nation. Further, it will thereby be willing to make a clear distinction between citizenship and nationality, leading to considerable autonomy for each of the country’s nationalities. It is only with this that the Assamese will, over time, no longer aspire to have their own sovereign state. Of course, there is a place in this country for further federation and autonomy, but, as Rosa Luxemburg would have reminded us, further autonomy will mean little in an undemocratic state – one has only to recall the way the Indian state has trampled upon the national aspirations of the people of Kashmir or of Nagaland, in the latter, especially the army’s counterinsurgency in the 1950s, including the use of strategic hamlets. We can visualise the Assamese and the various other nationalities of India living in harmony only within a future democratised India.