The issue of granting citizenship to religious minorities from Bangladesh on the one hand and deporting illegal (Muslim) immigrants from Bangladesh on the other figured very prominently in the Lok Sabha election campaigns of BJP in Assam. While the party did achieve electoral benefits based on its stand on the question of migration, their latest step towards allowing religious minorities from Bangladesh without any documents have not gone well with the Assamese population. The justification that BJP came up with is the religious persecution that these minorities face in countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan where political rule sometimes swings to governments run by radical elements.

While the BJP rode on the popular wave of opposition to illegal immigration and successfully cut into the votes of both Asom Gana Parishad and Congress, on the issue of citizenship for Bangladeshi Hindus, it diverged from the regional party. AGP wanted anyone entering the country after March, 1971 to be deported irrespective of their religion, whereas the notification of the present government said that religious minorities which entered the country till December 31^st, 2014 will be allowed to stay even without relevant documents. This is nothing short of communalizing a humanitarian issue.

While religious persecution may be a solid ground for taking in refugees and giving them benefits like citizenship, the Hindus from Bangladesh are not the only persecuted lot. One cannot overlook the plight of Rohingiya Muslims from Myanmar who have been facing a worst kind of persecution to the extent of being rendered stateless. While they were denied entry to Bangladesh, their fate is not much better in India. Denied of any rights this religious minority continues to languish in the margins. Terrifying stories of how the Rohingiyas were not allowed to study, work in Myanmar and finally had to fled a massacre abounds. These are refugees and not migrants who were forced to flee anti-Muslim violence in the Arakan state. In India far from citizenship rights, many have not been given the temporary refugee card from UNHCR.

The Chakmas in Arunachal Pradesh have been languishing in similar condition since independence. With much confusion with regard to Chittagong Hill Tracts, the CHT was finally made a part of Pakistan and Chakmas were unwillingly made to join erstwhile East Pakistan. But their influx to India started from partition onwards. Settled in northeast, their demand for citizenship and ST status enters the sixth decade. They have been denied citizenship on several occasions even after the Indira-Mujib agreement of 1972 which makes it mandatory for the Indian government to treat their applications lawfully for the grant of citizenship. While their initial absorption in the region was easier as the region was sparsely populated and due to their racial proximity to the local tribes, the current hostility of the local tribes further impinges on their demands for citizenship. They are denied government jobs for belonging to refugee families. Amidst acute livelihood crisis and joblessness, the absence of much needed state support like ration cards have further pushed this community to squandering poverty. In absence of government jobs, educated youths have taken up work as agricultural labour and farmhands. The absence of any specific policy of the state for handling the refugee issue has not only violated their socio-economic rights but also their human rights.

Another persecuted minority whose plight cannot be sidelined are the Tibetans. Under Indian law Tibetans are not even recognized as refugees but rather as foreigners. While the Indian government refers to Tibetans as ‘refugees’, they don’t enjoy any rights comparable to refugee rights under international treaty law. While the honorable Dalai Lama enjoys political asylum, the other Tibetans who fled to India later remain undocumented and reside in India under more precarious legal status. Their condition remains wholly subject to the discretion of Indian government and shows the absence of a coherent policy towards the refugees. The Tibetans are constrained in multiple ways. They are not allowed to stage protest and are often denied the right to higher education. Under, Tibetan Rehabilitation Policy, there are guidelines on how can Tibetans do business and take up economic activities in India. But the policy was passed only in 2014 and it is a rather cumbersome process. Before this, Tibetans were given a “Registration Card” which needed to be renewed from time to time. While the policy allows them the right to reside in India, it does not let them buy and own property, register business etc. The condition of India-born Tibetans is no better.

India has no specific policy framework for solving the refugee problem and neither is it a signatory of the 1951 UN Convention relating to the Status of Refugees or its 1967 Protocol. In such a scenario, the newfound love for religious minorities from Bangladesh points something more sinister than mere humanitarian concerns. This notification has very rightly met stiff opposition from the people of Assam. The state saw massive protests and strikes led by groups like AASU, AJYCP etc. For them while most parties have never put an effort to implement the Assam Accord, this notification of BJP amounts to completely subvert the accord. The Assam Accord did not differentiate immigrants on the basis of religion. This move by BJP seems like an attempt to consolidate the Hindu vote bank with an eye on the upcoming state elections.

Also the government which claimed to strengthen relationships with neighbouring countries didn’t take into account the repercussion of such a statement in Bangladesh. The Awami League government which is trying very hard to strengthen its secular credentials, is worried that such an announcement will encourage more Hindus to leave the country. This is a bad news as this will weaken the base of secular parties in the country.

In such a situation where a large number of refugees continue to face hardships on a day to day basis in India, the government of the day seems more interested in scoring brownie points by differentiating between refugees on the basis of religion. While the problem of Hindu immigrants is not limited to one particular state, the focus this time seems to be on Assam which is going to polls soon and where immigration continues to be a crucial issue. If citizenship is to be extended on humanitarian grounds to persecuted communities, it cannot be denied to Rohingiyas, Chakmas, Tibetans etc. India being a secular country cannot be assumed to be a natural homeland of a particular religion. However the present government’s act of limiting the benefit of citizenship to one particular community, point to the sinister designs of the rightwing NDA government which will lead to further communal polarization and hostility.

Last few days have seen several #AssamWithJNU #JusticeForRohith protests and rallies demanding justice for Rohith Vemula and against the assault on JNU, police crackdown and arrest of JNUSU President Kanhaiya Kumar under the charges of sedition, the media trial of Umar Khalid, and the undeclared emergency in the country.

Yesterday, on 19th February, Satra Mukti Sangram Samiti [Students’ Liberation Struggle Committee] along with SFI and AISF units of Gauhati University staged a protest in Gauhati University campus. On 18th February, a similar protest was staged by students of Dibrugarh University which was disrupted by hooligans of ABVP, Bajrang Dal and Hindu Jagaran Manch; according to reports  in order to control the situation from spiraling out district authorities had to deploy CRPF inside Dibrugarh University campus.

That same day, in Guwahati thousands of citizens including peasants, public intellectuals, artists, and students and faculty members of Cotton College State University, Gauhati University, TISS – Guwahati protested.

Under the banner of Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti (KMSS) [Peasants’ Liberation Struggle Committee] and Satra Mukti Sangram Samiti [Students’ Liberation Struggle Committee], the student wing of KMSS, the protesters gathered at 11 am at Dighalipukhuri near the District Library. The protesters were addressed by KMSS leader Akhil Gogoi, former principal of Cotton College and renowned cultural activist Sitanath Lahkar, eminent author and social activist Dr. Dinesh Baishya, noted artist Loknath Goswami, General Secretary Asom Sangrami Mancha Manjit Mahanta among others. At around 1 pm the gathered protesters took out a protest march from near Dighalipukhuri to the office of the deputy commissioner of Kamrup (metropolitan).

Addressing the protesters Akhil Gogoi said “This protest rally has been taken out to tell the people of Assam that the Centre, which has done nothing for the people, is arresting students who are working for the country. The students questioned whether hanging of Afzal Guru was right and sedition charges were slapped on them. Then goons of RSS and BJP attacked Kanhaiya Kumar, students and teachers of JNU and journalists on the premises of the court. The situation is now like the one during Emergency,”. He further added that “Today RSS-BJP is dictating us on everything – what to wear, what to eat, what to see and what to say. It is a fully fascist attitude … Kanhaiya is a symbol of protest and right to freedom of speech”.

Sitanath Lakhar while addressing the protesters said “First it was FTII, then University of Hyderabad and now JNU. If we keep mum, similar incidents will take place here also. It is a design to terrorise people. Kanhaiya, students, teachers and journalists were beaten up inside court where people go for justice”.

It might be worth mentioning that few days earlier scores of academicians from Assam; among others noted literary critic and retired Gauahti University professor Dr. Hiren Gohain, Renowned poet and former Vice Chancellor of Gauhati University Amarjyoti Choudhury, Gauhati University Professor Emeritus Khanindra Chowdhury, Assam University Professor Debasish Bhattacharya, Assam University Controller of Examination Suprabir Dutta Roy; had condemn the Modi Goverment’s handling of the JNU issue.
Dr. Gohain told PTI that “I think this is an excessive use of state power in such a way as to imperil some of our basic constitutional rights. The fact that many members of the faculty have come out in a demonstration of solidarity with the protesting students confirms that it is not a mere case of youthful adventurism.” Prof. Debasish Bhattacharya added that “Anyone can have an opinion on Kashmir and what is the problem in having a discussion on that? If there is anything wrong happening, the university has its own mechanism. The government should have faith on this and should not have interfered. It is a fascist approach”.

Below are few images from the rally and today’s protest in Guahati University! Photo courtesy: Rasel Hussain, adviser, Satra Mukti Sangram Samiti (Students’ Liberation Struggle Committee).

18th February Rally, Guwahati City

19th February Rally, Guwahati University

First published on Sabrang India

Assam enters into polls on April 4, 2016. Unlike previous elections, this time the state has caught some significant attention of the ‘nation’. The ‘nation’ is watching. The competition and stakes are high. The incumbent Congress is contending against a rising power in Assam and its long time contender in national electoral politics, the Bharatiya Janata Party – BJP. BJP’s aggressive drive to expand its mata-led nation building project, riding upon the back of a cow, is in eager and impatient wait to sweep a vast portion of electoral gains in Assam. This gain would establish its crucial presence not only in Assam but also in the rest of the states in the north-eastern region.

This election, with the national parties fighting for supremacy, can be read as symptomatic of  a significant step towards the nationalisation of regional politics, and remarkably so given the marginal status ‘enjoyed’ by the blob of geography known as the north-east of India, which for long has been perceived by mainland India as a habitat of insurgents, secessionists and anti-nationals.

The spectacular performance of BJP in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections where it wrestled 7 out of 14 seats in Assam, promised a rise in its reach beyond mainland India. After all, in a state where it has no organisational grass root presence, the BJP’s performance was unprecedented.

Almost as a boon to the BJP, immediately after the 2014 elections the discontentment within the Congress began to manifest itself out in the open. Himanta Biswa Sarma, who was one of the pillars of the Congress government for 14 long years, joined the BJP along with 12 other rebel Congress MLAs. Sarma’s rebellion against the Tarun Gogoi led Congress government was a smartly carried out performance to gain public support even in an act of defection, as he smoothly went on to the side of a new contender in the political field of Assam. To keen observers of Assam politics, Sarma’s defection to BJP did not come as a surprise as he had already started flexing his muscles before the Lok Sabha polls in 2014. In fact many in the Congress party went to the extent of accusing Sarma of implicitly aiding the BJP in the Lok Sabha polls.

I. Barring the ‘Illegal Immigrant’ from Economic Activity, a Fascist Agenda

In this Election BJP seeks to form the government and has, in a show of strategic political wisdom, drawn alliances with some of the smaller parties of Assam, namely the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP), Bodoland People’s Front (BPF) and the Tiwa and Rabha organizations. Its alliance with the first two does not come as a surprise at least for following reasons – a) in the first case, both the BJP and the AGP identify ‘Illegal Infiltration’ as being the core of the Assam’s problem, b) in 2012, the killings and displacement of a specific section of the population in Bodoland Territorial Area District (BTAD) areas are reflective of the think-alike position of clearing the ‘excesses’ upheld by both the BJP and BPF.

While releasing the Vision document on March 25, 2016, the Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, flanked by Himanta Biswa Sarma and Chief Ministerial candidate Sarbananda Sonowal, announced that “Our priority is the illegal infiltration and detection and deportation of these infiltrators”. This is one of the most sensitive issues that has kept Assam burning for decades.

The vision document boldly announced the promise of a “law to be enacted to “deal sternly” with industries, businesses, small and medium enterprises or any other agencies employing infiltrators.”  It needs to be pointed out here that this idea of economic boycott of “illegal Bangladeshis” is not the brainchild of just the BJP think-tank; it has been very much a part of the public discourse in Assam for over three decades dating back to the Assam movement (1979 – 1985). In fact, deployment of economic boycott has been unofficially attempted in several cases. For instance, the Bodos did not purchase anything from Bengali speaking Muslim vendors in Kokrajhar district for some time after the 2012 riots. Posters were put across the district announcing that whoever indulges in economic transactions with “illegal Bangladeshis” would be levied a fine of Rs. 10,000.

The xenophobic language, tone and the barely-veiled threat of incitement to violence of this electoral promise sounds as close to fascist propaganda as it can get in contemporary India, because for the first time a political party has promised to turn this widely held idea into a law if it wins the election.

II. Ghar Vapsi, Beef Eating win no brownie points in the campaign

The spectacular success of the BJP in Assam during the Lok Sabha polls of 2014 owed much more to the anti-incumbency fatigue of  people with 14 long years of Congress rule rather than any positive presence of the BJP. The latter’s success was not, and is still not commensurate to its organisational presence in the state. In any case, the spectacular success created a room for strengthening organisational presence and greater possibility of success for the BJP in this Assembly election.

Over the last two years BJP has been seen trying to consolidate its Lok Sabha success into a widespread acceptance of itself in Assam as a political force, and it has attempted to project itself as the upholder of Axomiya jatiyotabaad (Axomiya nationalism) [We use the term Axomiya as an ethno-linguistic category comprising of non-tribal Axomiya speaking caste-Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Sikhs in Assam; we use the term Assamese to connote all denizens of the state of Assam.] [pullquote align=”full” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Campaigns like “Ghar Wapsi” or “Love Jihad” didn’t find any resonance in Assam. So it tried to rally around the differentiation of “Illegal Bangladeshis” into Hindus and Muslims, the former to be assimilated into the Assamese – Indian fold and the latter to be detected and deported[/pullquote]

It wasn’t unexpected that the issue of “illegal Bangladeshi” became the cornerstone of BJP’s poll agenda in Assam: an issue that has been at the heart of Axomiya jatiyotabaadi politics. However, it didn’t happen without testing the political waters on a few other issues largely derived from the conventional organisational programme that it deploys in various parts of India where communalism is an easy seed bed for escalating conflicts and violence.

Campaigns like “Ghar Wapsi” or “Love Jihad” didn’t find any resonance in Assam. So it tried to rally around the differentiation of “Illegal Bangladeshis” into Hindus and Muslims, the former to be assimilated into the Assamese – Indian fold and the latter to be detected and deported. In the first week of September 2015, the Union government sent a notification to Assam government announcing its decision to allow Hindu Bangladeshis in Assam who sought shelter before December 31, 2014 to continue living in Assam. The Union government’s justification for this benevolent exception was   “due to religious persecution or fear of religious persecution” in their country of origin. The announcement didn’t go down well in Assam as it was seen to be in contradiction with the core principles of the Assam Accord of 1985, and large scale protests erupted across the state spearheaded by jatiyotabaadi organizations like All Assam Students Union (AASU) and Axom Jatiyotabaadi Yuva Chatra Parishad (AJYCP) .

Subsequently, it tried to bring beef on the menu card – an issue which so significantly determined the trajectory of the recent Bihar Elections to the detriment of BJP’s poll ambitions. Amidst an ethnically diverse state like Assam where beef is eaten not only by the Muslims who constitute 34 % of the total population  but also by a substantial section of the tribal groups as well as the Cha Janajaati (Tea Tribes), beef could not establish BJP’s much desired diet plans.

However beef did turn handy in another way, even if it appeared to be a leaf out of Bhisham Sahni’s famous novel Tamas: a new trend (at least in Assam) of throwing beef chunks and cow heads in mostly Kali temples has emerged in past one year. According to local (both social and conventional) media in Assam, there have been at least 22 reported cases of “beef-found-in-temples” since 2015.

However owing to the specific history of being largely secular, throughout Assam where these incidents occurred, the reactions of the public were quite different. Where the presence of Bengali Hindus were significant, communal tensions appeared volatile, unlike in Axomiya dominated areas where such incidents did not become an issue of any significant attention.

III. Project to Dis-enfrancise the entire community of Muslims of East Bengal Descent

BJP’s forceful thrust on detection, deportation and economic boycott of “Illegal Muslim Bangladeshis” cannot be misread – it is not just about Illegal Bangladeshis. It is an attempt towards disenfranchising an entire community of Muslims of East Bengali descent, irrespective of when their ancestors migrated to Assam from erstwhile East Bengal. In this respect a recent interview given to a national daily by Sarbananda Sonowal is telling where he doesn’t mince words:

The assertion that only those Muslims who have been living in Assam for 800 years are genuine Axomiya Muslims is a cunning deployed to drive home the point that the East Bengali Muslim peasants who migrated to Assam from 1890s onwards and their progenies are not legitimate residents of Assam. It might be worth mentioning here that only between 1901 and 1941, a little over10 lakh East Bengali Muslim peasants settled in Assam.

This assertion, again, is not the original brain child of BJP. It has very much been a part of the consciousness of the present generation of Axomiyas. Despite huge historical complexities involved in differentiating an “illegal Bangladeshi immigrant” from a Muslim citizen of East Bengali descent, to the young urban Axomiya any Bengali Muslim is a Bangladeshi. However the question arises as to how does one identify an “illegal Bangladeshi immigrant”? What are the ways of telling the difference? It is most certainly not difference but the similarities between an “illegal Bangladeshi immigrant” and a Muslim citizen of East Bengali descent which supplies the paraphernalia for slotting people of both the categories in a single category of the “illegal Bangladeshi immigrant”; it is physical and cultural markers, religion and language.

IV. Assamese Exceptionalism could open doors for the BJP

The rise of Sonowal from an Axomiya Jatiya Nayak (Amoxiya National Hero), as hailed by AASU, to becoming an important leader of the AGP and then finally the State President of the Assam BJP and its Chief Ministerial candidate for 2016 elections has been based on the anti-“illegal Bangladeshi” cause.
Both AASU and AGP, even today, vouch by the Assam Accord of 1985 which sets the cut-off date for detection and deportation of Bangladeshis from Assam as 26th March 1971, whereas the current BJP posture of Sonowal supercedes the provisions of the Accord to make a sweeping identification and marking of “illegal Bangladeshis” irrespective of the important dates and deadlines laid down in the Accord and giving it a communal edge.

It was also on the basis of the Assam Accord that the Indian Citizenship Act of 1955 was amended in 1986. Through this amendment, Article 6A was inserted to retrospectively grant citizenship to those who migrated from East Pakistan to Assam before 1st January 1966, and those who came on or after 1st January 1966 but before 26th March 1971 would enjoy all rights as citizenship except voting rights for 10 years.

Sonowal is the Jatiyotabaadi face of BJP in this election. For past six months, in his interviews and speeches Sonowal has been strongly putting forth the BJP magic card of development as one of the main agendas of the polls. It, however, comes with an important rider – this is development for the genuine people of the greater Assamese society, which according to him and Assam BJP, apart from the Axomiyas (Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians) and various tribes, includes Bengalis (read Hindu Bengalis), Marwaris, Punjabis and Nepalis. Sonowal and his party have also been harping that once elected their government will pay special attention to genuine Axomiya Muslims who have been “outmaneuvered by Muslim migrants”.

A substantial section of Axomiya Muslims have taken BJP’s bait. Out of three lakh Axomiya Muslim members of BJP, two lakh seventy thousand have joined the party in past one year. BJP’s election thrust of rooting out “illegal Bangladeshis” from Assam goes down well with this section of the population. Axomiya Muslims and Muslims of East Bengali descent might share the same religion but cultural difference, real or perceived, has always pitted the two communities against each other.

The anti Bengali Muslim sentiment among Axomiya Muslims is as pervasive as it is among the caste-Hindu Axomiyas and many other communities like the Bodos. In fact organisations claiming to represent Axomiya Muslims like the Federation of Indigenous Muslim Organisations of Assam (FIMOA), All Assam Goriya Moriya Desi Jatiyo Parishad, Axomiya Muslim Kalyan Parishad, All Assam Goriya Yuva Parishad have long been demanding special development package for the community and have long asserted that they not be equated with Bengali Muslims just because of a shared religion. These organisations have also been a vocal critic of Badaruddin Ajmal’s All India United Democratic Front (AIDUF) (which is perceived by Axomiyas to be a party exclusively of Muslims of East Bengali descent) and on several occasions accused Ajmal and his party of protecting illegal Bangladeshis, condemning him of trying to foment religious communal divide in an otherwise “secular and tolerant society”.

An important question arises here: what explains the fact that BJP and its Hindutva fascist politics doesn’t make a substantial section of Assamese society wary? There seem to be two plausible explanations.

Firstly, in Assam there exists a very strong sense of Assamese exceptionalism, that the Assamese are inherently tolerant, easy-going, secular and peaceful people. This sense of exceptionalism is pervasive among not just the Axomiyas but also among various tribes. A common refrain that can be very frequently heard is that “Assam is different. BJP can do a Gujarat or a Muzzafarnagar in other parts of India, but here in Assam BJP cannot and will not foment riots against Axomiya Muslims in Assam”. Another refrain that is often heard is that “Assam has never witnessed any violent conflict between Axomiya Muslims and Hindus”. It is a fact that there has been no history of violent conflict between Axomiya Muslims and Hindus; not even in the aftermath of the demolition of Babri Masjid, except for one small flare-up. However, this history will not stand as a guarantee that if BJP wins this election it will not turn Assam into a Hindutva laboratory in the garb of rooting out “illegal Bangladeshis”.

A good illustration of this confidence in the sense of exceptionalism is the curious case of the dynamic peasant leader Akhil Gogoi who leads the largest left-leaning social movement under the banner of Krishak Mukti Sangram Samati (KMSS). KMSS has also been the de-facto opposition to the Congress government for the past one decade albeit outside the legislative assembly.

Though Akhil Gogoi and KMSS are now at the forefront of the fight against what he calls BJP’s Hindutva fascism, during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections the need to defeat the Congress took precedence and Akhil Gogoi released a list of ‘who to vote for’, for his supporters and he also appealed to the people of Assam to consider his list. The list comprised of one CPM candidate, one CPI-ML candidate, three AGP candidates, two AIUDF candidates and 7 BJP candidates. This political blunder on part of Akhil Gogoi stems precisely from this flawed sense of Assamese exceptionalism.

On the contrary, one of the composite features of this exceptionalism has created a public sphere that denounces any regressive general communal slogans and statements; any overarching anti-religious minority statement made in Assam is met with hostilities and protests by people in general, including the jatiyotabaadi groups. One of the reasons for such political behavior could be because Axomiya religious minorities have had equal investment in the jatiyotabaadi project. Assam BJP is cognizant of this fact and has played it to its own advantage. To give a recent example, in 2015 Subramanian Swamy gave a statement in Guwahati that Mosques are merely a place of religious congregation and hence can be demolished. Theologically speaking Swamy might have been right, but the statement didn’t go down well in Assam. Effigies were burnt and protests were organized by various groups of people including the jatiyotabaadis; even Assam BJP condemned and distanced itself from Swamy’s statement.

V. ‘Genuine Assamese Muslims’ allies of the BJP in Assam?

The 2016 Assam election is a litmus test for the non-communal population of Assam to withstand the rightwing agenda of bringing religion and religious identity to the fore; it simply does not require another reason to burn. The ‘genuine Assamese Muslims’, however genuinely anxious they may be, are in the danger of allying and becoming complicit in the spread of a politics and ideology whose history talks more than loudly its destructive, divisive will. The BJP’s utilisation of the religious separation is derived from a specific Hindutva project unlike the sons-of-the-soil who have strongly and for long basked in the idea of Assamese exceptionalism. The exceptionalism may be present, may have been there, but times have changed.

It is crucial to recognize that BJP’s focus on Assam latches on to the most convenient and available issue of illegal Bangladeshis immigrants. Initially, as we have noted earlier, BJP tried to play its classic Hindu-Muslim segregation of the “illegal Bangladeshis”, although unsuccessfully.

The Bangladeshi problem in Assam does not fit into the mainstream Hindu rightwing understanding along the lines of religious identities and binaries, though it will be fallacious to say that such an element is not present in the ‘Assamese’ understanding.

With the twin combination of ignorance (about Assam and northeast) and desire ( to bring the northeast into its nation building project), the BJP is trying to create something of an optical illusion, especially to the people of Assam – the image of a flexible national party with concerns for the regional specificities, willing to go soft accordingly on hard core communal agenda which it deploys in other parts of the country, and take a hard line position on the main issue of Assam, pitting themselves against the ‘protectors’ of ‘illegal Bangladeshis”- AIDUF and the Congress. If not beef, Bangladeshi will do – B for BJP.

Assam politics, specifically Ahom politics, is at a crossroad. While Assam’s politics typically does not matter in the Indian Union’s ‘national scene’, for people of Assam, it means the world. For the first time in Assam’s political history, a non-Congress Delhi-headquartered party has positioned itself as the primary voice of Assamese Hindus. The BJP wants to follow up its spectacular and unprecedented success in Assam at the 2014 Lok Sabha polls with a bigger prize – becoming the primary ruling party of Assam. If that happens, it will be a political earthquake. The biggest casualty of the rise of the BJP in Assam has been Assamese nationalism (what pro-centre think-tanks refer to as Assamese sub-nationalism) in its electoral form. This election will decide whether Assamese nationalism and the particular type of identity-based pro-federalism politics in the non-tribal areas of Assam will give away to a more general Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan-type Hindu-Muslim politics in Assam.

Defying the decision of its general council, the top leaders of the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP), the principal electoral voice of Assamese nationalism (with “regionalism” and federalism being their signature planks), have allied with the BJP. AGP has been given a measly 24 seats out of 126 – thus underscoring its stock value after years of hemorrhage in their political base. There is a distinct possibility that the BJP-led alliance might win.

However, it seems that to a significant section of the AGP cadre and its more ideologically less-slippery leaders, winning is not everything. The AGP has split on this issue, with the former AGP youth wing president Sunil Rajkonwar leading the new formation AGP (Ancholikotabadi Moncho/Regionalist platform). He points out the incompatibility of AGP ideology with a Hindu-nationalist Delhi-headquartered formation like the BJP – “People supported the AGP because it is a secular regional force and fought for regional interests. But people will not tolerate them joining hands with the communal BJP .” AGP’s veteran ideological stalwarts like Thaneswar Boro have joined the new formation.

AGP has split several times before, but this split has been the most ideologically driven among them. While it is improbable that the AGP(AM) will be able to emerge as a principal pivot in Assam politics at the moment, the orphaned ideological stances that it wants to defend go to the soul of post-Partition Assamese politics and the principles enshrined in the 1985 Assam accord. The accord was the result of the All Assam Students Union (AASU)-led Assam movement which stood for protecting the rights of the ‘sons of the soil’ of Assam (this movement has served as the template of the Bodoland agitation and various other such homeland identity and rights movements in the region).

One one hand, this meant demands for the identification and banishment of illegal immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh, irrespective of religion. On the other hand, it sought to develop an Assam-centric politics, including protection of Assamese culture, language, economic and homeland rights. These issues are tied to greater political democratization and hence, devolution of power from the Union centre to the state. This democratizing and decentralizing thrust forms the core of federalist politics in the Indian Union. The AGP was born out of the churning of the Assam movements and was for many years one of the strongest votaries of decentralization and federalism.

On the communal question, AGP’s ideology is diametrically opposed to that of the BJP which considers the Indian Union to the natural host to all persecuted people of Dharmic faiths (Hindus, Buddhists,Sikhs,etc). This is where AGP’s homeland imagination becomes clear – it naturally starts and ends with Assam. The AGP stance has been that if the Government of India insists on hosting persecuted Hindus and Buddhists of Bangladesh, they have to be settled and given political rights in non-Assam India. Thus, Muslim Bengalis of lower Assam and Hindu Bengalis of Barak valley have long been the support base for the Congress, which has ruled Assam for the longest period by forging a broad front of various ethnic minorities along-with a section of the Assamese themselves. In this election, many fear an implosion of the Congress front – with Muslim Bengalis remaining with the Congress and the Hindu Bengalis going with the BJP which has promised illegal immigrants among them a path to citizenship. With the Muslim Bengali being constructed as the biggest threat to Assam, the shift of a significant section of Assamese Hindus to the BJP (many Assam BJP leaders are ex-AASU and AGP leaders) would make the communal polarization complete. Assam will join the “mainstream” via tried and tested Hindu-Muslim politics of South Asia. This is most damaging for the Assamese regionalists, who fear being left without a core constituency.

The situation of Muslim Assamese is particularly tricky, who are faced with an unenviable choice between their faith and ethno-linguistic identity, due to BJP’s aggressive Hinduization of what has long a very composite Assamese identity in the Assamese national imagination. In November last year, BJP MP Yogi Adityanath tried to hinduize Ahom glory by hailing the legendary Ahom general Lachit Borphukan as a Hindu general who defeated Aurrangzeb’s invading ‘Muslim’ army at the Battle of Saraighat. What is deliberately left unsaid is that the invading “Muslim” army was led by Ram Singh I, the ruler of Amber and the elder son of Raja Jai Singh I. Crucial to the Ahom victory at Saraighat was the bravery of top Assamese military officer ‘Bagh Hazarika’ Ismail Siddique, an Assamese Muslim. In fact, in the Assamese historical imagination (including that of the United Liberation Front of Asom -ULFA), both Lachit Barphukan and Ismail Siddique were on the side of Asom and the native Assamese people while Aurangzeb and Ram Singh I represented then what Yogi Adityanath represents now – the forces of Delhi.

The farther one goes from Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan, so-called ‘national parties’ operate less as political parties and more as temporary place-holders for powerful individual-centric client networks. The local brokers give Delhi-headquartered parties a representative aura, thus extending the legitimacy of the deep-state in these areas. In return, the brokers use extracts their fee in the form of access to resources (monetary and otherwise) that are available at the Union centre’s discretion.

The various ethno-linguistic homelands which constitute the Indian Union have always been in various depths of integration with the concept of India. A simple mind-game would demonstrate this. Close your eyes and try to place Madhya Pradesh, Assam and Nagaland in an increasing order of integration with the concept of India. Your particular ordering is unimportant but the fact that this mental exercise can be done at all tells us something. However, depths of integration are not uniform within the constituent ethno-linguistic homelands either. Even there exists a broad spectrum – from total identification and association to complete alienation and separateness. In case of Assam, this spectrum is represented by the AGP and its splinters, AASU, AJYCP, pro-talk ULFA, SULFA, BJP, Congress and other organizations, including those like ULFA(I) which cannot make themselves heard in the official ‘public space’.

What is the destiny of Assam as a homeland, as a society, as a culture, as an identity? Intricately tied to this question is the future of Assamese nationalism. This debate about the destiny of Assam as identity has various stake-holders who represent viewpoints and imaginations of Assam’s future, even an Assamese future. Though the Indian Union provides an over-arching context and has also been understood as the force whose hegemonic Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan thrust is most likely to defeat the particular culture and identity of Assam, this is essentially an internal dialogue within the Assamese people about the soul of Assam.

If people from the land of “Bharatmata ki Jai” were to visit Assam, they would see in every corner, monuments and slogans hailing another territorial mother, Mother Axom. The slogan “Joy Ai Axom” (Ai meaning mother) speaks of a different imagination of mother and motherland. Such proto-national aspirations may be deemed illegal in a super-centralized politico-judicial system that views dissenting diversity as the greatest enemy but they are neither illegitimate nor unreal. The persistence of the political representation vacuum that’s been created by AGP’s alliance with BJP needs resolution through a cross-communal, Assam-first electoral force. But if the political batte-field is so polarized between ‘Bharatmata’ and ‘illegal Bangladeshis’, who will fight for Ai Axom?

In the last two months the country has witnessed fervent battles in the name of nationalism. We have unwittingly entered a competition of proving who is a greater ‘deshbhakt’ and who is a greater ‘deshdrohi’. While the 9^th February incident in JNU accentuated the developments, hypernationalism was well on its way since quite some time. We should not forget how Ambedkar Periyar Study Circle, a students’ organisation of Madras IIT was targeted and how Rohith Vemula and others of Ambedkar Studies Circle of University of Hyderabad were also marked as anti-nationals.

This incident has brought a good time to rekindle certain debates – be it on the much needed anti-people colonial law of sedition or the question of an exclusive brand of nationalism. 9^th February, 2013 marks the day when Parliament attack accused Afzal Guru was hanged. Some students in JNU organized a talk in which they decided to take up the issue of Afzal Guru being wrongly hanged. A simple research on his case will reveal that many have felt his hanging was wrong and how for Kashmiris his death is closely related to the Kashmir question. Denied to meet his family for the last time, his hanging carried out in utmost secrecy seemed like a pacifying tactic for a ‘collective conscience’ which would satisfy with nothing less than the life of a man.

When alleged ‘anti-India’ slogans were raised in the same programme, it was a dangerous concoction as angst of Kashmiris came together with the question of the ‘judicial murder’ of an alleged terrorist who was a Kashmiri Muslim. This is a crucial moment to revisit the question of nationalism in the context of Kashmir. One cannot deny the fact that we are still at a distance from solving the Kashmir problem. Years of alienation and administrative failures in the valley has led to reverbation of ‘India go back’ frequently on the streets of the valley. However one also must take cognizance of the fact that not everyone from Kashmir lends support to the demand of secession.

The current debate has given birth to the idea of a narrow nationalism. A narrow territorial or cultural idea of Indian nation reduces the very diversity that our country claims to espouse. Professor Gopal Guru who spoke in one of the alternative classes of JNU made a case of looking at nation not as an institution that excludes but as an institution that acts as a means to achieve egalitarian goals. State’s institutions like bureaucracy and ministries should play a nation-building role.

Cultural nationalism as promoted by RSS and its political wing BJP reduces the nation to a majoritarian construct. As such those who question the dominant hegemonic ideologies are branded as anti-national and a potential danger. As a result Dalits who reject Brahminical Hinduism, leftists and secular intellectuals who reject Hindutva, beef eaters, inter-religious couples and even those like Kanhaiya Kumar who demand ‘azadi’ from social evils like poverty, communalism, casteism etc are branded as anti-national.

Lets move to another part of India which have also challenged a narrow reading of nationalism. The Northeastern region has had a difficult relationship with nationalism and nation building. While North Eastern Frontier Agency (NEFA) became Arunachal Pradesh, the nature of the frontier region has not changed much over the period. After decades of army operations Assam, Mizoram, Tripura have been identified as low intensity conflict areas but Manipur continues to burn. The persisting problem in this small state of Eastern India has led to gross human rights violation.

Much of the state’s problem can be traced back to its problematic assimilation to the Indian state post independence. In place of loose autonomy the Manipuri King was made to sign the Instrument of Accession without consulting his ministry. This is still for many nothing less than deception. What followed after independence is there for all to know. Terrorism and counter-terrorist state intervention have wrecked havoc in this tiny state. A state much smaller in size than Kashmir has seen casualties which is close to that in the valley. Gross violation of human rights of women, children is pervasive. Use of child soldiers as human shield is rampant in the state.

When General G D Bakshi broke down on National TV on the issue of hoisting national flags in central universities, a Manipuri student reminded him that there was more than the national flag in Manipur University. They had their own Assam Rifles’ Camp in the campus. The same Assam Rifles which have been held responsible for the rape and murder of Thangjam Manorama and numerous fake encounters in Manipur. The chilling encounter of an unarmed 22 year old Sanjit Meitei points to the state of the affairs. A pregnant woman was also shot in the cross fire. Civil society organisations have demanded probe in around 1,528 alleged fake encounters.

Our bleeding heart nationalists did not stop from coming out in streets in large numbers baying for blood of ‘anti-national university students’. Lawyers who act as custodians of law behaved like rowdy hooligans beating up students, professors and even journalists. But their nation and nationalism was not shaken by the Malom massacre where Army passed a 16 year old and a 60 year old among others as ‘dangerous potential insurgents’. 10 people waiting at a bus stop were gunned down by Assam Rifles in November, 2000. This very incident prompted Irom Sharmila to start her fast for repealing AFSPA. Their nationality is not further ashamed when Irom sharmila has been fasting for the last 15 years and is force fed by police personnel. The likes of General Bakshi have no tears to spare for her.

The racism that people from Northeast face in other parts of the country shows how our imagination of nation and its people is at best stunted. The assault ranges from remarks like ‘chinki’ to sexual and physical assaults. A 20 year old Nido Tania from Arunachal Pradesh was brutally attacked in 2000 which led to his death. 19 year old Richard Loitam from Manipur succumbed to his injuries of being subjected to tortuous ragging by seniors. Minor scuffles lead to physical assaults. Northeastern students were also picked up by police confused with Tibetans protesting the Chinese premier’s visit.

Nationalism and its derivative sub- nationalism have caused turbulence in Assam since decades. Borders drawn through the kitchen of many families made them foreigners in their own natural homeland. People living in border districts are bearing the brunt as large number of voters are marked as ‘Doubtful Voters’ and denied voting rights. It is this very idea of narrow nationalism that fuelled the Assam Movement which started the systemic harassment of Muslims of East Bengal origin as ‘illegal immigrants’. Their identity continues to be under question. These border areas are treated as security zones where the developmental initiatives of state are conspicuously absent.

These incidents show that we are far away from believing that a mongoloid featured non Hindu, non Hindi speaking person is as Indian as someone from Delhi or Uttar Pradesh. That the suffering of erosion led displacement comes within the purview of human rights violation and should not be overdetermined by the nationality of the victims. These people who buy into the narrow idea of nationalism also uphold, glorify and hold sanctimonious an ahistorical idea of India. It does not take into account the reality of the process of nation building and the pragmatic politics that went into the same. When citizens are systemically excluded and sometimes air bombed (like Aizawl in 1966) then their response to hypernational cries of love for motherland is mediated by their own experience of exclusion. The bombing of Aizawl in 1966 remains till date the only instance when India carried an airstrike against its own civilians.

The condition in the region continues to be grim and with election around in Assam, politics of polarisation is at play. The claims of the political party in power, BJP’s antics with giving citizenship to Hindu Bangladeshis have one hand made mockery of the genuine concerns of the indigenous population, on the other hand have put people belonging to the East Bengal origin at the receiving end of xenophobic hatred. Nationalism which has become a fancy tag for many in the capital, continues to be a question of life and death for many in the region.

The marginalized of Northeast will be more comfortable in standing up with the Dalits, minorities, LGBT and other excluded communities rather than chest thumping self acclaimed deshbhakts who will use a Hanumanthappa in every second sentence but opt for a better paying job abroad then slog in India. When one is constantly treated as the ‘other’, in terms of nationalism they are compelled to ask difficult questions like whose nationalism this is. Why those people who are willing to physically exterminate the ‘threats’ (read University students) to the country does not find the time to come out in the streets for the dying farmers??

A few decades back many in the northeastern region asserted its cultural difference with other parts of the country and demanded the right to secede. Of late most have accepted Indian sovereignty and Constitution. But what is unacceptable is the continuing gross violation of this very Constitution in different parts of the largest democracy on a regular basis. What is required is giving more people at the margins a stake and a stronger voice in the nation. Development rather than armed forces should be the face of the nation. Once it is done all will come under the banner of nationalism and work towards a more egalitarian society. Narrow chauvinist nationalism will stop being the benchmark of love, respect and allegiance for the country that one lives in.

I just read an article published in Raiot a couple of weeks ago titled ‘Axomiya Nationalism is Dead’. Once, Prof. Sanjoy Hazarika had told me an anecdote from his days as a young journalist in the eighties. Prafulla Kr Mahanta and others had just taken office and ‘Bodofa’ Upen Brahma, along with other tribal leaders, had gone to meet their comrade-turned-minister friends. They were in, though, for an indecorous reception, by being kept waiting for hours before they could see the new office bearers. Emerging, Brahma prognosticated a future where never again will any tribal community and leader believe the caste-Hindu Assamese politics and politicians.

One can of course read similar, but more cultivated statements  Karbi leader Jayanta Rongpi and others in the newspapers of 1985-86. If consolidation of Axomiya nationalism started in the 1880s, it reached its high noon in the 1980s, only to see a steep nosedive post the Assam movement. This was anything but unforeseen. The assertion of the different tribes and sections of people in face of the caste-Hindu Assamese hegemony is old, and each time that these sides came together on common grounds, like in 1947 and 1985, the disenchantment that followed only became more acute and immutable.

Axomiya Nationalism is dead precisely because it was ‘Axomiya’. From its genesis in the fight for the status of the Assamese language confronted by Bengali in the 1830s and the memoranda to Moffat Mills by Anandaram Dhekiyal Phukan and Maniram Dewan among others – if not in Xankardeb’s efforts of democratizing knowledge by bringing different castes and tribes under the Vaishanavite umbrella – it has been a nationalism which is strictly linguistic and almost equally staunchly caste-Hindu. Lex talionis followed towards the second and the third decades of the nineteenth century, with the formation of not only independent Koch Rajbongshi, Bodo Kachari and Sutia organizations but also umbrella organizations like the Tribal League to counteract the dominant Assamese middle-class. The nescience and lordliness of the Assamese, for Sanjib Baruah, is an “inevitable consequence of the very logic of language-based subnationalisms and the cultural grammar of the nation-province in India”. The smug, supercilious superiority of language also subsumed under it the varieties of Assamese spoken in the not-so-opulent sides of the state. Standard or national languages are anyway always maintained by dominant bloc institutions from the upper middle class of the upper caste of the upper-rank-holding places with natural and (post)colonially intellectual resources which in the case of Assam was upper Assam. The nationalistic process of false consciousness and absorption succeeded to the degree that Goalporia and Kamrupi became permanently redundant.

Most political commentators and scholars by now concede that the All Assam Students’ Union and Axom Xahitya Xabha, two of the most prominent corps of Axomiya subnationalism, are inherently stiff-neckedly Axomiya, despite saying Assam/Axom in their names instead of Axomiya. So has it also always been with the Axom Gana Parixod, or the AGP, that came out of the All Assam Students’ Union and the Assam Movement. Pronounced and interesting debates exist, though, about the nature of nationalism espoused and endorsed by the United Liberation Front of Assam, or the ULFA. Many like Udayon Misra and Kaustubh Deka argue that ULFA’s approach was more inclusive and catch-all, but the fact that the All Bodo Students’ Union would in 1987 demand protection from ULFA’s ‘political assassination and determinism’, calling it an ethnic Assamese organization, showed its limited appeal among the tribes and other indigenous peoples of the place. Also, ULFA’s insular and parochial emphasis on the ideal, historical Ahom Assam as an exemplum and parable straight from the Gospels did not hold attention and euphoria for long and it lost relevance just like the other ethnic Assamese groups.

But, as the article rightly suggests, Assam is as yet not a home to Bharat Mata Ki Jai wholly and if in parts it is, it is because of the chanters’ sense of painful vacuum, of an upsetting nihilism. Reading any newspaper in Assam after every election where AGP fails miserably, be it the 2011 Assembly Elections or the 2013 Guwahati Municipal Corporation Elections or the 2014 Lok Sabha Elections, would show people venting their disdain and dienchantment with the regionalist party and their desire for   an inclusive and sensitive brand of subnationalism of the people of multiethnic and polyphonic Assam.

That is why it is great news indeed that Axomiya nationalism is dead. It is dead for a good reason. The sooner this cultural and hegemonic Leviathan is irrevocably obliterated, the better. Before the monster of religious fundamentalism and Hindi-Hindu upper India misogynist nationalism completely mops up the historically heterogeneous state, a regionalist politics of the people(s) of Assam will manifest itself, as distinct from, if not in a showdown with, borderland-hating Indian nationalism. Hopefully this happens sooner rather than later. The demise of Axomiya nationalism has just laid the ground for it.

The Assam poll verdict 2016 is remarkable for more than one reason. It not only allowed BJP to form a government for the first time in Assam but also brought to the forefront some regional questions of national importance. For many old timers it was a nostalgic repeat of the 1985 elections when riding high on Assamese sub-nationalism, the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU) formed Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) and emerged victorious to form a government. This was an outcome of the six years long historic Assam Movement (1979-1985) which saw people from all sections of the society pour out in the streets demanding an end to persistent underdevelopment of the state and a halt to the changing demography of the state owing to unchecked movement of people from other parts of India and the subcontinent.

However the AGP fell short of delivering on its promises. As such the very people voted them out of power as well. The same AGP again found its way to the corridors of power after fifteen long years as an ally of the BJP. This makes revisiting the Assam Movement and the issues it espoused very important. The Assam Movement always claimed a secular credential giving more importance to ethnicity. For the proponents of the Movement the problem was migration and immigration from neighbouring countries and states which led to the minoritization of Assamese people. At that point the people at the receiving end of the angst of the locals were Hindi speakers as well as Bengali speaking people. The religious background of these people was not very relevant.

The United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) was born in the radical fringes of Assam Movement. They started with an armed struggle for a sovereign state but at the same time tried to be more broad-based than the Assam Movement. As opposed to Axomiyas(Assamese speakers), they appealed to Axombaxi (the inhabitants of Assam). While initially these groups enjoyed the support of many, their blatant use of violence alienated the common Assamese people. The hatred for outsiders, those critical of their stand was such that instances like murder of the Journalist Sanjoy Ghosh, attack on intellectuals like Hiren Gohain, murder of a number of Hindi speaking working class people etc are attributed to ULFA.

But of late this idea of ‘the other’ has undergone a change. BJP, since its 2014 election campaign, has been harping on the need to differentiate between the Muslims of East Bengal origin and the Hindus hailing from that area. The 1971 war between Pakistan and Bangladesh (erstwhile East Pakistan) saw massive displacement and a refugee crisis irrespective of religious background. BJP proposed that Hindus fleeing religious persecution in other countries must be accommodated and eventually absorbed as citizens. This was based on a premise that India is a natural homeland of Hindus. On the other hand economic immigrants will be pushed back.   

In similar lines, BJP again took up the immigration issue during the state elections campaign and raked up old controversies by saying that bypassing the Assam Accord which made 25^thMarch, 1971 as the cut off date, 1951 should be the benchmark and the first electoral rolls should be used as authentic proof of citizenship. This becomes important because partition violence saw large scale displacement all over the country. It was only the Nehru Liaquat pact which paved the way for return of many people who fled. As such their names have been subsequently included in the later electoral rolls. Such a demand also negates the category of ‘Na Axomiya’. These are people of East Bengal origin brought to Assam by British since the later half of 19^th century and who have assimilated with the Assamese society. They played a crucial role during the language movements and recorded Assamese as their mother tongue. It was instrumental in ensuring that Assamese as opposed to Bengali was declared as the state language of Assam.

BJP rode to power on its promises of solving the immigration problem. But in doing so, it redrew the battle lines between a khilonjia (an indigenous person) and a bohiragoto (an outsider). BJP’s campaign speeches often named Badaruddin Ajmal as the CM of Bangladeshis. Seen as someone representing the Bengali Muslims, such statements equated Bengali Muslims as Bangladeshis. Regional parties like AGP coming on board will make one wonder if BJP has succeeded in convincing AGP that it is the Bengali Muslim of East Bengal origin who is a threat as opposed to migrants coming from other states or countries like Nepal. When an entire community is regarded as illegal immigrants, the various waves of immigration become irrelevant along with the fact that this very community was systematically ‘settled’ to turn wastelands into revenue generating assets.

This election verdict shows a paradigmatic shift in how Assamese society views the ‘Other’ and it is bound to have long term ramifications. AGP which claims to represent the interest of all indigenous communities of Assam went quiet on the differential treatment of Hindu Bangladeshis. Indigeneity came to be defined by ethnic as well as religious identity. BJP’s permutation and combination led to such a situation where Muslims of East Bengal origin found themselves pitted against all other. In times to come it is to be seen how such narrow formulation of identity overdetermined by religion plays out in a state which has seen many fits of violence on this very issue. And how regional parties grapple with such formulations will go a long way deciding the future politics of the state. 

“As kids we would go in a big group every night and watch jatra,” quips my maternal uncle. Then he launches into telling me about how jatras or Bengali folk theatre used to be the main attraction in Raas melas. The stage would be open in all sides and audience would sit all around it. The green room would be at a distance. And actors dressed in fascinating attires would walk through the audience to the stage.

Raas melas are traditional fairs held to celebrate and pray to Lord Krishna. Commencing on the day of Purnima in the Bengali month of Kartik, it continues for almost 15 days. As these fairs are held during winter and jatras are staged at night, for audience sitting arrangements are made accordingly. Along with chairs, dried hay is strewn over the ground covered with plastic. The ticket for sitting on the hay is cheaper and in fact sitting on the ‘farash’ (floor) is more comfortable to many.

In my family gatherings, one of the favourite stories often repeated would be how my mama went to watch a show of the jatra and went off to sleep on the hay. By the time he woke up, the show was over and our national anthem Jana Gana Mana was being played. The talk of such times when jatras and similar cultural shows were the sole source of entertainment would transport us to a different world. It would make me and my cousins feel nostalgic about things we never even did.

Hearing about jatra which was a part of my mother and her siblings’ growing up, I decided to watch it for myself. So this year even before the Raas mela started, I told my uncle that I would like to see jatra. After making enquiries I got to know that there will be a single show on the 1^st of December. On the day of the show, accompanied by my uncle and a cousin, we made our way to the venue of the fair. Having reached half an hour early we were taken to the Green Room where the artists were busy getting ready for their play.

Kartik uncle, the secretary of the Organizing Committee of the Fair introduced me to the members of the Kolkata Opera. In conversation with the actors over cups of steaming cardamom tea, many interesting issues popped up. The lead actor and singer of the troupe, Mohammad Sabbir told me how jatra is losing its earlier popularity. With the influx of TV and film actors in jatras, the quality of jatra suffered. Jatras have also had to compete with newer sources of entertainment like TV soaps and movies. The dwindling demand of jatras is proven by the fact that this very group used to visit different parts of upper Assam but with time the frequency of such visits diminished.

Kartik uncle chips in saying that as opposed to earlier days when special stages were prepared for staging jatras, this time the organizing committee provided a common stage for all the cultural programmes.

Despite this, jatras have tried to compete for its previous position. Another actor of the troupe, Swapan Das tells us that as opposed to historical plays, jatras now stage plays on contemporary social issues responding to the demand of the audience. They are trying to use better sound and light to appeal to the younger generation who are more used to high definition images. The conversations did leave me a little concerned about the possibility of extinction of this folk theatre.

After this we moved to the sitting area and eagerly waited for the play. The musicians sitting on both sides of the stage played some pieces of music before the play started. A loud gong of a bell marked the start of the play. It was about a family falling apart because of contemporary social evils like corruption, nexus between administration and mafia. The story seemed very similar to the kind used by popular TV soaps. While earlier jatra troupes performed two to three different plays simultaneously, these days they perform just one play hence doing away with the need of a prompter.

Half way through the show, my uncle says this is different from what they used to watch. And he is right in some ways. Jatras have changed over the time. While it continues to be unique in practically using no or minimal props, the story being taken forward by the dialogue and songs performed by the actors, the impact of changing times is obvious in the kind of stories being used. The dialogues are delivered in a rhythmic fast pace to ensure the audience’s attention.

The tickets for women were cheaper and it was good to see that they comprised a large part of the audience. While the show proceeded, a tea seller walked across the rows. Sipping on hot tea, we watched this version of folk theatre which was very different from Assamese theatre with proper sets and props. Four hours later when the show ended, we all made our way out. At 1.30 a.m I walked back to my uncle’s house, feeling happy for having seen something which was new for me but also aware of the kind of competition these theatre groups had to face.

The venue of the BJP national executive meeting in Allahabad blazed with the red flowers of the Axomiya gamosa as the party celebrated it’s first-ever victory in Assam. Party leaders claimed that the choice to congratulate the national executive members with the Axomiya gamosa was a symbolic gesture to express their gratitude to the people of Assam. But there was more in store for Assam apart from the merely symbolic. The resolution adopted by the national executive on the final day had eight paragraphs on Assam, which is one-third of the document. The resolution repeatedly stresses the singular importance of the electoral victory in the state- “The mandate of Assam calls for a very special mention. Assam holds an important place in the minds and hearts of millions of BJP karyakartas across the country.” “It signifies a major ideological victory for the Party.” “This victory is hard-earned one for the Party.” The resolution underlines another factor- the threat posed to Axomiya identity by the relentless infiltration of Bangladeshis. The illegal flow of Bangladeshis into the state, according to the resolution, has reached “Himalayan proportions” and the threat of an impending demographic convulsion is very much real.

The support that propelled BJP to power in Assam merits an analysis because the distribution of political allegiance ahead of the election defied the conventional logic of communal polarisation. The Muslim population of the state is a divided house, which is why the normative Hindu-Muslim binary that operates in other parts of India fails to explain the relation between the two communities in Assam. The parties representing the indigenous Assamese Muslims (the first such Muslim was Ali Mech, a native of Kamrup who converted to Islam during Bakhtiyar Khilji’s military expedition to the region in early thirteenth century) – Sadou Asom Goriya Moriya Desi Jatiya Parishad, Sadou Asom Goriya Yuba Chatra Parishad, Khilongia Asomiya Musalman Unnayan Parishad, Khilongia Musalman Suraksha Mancha, Ujoni Asom Muslim Kalyan Parishad and Asomiya Muslim Kalyan Parishad reposed their faith in the BJP’s Vision Document in the run-up to the election. The Muslim groups also clarified their opposition to Badaruddin Ajmal’s All-India United Democratic Front (AIUDF) and described Ajmal as a ‘threat.’ While the indigenous Muslims of Assam are scattered throughout the state, the descendents of the Bengali Muslim immigrants of East Bengali origin are concentrated in the lower and middle Assam districts of the Brahmaputra valley and parts of Barak valley. The latter category of Muslims living in the state today trace their origin to the Bengali Muslim settler-peasants from East Bengal who were brought to inhabit and cultivate the wastelands of Lower Assam by the colonial state with the complicity of the Axomiya middle-class starting from the latter half of the nineteenth century. The settlers were poor, hardy peasants who soon turned the wastelands into revenue-generating assets. At the same time, they also activated a creative process of assimilation with the Axomiyas. Their decision to state their mother-tongue as Axomiya played a major role in Axomiya becoming the majority language of the state for the first time in the 1951 census. The community also threw their weight behind the Axomiyas during the language movements in 1960 and 1972. But the process of assimilation received a jolt during the Assam movement when the Muslims of East Bengali origin found themselves at the receiving end of a frenzied demand to expel the illegal foreigners residing in the state. There was growing anxiety among the members of the community and the massacre at Nellie on February 18, 1983 convinced them that their fear was indeed real. On the contrary, the composition of the leadership of the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU), key constituent of the Gana Xangram Parikhad which led the movement, reflected the strong support the movement had among the indigenous Muslims. The Vice-President of AASU and the Presidents of the Kamrup and Jorhat unit of the AASU were indigenous Muslims of Assam. A section of the Muslims in the state were however sceptical of the intentions of the AASU and the All Assam Minority Students’ Union (AAMSU) was formed in May 1980 to counter the AASU. AAMSU won the trust of the Muslims of East Bengali origin and organised rallies against the anti-foreigner upsurge in Lower Assam.

The anti-foreigner movement ended in 1985 with the signing of the Assam accord between the AASU and the Congress government at the centre. The culmination of the movement laid bare the tension between the indigenous Muslims and the Muslims of East Bengali origin. The Axom Gana Parikhad (AGP), the political party floated by the movement leadership sought the people’s mandate, while AAMSU also spawned its own political arm called the United Minority Front (UMF). The UMF united a number of organisations like the All Assam Minority Front, Citizens’ Right Preservation Committee, Assam Jamiat Ulema and All Assam Minority Juba Parikhad and won a considerable 17 seats in the 1986 election.

Another critical moment that changed the way the descendents of the immigrant Muslims relate to the Axomiyas was the assembly election of 1983. That was the time of the mass demonstrations to press for an electoral list cleansed of illegal voters and both urban and rural masses in the Brahmaputra valley heeded the call to boycott the election that was supposed to be conducted on the basis of the old voter list. But the centre wanted to conduct the election in the state at any cost. The dogmatic attitude of the centre was locked into the equally rigid stand of the AASU leaders who appealed to the people to boycott the election. The call to stay away from the election influenced the constituencies inhabited by indigenous Axomiyas and there was no polling in as many as 17 constituencies. The percentage of voter turnout was 31% thanks to regular voting in the two hill districts, Barak valley and the constituencies dominated by the descendents of the immigrant Muslims in middle and lower Assam. These Muslims wanted to cast a ballot so that a government which would look after their interests could come to power. But their decision to vote earned the wrath of the leaders and supporters of the Assam movement. As a result, 500 Muslims were killed in Saolkhuwa and this was followed by the gruesome killing of 1600 immigrant Muslims in Nellie in central Assam. The Congress won the state election and the Indira Gandhi government at the centre quickly enacted the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act (IMDT) in Assam to work as a legal buffer against the persecution of the Muslims of East Bengali origin under the pretext of ousting the foreigners from the state. The IMDT was a marked departure from the conventions of deporting foreigners from Indian territory under the Foreigners Act, 1946 as the new law shifted the onus of proving the citizenship or otherwise on the accuser or complainant who must reside within a 3 kilometre radius of the accused. The police would then make a preliminary investigation and submit a report to a committee constituted by the District police superintendent and the Sub-divisional magistrate. This committee would make the necessary judgments and submit their report to the government who would then direct the District Tribunal to initiate legal proceedings. In case the decision of the tribunal is challenged, the accuser can move the appellate court in Guwahati. The appellate court’s judgment can be further challenged by the accused in the High Court which can direct the appellate authority to review the case. The IMDT Act therefore provided for layers of screening in the case of an alleged illegal foreigner and provided legal safeguards to the accused against the use of arbitrary power by the state.

In the meantime, a strong anti-IMDT lobby developed at the behest of the nationalist parties-AGP, BJP, AASU and Axom Jatiyotabadi Juba Chhatra Parikhad (AJYCP). The Congress stuck to its position that the IMDT was required to provide legal safeguards to the minorities in the state in an atmosphere vitiated by the dubious inheritance of the Assam movement. The IMDT Act was finally revoked by the Supreme Court in July 2005 after former AASU president and then AGP leader Sarbananda Sonowal petitioned the apex Court. The Court declared the Act unconstitutional as it saw no reason why the foreigners staying illegally in Assam should be treated differentially from those in other parts of the country. The Court maintained that the jurisdiction of the Foreigners Act, 1946 could cover the territory of Assam as well. The annulment of the Act was seen by the nationalist camp as a movement forward towards cleansing Assam of infiltrators. And the hero in the nationalist camp was Sarbananda Sonowal. He was hailed as the jatiya nayak (national hero).

The repeal of the IMDT Act reinforced existing religious faultlines in the state. The All Assam Minority Students’ Union and the Muslim Juba Parikhad blamed the Congress governments at the centre and state for the revocation of the Act and reached New Delhi along with hundreds of supporters where they sat at a dharna at Jantar Mantar to publicise their demand for a similar Act to be enacted again in parliament. The Assam unit of the Jamiat Ulema-E-Hind joined the protest against the repeal of the Act. Jamiat President Badaruddin Ajmal united thirteen Muslim organisations and floated a new political party called the Assam United Democratic Front (AUDF) by the end of 2005. The United Minority Front (UMF) whose influence had waned after the success in the 1986 election became a constituent of the AUDF. The AUDF fought the 2006 state assembly election and won 10 seats. The new party, as expected, dented the traditional Muslim bastions of the Congress and the Congress had to ally with the Bodo People’s Progressive Front (BPF) to form the government. The AUDF soon morphed into the All-India United Democratic Front (AIUDF) and tried to expand its base outside Assam. The process of polarising the electorate on communal lines continued in the 2011 assembly elections in which the AIUDF emerged as the main opposition party.

A number of events followed each other quickly in the next couple of years. The ‘jatiya nayak’ Sarbananda Sonowal joined the BJP and subsequently became the state unit President. But there was nothing radical in this act of switching parties. Sonowal deserted a regional nationalist party that had lost the people’s faith only to join another nationalist party with a communal agenda that was yet to win the trust of the people of Assam. While Sonowal’s former party had come to power riding on the avowed principle of opposing the presence of illegal foreigners in Assam, his new party had a history of advocating opposition to alleged foreigners but was yet to attain an opportunity to actually implement its purported anti-foreigner agenda in the state. It was the dismal performance of the AGP in the 2009 Lok Sabha election (the party won just 1 out of the 9 seats it contested) that convinced Sarbananda and many others of his ilk that the AGP’s brand of nationalism had ceased to appeal to the people. Sarbananda crossed over to the BJP in 2011, became the President of the state BJP unit in 2012 and two years later led the party to victory in 7 out of the 14 seats from Assam in the Lok Sabha election.

The AGP’s alienation from the people continued in the 2011 assembly election and the party allied with the BJP months before the 2016 polls. Even though this was not the first time that the AGP had dilly-dallied with elements averse to its own ideology, the party’s decision to join hands with the Hindu-nationalist party left many people wondering if a regional-nationalist agenda had become altogether dispensable for the AGP. The decision to join a national party whose agenda is set by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh diluted whatever had remained of the AGP’s regional credentials. Meanwhile, in a communication to the Assam government in September 2015, the BJP central committee announced its decision to grant citizenship rights to the Hindu Bengali infiltrators from Bangladesh residing in Assam till December 31, 2014. This announcement flew in the face of the AGP leaders’ avowed commitment to weed out illegal migrants from the state. History behoves us to associate AGP leaders with secular opposition to foreigners residing illegally in Assam. Following is an excerpt from a letter written by the then AASU General Secretary and later the Home Minister in the AGP government, Bhrigu Kumar Phukan to the central government on 13 November 1980-

“[…] in the last round of talks, you mentioned special advantages due to the displaced people and obliquely that means you wanted to introduce religion in the process of identifying foreigners. If the central government persists with such a mentality, then the unity between the various religious communities of Indians living in Assam will be endangered. We can never allow such a situation […]”

In a far cry from such ideological moorings, the AGP allied with the Hindutva party even as AGP leaders distanced themselves from issues such as the granting of citizenship rights to Bengali Hindu infiltrators and the construction of mega dams at the Subansari. The vital outcome of the AGP-BJP alliance was that middle-class Axomiya nationalism lost its most articulate voice and representative as the AGP conceded itself to the BJP. The BJP had already proved its growing popularity among the voters of Assam and soon occupied the space vacated by the AGP. In the meantime, we shall have to wait and see whether the AGP has completely forfeited its identity to the saffron party.

The saffron party revived the most important inheritance of the Assam movement- mistrust on the part of the descendents of the immigrant Muslim population of the exclusive intentions of the indigenous Axomiyas. In its Vision Document 2016-2015 for Assam, the BJP’s approach to the Muslim population of the state is clearly biased against the Muslims of East Bengali origin. Under the sub-section ‘Religious Minorities’ Welfare,’ there is a resolution to protect the “socio-economic and political identity of indigenous Assamese Muslims like Goriya, Moriya, Desi, Maimol and others.” This point is backed up by another undertaking to conduct academic research on the identity, language and culture of the indigenous Muslims. The descendents of the immigrant Muslims figure in the document only in a tangential way- there would be missions to develop skill-based education and girls’ education in the char-chapori areas (These are the riverine tracts inhabited mostly by these Muslims). The document is conspicuous by the absence of any resolution to protect the identity of the descendents of the immigrant Muslims. However what confounds most is the assertion that only the Goriyas, Moriyas and their ilk who came to Assam some eight hundred years ago are “indigenous Muslims,” a chilling reminder that the Muslims of East Bengali origin are viewed as illegitimate citizens by the Hindutva party.

The other important ally of the BJP, the Bodo People’s Front (BPF) was a constituent of the Congress when the latter formed the government in 2011. The AIUDF became the main opposition party in the state and the traditional Muslim votes of the Congress were affected. The BPF was the first ally that the BJP found in Assam and Prime Minister Modi seized the moment by launching the party campaign in Assam from Kokrajhar, capital of the Bodo Territorially Administered Districts (BTAD). BTAD is strategically important- 16 representatives in the state assembly come from the area. Modi highlighted the party’s agenda of development but eschewed the contentious issue of a separate Bodoland. But the demand for a separate Bodoland still resonates. In March, a new party- the United People’s Party (UPP), backed by the All Bodo Students’ Union (ABSU) and the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (G) was formed and it allied with the Congress. The UPP kept alive the hope of a separate Bodoland but failed to win a single seat out of the four seats that it had contested. On the other hand, the BPF won 12 out of the 13 contested seats. What emerges from the people’s voting behaviour is that the immediate necessity to preserve Bodo identity from its nearest possible threat-the purportedly illegal Bangladeshis, won over the long-cherished hope of a separate Bodoland. The decisive turn of the electorate towards the BJP-BPF alliance reflected the people’s anxiety engendered by the spectre of the Bangladeshis. It is worth mentioning here that the relation between Bodos and Muslims in the BTAD areas is fraught with distrust. Large-scale violence between the two communities had crystallised into a humanitarian crisis in mid-2012. Almost a hundred people had lost their lives and some 400,000 displaced. This crisis was preceded by sporadic outbursts of violence between the two communities. A section of Bodo and mainstream Hindu leaders had tried to fix the blame on the demographic convulsions wrought by unchecked immigration from Bangladesh. The area remained susceptible to communal polarisation as a sizeable number of D-voters (This is the legal term for the category of doubtful voters or those Muslims of East Bengali origin who are disenfranchised because they are unable to provide proof of Indian citizenship) are concentrated in the BTAD districts. No wonder the BJP’s professed high-handed approach to deal with the problem of ‘Bangladeshis’ drew the people towards the party.

Could there be any other rationale apart from its communal agenda that explains BJP’s insistence on aggressively taking on the Bangladeshi infiltrators in Assam? The BJP’s image of a Hindi-speaking Hindu party had to accommodate the regional aspiration of the Axomiyas and the party did it with an effortless tweak: they couched their Hindutva agenda in the familiar idiom of the burning need to check infiltration of Bengali Muslims from Bangladesh. Or else what explains the party’s decision to grant legitimacy to the Bengali Hindu immigrants from Bangladesh who crossed over to Assam till December 31, 2014? This announcement scoffs at the gullible electorate whose anxiety to preserve their indigenous identity is demeaned by the saffron leaders’ devious ploy to legalise a section of infiltrators from Bangladesh. Through this decision, the BJP has caused a mutation in the contours of Axomiya society. The elementary aspects of the formation of Axomiya society, historically, have been language and a composite culture but the proclamation to legalise the Hindu Bangladeshi infiltrators tries to extend Axomiya society towards a religious angle. The credulous electorate, hardpressed by a perceived fear of being swamped by Muslim infiltrators from Bangladesh slighted the discredited Congress and turned towards the BJP whose government at the centre has been promoting a cult of masochistic jingoism. A similar macho political culture was needed in Assam to strike hard at the aggression of the Bangladeshis. Love-jihad, ghar-wapsi and beef failed to sway the people of Assam which left the saffron party with that familiar Other deeply embedded in the Axomiya psyche- the Bengali Muslim infiltrator from Bangladesh. The BJP’s campaign to deal with these infiltrators with an iron fist chimed with people’s concern to protect their indigenous identity. At the same time, the machinations of Hindutva propped up the BJP’s professed resolve to protect Axomiya identity from the infiltrators. Identity politics and elements of Hindutva crossed paths as BJP won a resounding victory. But it would be worthwhile to remember that the support that upholds the BJP government is based on weak ground, at least theoretically. An alternative identity politics that goes beyond the spectre of the Bengali Muslim infiltrator could be mobilised by either of the two regional parties in the BJP alliance. As for now, one needs to wait and keep a careful vigil.

Bibliography:

Ahmed, Abu Nasar Saied. ed. Nationality Question in Assam: The EPW 1980-81 Debate. New Delhi: Akansha Publishing House, 2006.

Gogoi, Akhil. Bidekhi Xamashya aru Jatiya Andolanor Poth. Guwahati: Akhar Prakash, 2013 (third edition).

Gohain, Hiren. Assam: A Burning Question. Guwahati: Spectrum Publications, 1985.

Gohain, Hiren and Bora, Dileep. ed. Axom Andolan: Pratisruti aru Falasruti. Guwahati: Banalata, 2007 (second edition).

Guha, Amalendu. Planter Raj to Swaraj: Freedom Struggle and Electoral Politics in Assam 1826-1947. New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2006 (second revised edition).

Malik, Abdul. Axomiya Musalman: Samaj aru Xonskritir Abhakh. Nagaon: Saraswati D N Prakashan, 2014 (second revised edition).

Nath, Manoj Kumar. Khilonjiyar Xonxoi, Musalmanor Atmoxonman. Guwahati: Banalata, 2014.

Nath, Manoj Kumar. Axomor Rajnitit Musalman: Bishax, Bastab aru Xanghat. Guwahati: Banalata, 2015 (revised edition).

Rahman, Abdur. Axomor Musalmanxokol. Guwahati: Chandra Prakash, 2008.

Misra, Udayon, “Victory for Identity Politics, not Hindutva in Assam,” Economic & Political Weekly. May 28, 2016 vol LI no 22.

Assam Vision Document 2016-2025. Published and issued by BJP, Assam Pradesh.

Press releases from ‘State Election management Office.’ BJP, Assam Pradesh.

www. wikipedia.com

Photographs from Dhubri & Gauripur by Khairul Islam 

Floods which leave a trail of devastation have become almost an annual affair in Assam. This year it has left close to 40 people dead and more than lakhs displaced. Entire villages were submerged and people moved to temporary relief shelters. Schools often served as such shelters. The mayhem has not been limited to people alone, rather it took a toll on the wild life of the state as well. Kaziranga saw the death of animals like rhinos and deers due to lack of high land and no preventive measures taken by the forest department.

The response from Central government has been delayed as usual. While village after village were being lost to the mighty Brahmaputra, officials in Delhi were more concerned with the man made flood in Gurugram/Gurgaon – a result of just bad unplanned urbanization. Dirty effluents reaching the affluent and the expatriates are definitely Prime Time news worthy unlike the flood in Assam which is seen as a part of life of the people languishing in tents and relief camps. While the response of the state has been pathetic, it did see some initiative prior to the visit of Ministers and other high officials. This was at least the case in the relief camps in Dhubri where according to onlookers relief material in bulk was distributed only prior to the visit of Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal.

Flood affected areas also see a risk of breakout of diseases, hence making it imperative to ensure that medical teams render services to the relief camps. Dr Umar Faruque, the in-charge of Dhubri Mobile Medical Unit says that while medical teams have been deployed, the inadequate number of officials and large number of relief camps make it difficult to cover the entire area. Certain cases also need to be treated in proper hospitals but the flood situation makes it difficult to commute.

Amidst such situation, while the loss of property and cattle has left people pauperized, the state saw a quick visit of the Home Minister Rajnath Singh. The Minister did an aerial survey and visited a relief camp in Jagiroad made specially for the purpose of his visit a day before. At an embarrassing turn of events, local news channels showed how people in the relief camp were being trained to answer questions and the entire episode seemed like a sham. The comparatively better situation of the camp conveniently hid the plight of those languishing in close to nine hundred relief camps.

Amidst this crisis, the officials have further proved their apathy by creating official reports which do not reflect the genuine condition of the flood affected people. When a two year old photograph of Bangladesh flood is used and circulated by newspapers, one is left wondering about the commitment or lack of it in officials. Are flood reports prepared only in AC rooms with the help of google images? The incident saw some quick suspensions but the rot of official apathy runs much deeper.

Along with villages even towns and urban areas suffered, as unplanned drainage system ensured that the town areas remain submerged. Parts of the Dhubri town on the bank of Brahmaputra continue to be under water. Laments Momina, who works as a cook in some households, their home is submerged and they are forced to stay in Jawahar Hind School. But she had to leave the old mother in law back home to look after the empty house. As relief camps are being shut down, Momina along with other families is being forced to go back home. The areas near Dhubri railway tracks are also submerged forcing the people to live on the tracks on makeshift tents. According to Mala Dey who is staying on the tracks along with her family, the relief provided by government was not enough. And their house is still not fit for living as the low lying area is still under water.

Floods leave behind a trail of devastation. Displacement is massive. Like every year the state loses a large tract of land to erosion. But most aspects of the issue finds no place in national media. Rajnath Singh’s decision to not declare the situation a National Calamity further ensured that national media will continue to turn a blind eye to this disaster. However this conspicuous absence is nothing new. The Northeastern region hardly figures in the mainstream media and when it does, it is mostly for the wrong reasons. Senior Journalist Rajdeep Sardesai has famously described the “Tyranny of Distance” as the reason for the electronic media’s neglect of the Northeast. Pushing the region to the fringes is nothing new. But nothing can justify this persistent undermining of a national disaster. The apathy of the media forces one to wonder about the agenda behind such biased reporting. With the waning of secessionist movements in the region, the need to legitimize Army has declined. Can this explain such lukewarm handling of the Assam floods?

The region has always felt marginalized and complained of a step motherly treatment from the centre. People from this region living in other states are constantly subjected to racially instigated hate crimes. The idea of who is an Indian continues to be a narrow one. In such a scenario, the dismissal of such a crisis and lack of concern on the part of national media as well as central government sends a very wrong message. The nation does not care about what happens beyond the chicken neck corridor. Their concern ends at Bengal. Shaping public opinion in favour of the victims would have made the region feel a little less alienated.

Both the government and the national(ist) media have conveniently downplayed the seriousness of the situation. Some border areas where the loss has been worse have received meagre support from the government. But the concern of TRPs for corporate backed mainstream media pushes such stories to the back burner. While people continue to suffer from the aftermath of the floods with disease and hygiene problems, the media has already moved on to the next big story.

It was probably the longest Budget Speech ever in Assam. But this simply reminds us of the proverb “an empty vessel makes a lot of sound”. So the govt. will hand over the mid-day meal scheme to NGOs throughout the whole state excluding Jalukbari from now on. This govt. is abandoning its own duties in the name of governance even as Himanta Biswas Sarma declared the motto of this budget as “No Arrogance, only Governance”.

Finance Minister, Sarma, said that 1.20 crores would be invested in each revenue village. Total requirement for the mission is a whopping 30000 crores. In the next point, the Finance Minister said that for the current year he proposes to allocate 500 crores. If the allocation follows the current trend in the next five years, the government will be able to spend only 2500 crores. In other words, it will take 60 years to spend 30000 crores at the current rate of allocation. In other words, the rhetoric of 1.2 crores for every village will require at least two generations.

The Central Govt. has already drastically reduced fund allocation to states with the argument that the states get bigger shares from the central pool of taxes after the 14th finance commission. So states, it is argued, should make bigger contribution of funds to various departments and schemes. But in this budget, Assam has hardly made any significant increase in public investment. Even the sluggish increases to some departments are too minimal in real terms because of high inflation. For example, allocation to the social welfare department has increased from 102 cr. in their last budget to 125 cr. Taking into account, high inflation, this is hardly an increase in real terms. With such marginal increase how will this CM keep his promise to increase the honorarium of anganwadi workers and helpers? Even Finance Minister, Sarma has not kept his own promise to ensure admission of all students who have completed HS and Matric. At least 1 lakh students, who completed their HS, have no space in colleges. The Education minister promised to take the matter seriously. But no announcement has been made for new colleges, infrastructural development of existing ones or recruitment of new college faculties. The budget declares the intent to establish three new engineering colleges, but did not mention the allocation of funds for that purpose in the heading. In another heading ‘Fund for new Engineering and Degree colleges’ Rs. 200 crores is allocated for both together.  Such allocation is welcome but it is still a meagre amount.

Most of the announcements are gimmicks and media-oriented. For example, few awards have been announced for some sports stars who already got media highlights. But there are still no schemes to recruit PT/PE teachers. Without any good infrastructure in schools who will play in stadiums? Or will those be commercialised for the use of private sports coaching centres? Time will say.  There are a few insurance and loan schemes for students and others.  Amartya Sen has warned us many times about how a credit induced economy is very fragile and unsustainable. It means people are ‘funding themselves’. Where is govt. funding here when they are collecting extra amounts of VAT? Total amount from VAT seems to remain the same as VAT rates are decreased in some items and increased in some others. But the FM of Assam shows his ideological conviction by helping satras, not collages.

Sarma also talked about Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) but there is no direction or fund allocation found in his budget speech to meet the SDGs. ‘No poverty’, ‘zero hunger’, ‘good health’ and ‘quality education’ are the major goals among the 17 goals. If the finance minister expects that his proposed 40 mobile medical units will achieve SDG #3 (i.e. good health) in the tea gardens where MMR is as high as 480 then it’s nothing but jhumla. This is because the primary reason for pathetic health condition is malnutrition. These workers are living on Asia’s lowest organised sector wage. There is no proposal to implement the Minimum Wage Act in the budget even in govt. operated gardens! Without improving the living conditions of the people, the pathetic provision of a few mobile units is like treating the symptom of disease, not the disease itself.

He also proposes 5 boat ambulances to provide round-the-clock Emergency Referral Services to over 300000 char dwellers. But never mentions the allocated amounts and how long they will take to be implemented. In the 2014-2015 financial year, the Assam government gave Rs 7.24 crore via the National Health Mission, to run the boat clinics on the Brahmaputra. That amount covers everything – salaries, supplies, fuel and the maintenance cost of the boats – for a service that currently reaches about 150,000 people every year. The amount was meagre even at that time.

The biggest mystery is regarding funds. Himant Biswa Sarma claims in the media that the ‘special status’ of Assam is unaltered. Meaning Assam would still get 90% funding for all central schemes. Moreover, along with all other states, Assam too would be getting 42% share of central pool of taxes and VAT has been increased recently. Still the budget document clearly shows that the State Govt. doesn’t have enough funds to provincialize the schools and only way is to put another education cess. It is clear that there are attempts to de-provincialize the already provincialized schools by putting complete blame of poor performance on them ignoring the other factors like infrastructure, over-burden on teachers, the new system under Sarva Siksha Abhiyan which does not allow retention of a student in the same class. Poor performance is a direct result of such policies which create poorly equipped students.

After the BJP came to power in Assam in May 2016, the state government has unleashed a reign of terror to execute its fascistic agendas. Within 2 months into power, the government opened fire and killed a 25 year old man Mintu Deuri, during a protest organized in Raha against the transfer of the site for a proposed AIIMS in the state on 15^th July 2016. Now on 19 September 2016, just 34 days after the Raha incident, the police has again opened fire and killed two people – Anjuma Khatun and Fakhruddin, at a demonstration led by the Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti (KMSS) and All Assam Minority Students’ Union (AAMSU) at Banderdubi revenue village near the Kaziranga National Park. The protestors were demanding resettlement and adequate compensation against an eviction drive carried out by the mandate of the Gauhati High Court order dated 9 October 2015 which was supposed to happen two days later, i.e. on 21 September 2016 but had been preponed to avoid protests. The villagers, belonging mainly to the Muslim community of erstwhile East Bengal origin, have been residing in the village for more than half a century.

Out of the 198 displaced families from Banderdubi, around 40 have moved in with their relatives and the rest have been compelled to seek shelter in Baghmari, a nearby village under the open skies. The Deputy Commissioner of Nagaon has not yet allowed any relief measures to reach them. It must be mentioned here that the 7 Hindu families that lived in the village were informed before and were reportedly asked to move into safe places before the commencement of the forceful eviction drive, which highlights the communal agenda of the state administration. One of the most powerful ministers in the Assam government, Himanta Biswa Sarma, posted on his official Facebook page after the eviction drive that the new government would never compromise on “Jati, Mati, and Bheti” [Nationality, Land, and Home], a rhetoric of the homeland creating a paranoia against the Muslim inhabitants of erstwhile East Bengal origin, with which the BJP came to power. Thus in a true fascistic form, the repression has been accompanied with a parallel mobilisational drive, pitting one section of the society against another. Through electronic, print and social media, gross misinformation and falsehood has been consciously spread and we are told, this is a struggle to recover the Assamese nation from the outsiders – the Bangladeshis.

During the hearing of the case, the Advocate-General acknowledged and supported the contention of the applicants that as per the revenue records, Banderdubi and Deochur Chang are two villages that have been declared as revenue village by the government (in 1961) and therefore are not part of the Kaziranga National Park which makes the eviction of any villager from the said areas illegal (GHC Order, pp. 21). However the Gauhati High Court ordered fast eviction of inhabitants in the second, third, fifth and sixth additions of the Kaziranga National Park (GHC Order, pp. 36-37). Reportedly a total of 198 families from Banderdubi, 160 from Deochur Chang and 12 from Palkhowa were evicted in this drive. These villages have been in those areas even before official recognition of Kaziranga Wildlife Sanctuary as a National Park, it’s inhabitants are not encroachers but revenue-paying villagers.According to records these villages (Banderdubi and Deochur Chang) came into existence in 1951 and the government granted patta (land entitlements) in 1961. The names of the villagers were inserted into the voters’ list in 1965 for the assembly election, and a government school was established there in 1966. On the other hand, Kaziranga was declared as a National Park by the central government on 11 February 1974.

Section 144 had already been in place in the said areas since Saturday, 17th of September. It must be mentioned here that the villagers were willing to abide by the Gauhati High Court order and evict the land voluntarily for the cause of conservation of the national park but were simply demanding resettlement and adequate compensation and enough time to comply with the court’s order. In the consequent clash between the police and the local people, the police blatantly resorted to extreme brutality, first with tear gas and then with live bullets. Apart from the casualties, five more people have been severely injured.

The rapidity and force with which the current government has deployed its fascistic agenda by using state mechanisms must be read as clear signs of impending trouble for the already much troubled people of Assam. The targeted and brazen use of police force to kill citizens in order to craft a ‘nation’ and society as per its skewed wishes may soon turn into an irretrievable situation. As in other parts of the country, the Assam government has been acquiring land to serve the interests of the big capital or pursue its ‘developmental’ policies but it has no patience to listen to toiling people when it comes to their requirements for livelihood. And to repeat an age long political cliché, nowhere in the rest of India, or the national media have we seen any reactions or responses to this incident.

In any case, why is it legitimate to kill, even if he or she is a Bangladeshi?

We demand:

1. Immediate action against the concerned security and state officials who approved the decision to open fire on unarmed and peaceful protestors.
2. Immediate compensation and rehabilitation of all the evicted people of these villages.
3. An unconditional apology by the Chief Minister and the Home Minister of Assam to the people of these villagers and the country.
4. The Government of Assam must ensure and guarantee the safety and human rights of all people, irrespective of caste, creed, sex and religion, as laid out by the Constitution of the Union of India.

We also intend to:

1. Submit a petition to the National Human Rights Commission appealing that a show-cause notice be served to the Government of Assam asking for the rationale behind the live bullet firing upon protestors.

Sd/-

Biswajit Bora, Shalim M. Hussain, Jyotirmoy Talukdar, Sukruta Alluri, Bonojit Hussain, Mayur Chetia, Nayan Jyoti , Lokesh, Kislay Gonsalvez, Amrapali Basumatary, Usman Jawed, Apoorva Gautam.

Akhil Gogoi writes of his continuing incarceration by the #BJP government in #Assam

On 2nd October, Akhil Gogoi, a peasant leader and founder Secretary of Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti (KMSS) – a left wing peasant organisation based in Assam was picked up from Gandhibasti, Guwahati and was later handed over to Jakhalabandha police in connection with a case of inciting protestors during an eviction drive against illegal settlers in and around the Kaziranga National Park (KNP). A team of Chandmari police escorted him to Nagaon and later he was sent to Lakhimpur Jail. Akhil Gogoi was remanded to 14 days judicial custody by a court at Golaghat on 2nd November. He was re-arrested in connection with a case of 2006. And He is still in Golaghat Central Jail. Akhil Gogoi wrote an open letter in Assamese from jail. This is a translation published in The Assam News.

Respected people of Assam,

Revolutionary greetings to everyone. It is surely known to you that I have been in Lakhimpur Central Jail since 6 October 2016. Before that, from 2nd October onwards, I was taken into police custody from our office in Gandhibasti and put into Nagaon Central Jail. I had been in jail for several times in the past. But this time I am restless and want to come out from jail and immediately join the movement. I want to be a part of the movements against the Central Government’s conspiracy to grant Indian citizenship to Hindu immigrants from Bangladesh to reside in Assam. Everything that is happening outside the jail in Assam and in Delhi has made me grow restless.

Inside the cell, I can watch news only on the governmental channel. Therefore my communication with the people of Assam is restricted only through the newspapers. The public intellectuals in Assam have also condemned and warned the people against this conspiracy. I express my anxiety in this regard. I am also observing the statements and programmes of various organisations. But I want to clearly state that the role of various organisations in this regard is too weak. The people of Assam is in an extremely precarious position. On one hand, they have waved the Congress goodbye to be free from maladministration and corruption and exploitation while mandating the BJP to look forward to ‘good days’. On the other hand, the BJP has taken this opportunity to execute their anti-people agenda. The BJP governments have opened all the market sectors for the capitalist-imperialists while selling the opium of religion to the people of the country. After the election, the BJP Government in Assam have raised the price of commodities by increasing VAT, auctioned oil fields, jeopardised the livelihood of thousands of teachers by striking down the Assam Venture Educational Institutions (Provincialisation of Services) Act, 2011, moved ahead to grant citizenship to Hindu immigrants from Bangladesh in Assam. Overall, the BJP government in Assam has taken decisions against the interests of the common people of Assam in all the issues. They have encouraged a communally charged atmosphere by the eviction drive near the Kaziranga National Park. In these times of change, the nationalist organisations have failed to take a pro-people national position. How can these nationalist organisations now oppose the government whom they have given their support to four months ago! That too when the government is led by Sarbananda Sonowal and Himanta Biswa Sarma. Most of the leaders of these nationalist organisations have an excellent relationship with Sarbananda and Himanta Biswa. Therefore, the leadership of these organisations is at a loss in front of the BJP Government which has shown its true colours by rapidly taking anti-Assam, anti-people decisions. That is why I say that the Assamese society finds itself choked and drowned in troubles. The BJP is busy in gratifying Hindu Bengalis. Even as the opposition party, Congress also cannot oppose them. During the chief ministership of Tarun Gogoi, Congress has given its decision to the cabinet in favour of granting citizenship to Hindu Bengalis. Congress leadership in general is in favour of granting citizenship to Hindu Bengalis. Therefore the position of Congress is hazy, unclear and mysterious. Asom Gana Parishad is now trapped in the avarice of power. So far as we know the AJP leadership they cannot take a strong position in favour of Assam. This is their class position. BPF and AIUDF also have an almost negligible position; we all know their limitations. Overall, in these hard times, the people of Assam won’t get any help from political parties. All of them are trapped in the equation of vote and power. For decades, Congress has been busy in protecting the vote banks of immigrant Muslims, now BJP is devoted to build up a vote bank of immigrant Bengali Hindus. These vote bank politics of both the parties have jeopardised the future of the Assamese people.

The issue of granting citizenship to Hindu Bangladeshi’s cannot be seen from the vote bank perspectives of Congress and the BJP. Many equations are involved in this. Even before independence, the RSS or the Sangh Parivar have been devoted to making India a “Hindu Nation”. The “Hindu Nation” of the RSS is not only mere Hindu nation, their Hindu nation is a capitalist state erected on the base of Hinduvta which will have an imperialist character, i.e., it will have a goal of oppressing the small neighbouring nation states. Although base of the state is capitalist, it is always controlled by the Hinduvta superstructure. Their aim is to build an India which is Hinduvta from outside, with a capitalist, free, neo-liberal economy from the inside(this Hinduvta is not of the Dalits, tribals so called lower classes and the poor, this is casteist Hinduvta controlled by the upper castes.) Their national economy is already devastated in front of the capitalist economy of casteist, free trade. In line with this economy, the BJP wants to grant citizenship to Bengali Hindus in order to transform a society which has a historically tribal character with weak and loose religious sentiments and hegemony of the multi-divided indigenous people into one according to their Hindutva agenda. That is why, they are conspiring to convert “Assamese Heroes” Lachit Barphukan and Chilarai into “Hindu Heroes”. Instead of celebrating Sankardeva’s birthday they are trying to establish the hegemony of Durga Puja. They are trying to destroy the independent and distinctive character of Assamese community and build it up as an imitative community of an Indian character then it will be easier to loot the market of crude oil, coal, limestone, water, tea, as well as to enslave a historical nationalist force. If Hindu Bengalis are granted citizenship the people of Assam not only will become a minority, linguistically oppressed but also a long and powerful movement against the Centre in India would die for good. The Assamese people will be made to fight among themselves then our national goal would be to fight among ourselves in Assam.

The BJP campaigns that the demography of Assam has changed because of migration, the number of Muslims has increased, and if the Hindu Bengali foreigners migrating to Assam after1971 are given Indian citizenship, the Hindus will again become the majority in Assam. In this way the Assamese community will be saved from becoming the minority. In this way the BJP is trying to club together our long held national aspirations with Hinduvta. First, the Assamese people have never dreamt of becoming the majority in their homeland with the help of Hindu Bengali foreigners. Instead they have always imagined to be the dominant community by deporting foreigners. That is why the updating of the NRC is the national dream of the Assamese people. We can never accept the communal politics of the BJP government in the Centre and the state who initially promised to deport illegal immigrants but instead attempting to create conflicts between Hindus and Muslims. We can save our national existence only by deporting foreigners and safeguarding the interests of the indigenous people and we want only that. Second, there should be provisions to reserve seats in the Parliament, the Assembly and in Panchayats as well as in jobs, trade and commerce, and land for the indigenous Assamese people. Instead, the decision to grant citizenship to Hindu Bengali foreigners in an attempt to save the Assamese people from becoming minority is an extreme form of slandering. Third, the Assamese community was never communal, now the BJP is invested in transforming our national character into a communal one.

We should be clear in this point that we are not against the Bengalis, we are only against foreigner’s immigration happening after 24 March 1971. We have accepted every Bengali who have migrated from Bangladesh (erstwhile East Bengal) before 1971 as Assamese, given them citizenship, jobs, opportunities for trade and commerce, and the right to contest in elections. The Assamese people are against post-1971 immigration of both Hindus and Muslims. This our national consciousness. Now if those Hindu Bengalis who had been granted citizenship take the side of foreigners, there would be cracks in the relationship between the indigenous Assamese people and them. Ridiculously some sections are campaigning that the five lakh Hindu Bangladeshis who are to be settled in Assam would not hurt the interests of the three crore Assamese people. Forget about five lakh Hindu Bangladeshis, even a single Bangladeshi foreigner would tremendously hurt interests of Assamese people. On the other hand as claimed by some sections of communally-motivated people that only five lakh Hindu Bengalis have immigrated to Assam after 1971 is absolutely false. In 1971 there were 14% of Hindu population in Bangladesh and now it is 9.6%. After 1971, Hindu population in Bangladesh has decreased by almost one crore. This people have immigrated mainly to West Bengal, Tripura and Assam. Therefore the Hindu Bengalis who have immigrated to Assam after1971 would not be less than 20 lakhs. When we were travelling throughout lower Assam by foot from 20 October 2014, we came visited many such illegal Hindu Bengali villages who claimed to have come to Assam after 1971.

According to the census of 2011, total population of Assam is 3 crore 18 lakhs. According to linguistic data of 2001 census, the percentage of Assamese speaking people in Assam is 49.44% while that of Bengali speaking people is 27.91%. It is certain that the percentage of Assamese speaking people in the census data of 2011 has decreased. And if 20 lakh Bengali speaking people are added to this equation, people can easily guess how much it will increase the percentage of Bengali speaking people. Most importantly, if the proposed Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016 becomes an act, not only the present 20 lakh Bengali Hindus will be citizens of Assam but it will also it easier for the rest of the Bengali Hindus living in Bangladesh to come to Assam and become citizens. According to the proposed amendment of the act, if people belonging to minority religions like Hinduism, Sikhism etc. in Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan illegally enter India, they won’t be treated as illegal immigrants and will be granted Indian citizenship after an illegal residential period of 6 years. This means that the rest of the 1 crore 70 lakh Hindu Bangladeshis according to the census report of 2015 can easily come to Assam (India). Of these 1 crore 70 lakh Bangladeshi Bengali Hindus, if one crore or all of them take citizenship in Assam, will not their population increase more than their present population in Assam? How can we accept such a devastatingly dangerous decision? Will not this dangerous decision of the central and the Assam government push us towards a permanent civil war? And may be, Assam will be divided again into two camps based on language. Will not the conscious indigenous Assamese people lose the political, economic, linguistic, and land rights and become fugitives in their own state?

Yours faithfully,
Akhil Gogoi
Adviser
Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti.

BONOJIT HUSSAIN ON FASCIST INCARCERATIONS OF #AKHILGOGOI BY BJP GOVT. IN #ASSAM

Tonight, 13th of December 2016, would be the 73nd night that Akhil Gogoi, the maverick 40 years old leader of Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti (KMSS) would spend in prison. For the uninitiated – KMMS has been the largest social movement in Assam after the turn of the century – that too a left-leaning social movement. This is not the first time that Gogoi has been in prison since KMSS was launched in 2005, but what sets apart the last 72 nights compared to previous incarcerations is the blatant misuse of the criminal justice system and police by the BJP Government in Assam.

Expectedly, there has been no media coverage (electronic, print or social), and civil society ‘hallabol’ in mainland India over Akhil’s continued incarceration. And one can grant it to the lack of mainland media’s OB van in Assam, and dependence of mainland social media and civil society on the ‘missing’ OB vans (all puns intended).

So much so that even Akhil’s old comrades from NAPM (National Alliance for People’s Movement) days did not know that he has been in jail for so long until few facebook memes in English went viral on the night of 7th December.

While Akhil remained in custody (shifted around 3 jails till now), I thought, to tell the story about which District/Sub-divisional Police arrested him for which cases from which years (one case dates back to 2006) and which courts granted or refused bail for which cases will require Excel Sheets or a Flow Chart.

But let me try and narrate it without a Flow Chart or an Excel Sheet.

Two cases were filed in Jakhalabanda police station in Nagaon district against Akhil allegedly for instigating protesters during the 19th September eviction drive in Kaziranga. During the eviction drive a clash between protesters and police resulted in the death of two protesters. Jakhalabanda police slapped several serious charges on Akhil Gogoi – criminal conspiracy, rioting, being armed with deadly weapons, attempt to murder, and resorting to assault or criminal force to deter public servant from discharge of duty.

Following this Akhil was arrested on 2nd October during a press conference at the KMSS headquarters in Guwahati. On 3rd October he was produced before the sub-divisional magistrate in Kaliabor, though police had asked for a week long police remand, the magistrate send him for a day in police remand. On 4th October Akhil was shifted to Nagaon central jail.

In the meantime, Lakhimpur police made a move to arrest Akhil Gogoi in connection to a case registered against him in 2013 for allegedly obstructing officials from performing duty during a KMSS led anti-dam protest in Gerukamukh near Lakhimpur. Akhil was then taken to Lakhimpur and produced before the chief judicial magistrate on 6th October. The Chief judicial magistrate sent him to Lakhimpur district jail on 14 days judicial remand which was later extended by another 10 days.

On 1st November Golaghat police sought to arrest Akhil in connection with a case that was registered on 19th December 2006 for allegedly instigating assault on a Golaghat district Youth Congress leader. In connection to this case police, in 2006, police had arrested Akhil’s comrade Jiten Doley and was later released on bail. But in the past 10 years Akhil was never summoned or detained in connection to this case.

The following day on 2nd November, amidst heavy security Akhil produced before the chief judicial magistrate in Golaghat and he was sent to Golaghat district jail on 14 days judicial remand.

Then again on 15th of November Bokakhat police in Golaghat district made another move to arrest Akhil Gogoi in connection to a case registered on 15th November 2015 for allegedly inciting a mob during a protest against a proposed eviction drive on the peripheries of Kaziranga National Park in which nearly 50 people were injured in a clash between police and protesters.

On 16th November, fearing deterioration of law and order situation, Akhil was again produced before the chief judicial magistrate in Golaghat through skype video conferencing. The CJM court sent Akhil back to judicial custody till 29th November.

On 25th November Akhil was produced before CJM and SDM court in Golaghat, and the courts granted him bail for the 2015 Bokakhat case, and the 2006 Golaghat case.

Again on 29th November Gauhati High Court granted bail to Akhil in the two cases related to the September 2016 Kaziranga eviction. But he could not walk out free as he still had to get bail in the 2013 Lakhimpur case.

Finally, on 5th December Gauhati High Court rejected the bail in connection to the Lakhimpur case, and sent Akhil back to prison on judicial remand. After the dismissal of the bail plea Akhil has refused to waste scarce monetary resources by knocking at the door of Supreme Court in Delhi.

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If one goes through this maze of arrests, re-arrests simply to extend Akhil Gogoi’s prison term, one doesn’t need to be a legal expert to figure that this is gross travesty of justice, and a blatant political misuse of police and criminal justice system by the BJP Government in Assam to muzzle voices of dissent. But still several issues need to be raised :

• If Akhil Gogoi’s custody was so crucial for police to investigate these cases ranging from 2006 to 2015, why was he not summoned or arrested by Assam police for all these years. Assam police has not yet issued any statement about this sudden urgency to arrest Gogoi related to old cases.

Barring one, all the cases that are been used to prolong Akhil’s prison term were registered during the second and third term of the 15 year long Congress government in Assam. Now even the Congress party has raised questions on Akhil’s arrests and re-arrests. Akhil was arrested on several occasions by the previous Congress. But as the opposition leader and leader of Congress Legislature Party Debabrata Saikia has pointed out even “the Congress did not impose old cases on him the way the BJP-led government is doing. The new government is working like a fascist one.” Saikia in a letter to the Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonwal alleged that the “repeated arrest is an attempt to gag the voice of protest”, and reminded Sonowal that “the Supreme Court had observed in a recent verdict that opposition to the policies of the government cannot be treated as an act of treason. But, the process of arresting Akhil and the bid to lengthen his jail term indicate that the State government is treating opposition to its policies as acts of treason.”

It might be worth mentioning here that many allege, and not without basis, that Akhil Gogoi’s rabid anti-Congressism had indirectly helped the BJP in sweeping the 2014 parliamentary elections in Assam. Though Akhil Gogoi and KMSS have been at the forefront of the fight against what he calls BJP’s Hindutva fascism since later part of 2014, during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections the need to defeat the Congress took precedence and Akhil Gogoi released a list of ‘who to vote for based on personal integrity of candidates’ for his supporters and he also appealed to the people of Assam to consider his list. The list comprised of one CPM candidate, one CPI-ML candidate, three AGP candidates, two AIUDF candidates and 7 BJP candidates. I have explained elsewhere what led Akhil Gogoi to commit that political blunder.

One does not need to look for any further evidence to clearly see that Assam police is working overtime on behest of its political masters ie; the Sonowal led BJP government in Assam. Perhaps Assam police needs to be reminded that while arresting and re-arresting Akhil Gogoi in most arbitrary manner they are acting against several Supreme Court orders. Apart from many other judgments, in the Arnesh Kumar vs State of Bihar, Criminal Appeal No 1277 of 2014 (@ Special Leave Petition (CRL.) no. 9127 of 2013) the Supreme Court said in no uncertain terms that :

“Arrest brings humiliation, curtails freedom and cast scars forever. Law makers know it so also the police. There is a battle between the law makers and the police and it seems that police has not learnt its lesson; the lesson implicit and embodied in the Cr.PC. It has not come out of its colonial image despite six decades of independence, it is largely considered as a tool of harassment, oppression and surely not considered a friend of public. The need for caution in exercising the drastic power of arrest has been emphasized time and again by Courts but has not yielded desired result. Power to arrest greatly contributes to its arrogance so also the failure of the Magistracy to check it. Not only this, the power of arrest is one of the lucrative sources of police corruption. The attitude to arrest first and then proceed with the rest is despicable. It has become a handy tool to the police officers who lack sensitivity or act with oblique motive.

Law Commissions, Police Commissions and this Court in a large number of judgments emphasized the need to maintain a balance between individual liberty and societal order while exercising the power of arrest. Police officers make arrest as they believe that they possess the power to do so. As the arrest curtails freedom, brings humiliation and casts scars forever, we feel differently. We believe that no arrest should be made only because the offence is non-bailable and cognizable and therefore, lawful for the police officers to do so. The existence of the power to arrest is one thing, the justification for the exercise of it is quite another. Apart from power to arrest, the police officers must be able to justify the reasons thereof. No arrest can be made in a routine manner on a mere allegation of commission of an offence made against a person.”

• Akhil Gogoi has never been summoned or detained in connection to the relevant cases for which bails have been denied. Many keen observers of political developments in Assam have opined that Gogoi could have been easily summoned or detained briefly for interrogating him in all cases that have been racked up. Also none of the cases (in which bail have been denied) are of such grievous nature that there will be any eminent attempts at tampering “with the witnesses if left at liberty”.

Under such circumstances, the recent denial of bail by Gauhati High Court itself appears to be an instance of Judicial Overreach and smacks of political intervention in a judicial process, especially when the Supreme Court itself had clearly stated that such instances are mostly in violation of the Article 21 of the Indian Constitution. The Supreme Court noted in the Sanjay Chandra vs CBI, Criminal Appeal No. 2178 OF 2011 (Arising out of SLP (Crl.) No. 5650 of 2011) that :

“In this country, it would be quite contrary to the concept of personal liberty enshrined in the Constitution that any person should be punished in respect of any matter, upon which, he has not been convicted or that in any circumstances, he should be deprived of his liberty upon only the belief that he will tamper with the witnesses if left at liberty, save in the most extraordinary circumstances. Apart from the question of prevention being the object of a refusal of bail, one must not lose sight of the fact that any imprisonment before conviction has a substantial punitive content and it would be improper for any Court to refuse bail as a mark of disapproval of former conduct whether the accused has been convicted for it or not or to refuse bail to an un-convicted person for the purpose of giving him a taste of imprisonment as a lesson … So it is desirable that the subject is disposed of on basic principle, not improvised brevity draped as discretion. Personal liberty, deprived when bail is refused, is too precious a value of our constitutional system recognised under Article 21 that the curial power to negate it is a great trust exercisable not casually but judicially, with lively concern for the cost to the individual and the community. To glamorise impressionistic orders as discretionary may, on occasions, make a litigative gamble decisive of a fundamental right. After all, personal liberty of an accused or convict is fundamental, suffering lawful eclipse only in terms of “procedure established by law”. The last four words of Article 21 are the life of that human right.”

KMSS leaders have stood by their position that Akhil Gogoi’s endless incarceration is a ploy by the BJP government to weaken the, largely KMSS led, people’s movement against Modi government’s controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Bill 2016 under which the government plan to grant citizenship to ‘persecuted’ Hindu+ religious minorities from neighbouring Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Bhasco De Saikia, the joint general secretary of KMSS, who was also recently detained by Guwahati police for campaigning against the Amendment Bill, is certain that, “Akhil’s arrest and re-arrests even in a 10-year-old case proves how desperate the Sarbananda Sonowal government has become to muzzle our agitation against its move to amend the bill to grant citizenship to Hindu migrants from Bangladesh.”

Akhil Gogoi wrote an open letter (written in Assamese) from Lakhimpur prison in which he asserted that :

“The BJP campaigns that the demography of Assam has changed because of migration, the number of Muslims have increased; and if the Hindu Bengalis from Bangladeshi who have and are migrating to Assam after 1971 are given Indian citizenship, the Hindus will again become the majority in Assam. Thus Assamese community will be saved from becoming the minority. This is BJP’s way of collapsing our long held Assamese national aspirations (for self-determination) with the project of Hinduvta.”

But the moot question that needs to be asked here is – Why is BJP government so afraid of Akhil Gogoi and KMSS?

Perhaps, one needs to ask this question to the de-facto Chief minister of Assam – Himanta Biswa Sarma – who was also the most powerful minister and a ‘blue eyed boy’ of Tarun Gogoi led Congress regime of 15 years.

Since the formation of KMSS in 2005, it has been a constant irritant for the Congress government – exposing corruption scams, leading movements against corporate land grab, evictions, construction of big dams bypassing environmental concerns in ecological fragile Northeast region; and also protesting for land settlement & forest rights of the working populace.

Off late since the new BJP government came to power in Assam, KMSS along with the Left-Democratic Forum of Assam has been in the forefront against privatization of (minor) oilfields, communally motivated eviction drives like that of Kaziranga in September 2016, Citizenship (Amendment) Bill 2016 etc.

Under the much hated previous Congress regime (without a worthwhile numerical opposition in the Legislative Assembly), KMSS and its leader Akhil Gogoi acted as the real opposition on the streets of ‘power’.

The current BJP government in Assam is also without a worthwhile numerical opposition in the Legislative Assembly. So, is Akhil Gogoi and KMSS still the real opposition?

Himanta Biswa Sarma knows that it is the case, Akhil Gogoi and KMSS is still a worthwhile opposition.

Manjit Mahanta – veteran journalist, public intellectual and leader of Asom Sangrami Mancha- put it succinctly, “the government is well acquainted with the mass support that Akhil has and his protesting nature. So the government is afraid and hence it has left no stone unturned to stop Akhil. As a result, Akhil was repeatedly arrested and imprisoned.”

Akhil Gogoi and KMSS is no longer in the good books of Assamese urban middle class; they (middle classes) shunned him and the movement he led way back. They found his politics to be way too disruptive for their class positions and their ways of (newly acquired) mall culture with parking space crunches.

If, we sitting in various parts of the world, don’t raise our voices against Akhil Gogoi’s incarceration, we are tacitly hammering the nails of our own incarcerations.

The point is not about whether one agrees or supports Akhil Gogoi or KMSS. The point, let me reiterate, is about our tacit approval of FASCISM being rolled in!

by
Sanjoy Barbora, Guwahati;
Joydeep Biswas, Silchar
Bidyut Sagar Boruah, Guwahati
Debarshi Das, Guwahati
Sanjib Deblaskar, Sonai, Silchar
Anshuman Gogoi, Guwahati
Gaurav Rajkhowa, Guwahati
Ankur Tamuli Phukan, Guwahati
An Assamese version of this article appeared in Amar Asom on November 23 as a joint public statement, with the above authors as signatories

The government’s intention of amending the Citizenship Act via the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016 has been met with anger, anxiety, and unrest across Assam. Faced with a strident opposition to the proposed amendments from across Assam in the last few weeks, the BJP—with the support of a number of Bengali organisations as well—has reoriented its strategy by calling on the Bengali-speaking community to identify themselves as Assamese-speakers. Key leaders such as Himanta Biswa Sarma have advocated the assimilation of the Bengali-speakers of Barak into Assamese linguistic and cultural identity. Others have suggested that they “become Assamese” while maintaining their linguistic identity, and yet others have called on them to return Assamese as their mother-tongue in the Census.

This represents the latest attempt by the RSS to reconfigure Assamese-Bengali relations in Assam (the amendments themselves are consistent with the grand vision of the RSS of the Akhand Bharat, the homeland of the Hindus). Such call to a linguistic nationality to “disappear”—or more politely, “assimilate”—into another cannot but be reactionary and divisive in nature. In multi-ethnic, multi-lingual Assam, every community has the right to protect and develop its culture and language. Furthermore, the popularly elected government must be held to account for its failure to enable the conditions for the same. Against this democratic principle, leaders of the government in power have taken to justifying publicly the blatant usurpation of the cultural and political rights of its citizens.

The Hindutva agenda in Assam is unfolding, on the one hand, by forging a unity of Assamese and Bengali-speaking Hindus against Muslims, even as they concurrently call on the Bengali-Hindus to give up their linguistic identity. On the other, it forces upon the Assamese the anxieties brought on by the communally motivated Citizenship Bill. Against this sustained effort to push Assam towards violence, the right of all Bengali-speakers to protect and develop their language and culture must be upheld. For this very reason, the idea the government would offer them the promise of safety and security, on the pre-condition that they give up their linguistic and cultural identity is atrocious. Further, the state’s duty towards their safety cannot be subject to the pre-condition that they uncomplainingly welcome the persecuted Hindus from across the border. With every new statement by the BJP and their extended family on the issue, their humanitarian sympathy for their “brethren” across the border rings hollow. Their promise to rescue the persecuted minorities is always—always, conditional on a restriction of the democratic rights of all.

Not unlike fascists around the world, the Hindu Right is little concerned about people’s linguistic identities and their cultural resources—except when they can be brought together in antagonisms that forward their Hindutva agenda. It is not, surprising, then, that the most chauvinistic elements of linguistic national identities have periodically gravitated towards the sun of Hindutva—the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra being a case in point. When an Assamese-speaking BJP MLA calls on the Bengali-speaking population of the state to give up their language in favour of Assamese, it must also be understood as part of their conscious effort to cultivate and ally with the most virulent and violent forms of linguistic and ethnic identity across the country.

Hindutva’s inherently Brahminical politics, coupled with India’s historically skewed Centre-State relations come together to create a situation where various regional elites are forced to articulate their claims in ever more exclusivist terms as they struggle to hold their own against a domineering Centre. The imminent rebirth of the most chauvinistic forms of Assamese and Bengali linguistic assertion cannot be seen in disjunction to the BJP’s cynical pursuit of Hindutva nationalism. The real effects of this political calculus, however, are always borne by the most disadvantaged amongst these communities.

In this charged atmosphere, it is imperative to assert the strong historical relations between the Bengali and Assamese-speaking communities in Assam. Concerted efforts by chauvinists within both communities notwithstanding, there continue to be extensive cultural exchanges between them. In the Brahmaputra Valley, the Bengali community uses Assamese as language of common language of social intercourse; many Bengali-speakers have studied in Assamese-medium schools; some have even chosen Assamese as their language of literary expression. Similarly, many historical developments in the Assamese language can be traced to fertile periods of exchange of ideas and practices with Bengali literary culture. Yet, none of this required that Bengalis must become Assamese, nor that Assamese be considered a minor stage in the forward march of Bengali language and culture. Such demands only close off the possibilities of continued relations of mutual exchange and learning.

Through the last two decades, some progress was made towards establishing a difficult but democratic consensus against such a political atmosphere. During this time, ethnic communities across Assam have challenged the chauvinistic excesses of linguistic identity assertions. Social, political and linguistic demands are being made with increasing assertiveness. The lumbering elephant of Assamese nationalism was forced to account for its pernicious hierarchies of caste and conservative authority. It is not surprising that the State has met this surge of democratic demands by riding out on Hindutva’s chariot, with chauvinistic linguistic nationalism as its trusted sarathi (charioteer). Bengali linguistic identity too had undergone significant transformations in the last few decades, as there is an ongoing trend to identify as Bengali-speakers from Assam or the broader north-east, with their distinct cultural history. Against such efforts, the government has chosen now to raise the spectre of the “Bengali Hindu”. This is an attempt to communalise the secular dimensions of Bengali linguistic-national identity, even as it disavows its deep-rooted casteist underpinnings. The attempts to “resolve” the long-standing tensions between Bengalis and Assamese under the flag of Hindutva cannot but affirm and entrench the domination of caste elites within the two communities. Against this, the only alternative is to transform the Bengali-Assamese relationship through a combined and shared critique of the Brahminical ground that supports Bengali and Assamese nationalism.

Finally, a word on the proposed amendments themselves. In an article in The Hindu, Joydeep Biswas has pointed out that, “Most significantly, however, this Bill does not actually give citizenship to anybody. It only proposes to enable the post-1971 stream of non-Muslim migrants to apply for Indian citizenship via the route of naturalisation; they are proposed to be decriminalised by lifting the prefix ‘illegal’ before ‘migrants’” (“Citizenship on a Divisive Agenda”, November 4). This move will only encourage and embolden the most casteist and regressive elements within the Bengali Hindu community. Some supporters of the proposed amendments have argued that insofar as a large number of Bengali Hindus belong to the Namasudra community, the proposed amendments will benefit them the most. Such words of new-found sympathy for the lower-caste peasant, however, ring hollow in the mouths of Hindutva chauvinists who have until today resisted the democratic demands of the anti-caste struggle in the Bengali Hindu community. We fear that as ethnic tensions become more confrontational, the burden of consequences will fall upon the Namasudra community rather than the Brahminical elites, who will always find a sympathetic ear in Nagpur.

The government, for the most part, has chosen to not address the deep seated anxieties of the indigenous communities of Assam. Its only gesture towards allaying these fears is a vague promise to displace and re-distribute en masse the migrant population across the country. That the state wishes to implement such a move is very much in doubt, and more so its ability to accomplish the same. If historical precedent is anything to go by, the burden of accepting such migrants will ultimately fall on the smaller and weaker states alone, and will once again create new points of confrontation in those regions. We find ourselves unable to extend our support to any such attempt on the part of the government, to simply shift the site of ethnic conflict brought on by its proposed amendments, without really resolving it.

The Indian nation-state looks to administer its frontier regions through a two-pronged approach that makes calculated use of the discourse of citizenship and homecoming even as it realises the promise of legal citizenship through extra-legal threats and enticements, the Indian nation-state looks to administer its frontier regions. In such a situation, the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill will actually have the paradoxical effect of rendering Bengali Hindus as second-class citizens—their legal status notwithstanding—while at the same time making strategic use of the humanitarian claim to defend the rights of persecuted religious minorities. Such selective invocations of the discourse of persecution and succour can only establish themselves by trampling on the democratic political aspirations of all linguistic and cultural groups in multi-ethnic Assam.

Steadfast in the belief that the people of the Barak and Brahmaputra Valleys will come together to take forward the fight against forces of casteism, communalism, and linguistic chauvinism, we call on democratic organisations and concerned citizens across the country to strengthen the barricades against Hindutva fascism.

Ashraful Hussain and Parvin Sultana report on the eviction at Dhubri’s Chandordinga in #Assam

Chileshwari Devi laments that they could not salvage even a single thing from their house which was ravaged to ground. Despite repeated requests, the forest officials and guards did not give them any time to shift their furniture and other things. A same story is shared by Ludhia Malla’s family whose children were made to leave their ready food as they witnessed their house being bulldozed. Around 56 families had to undergo such an ordeal in Chandordingha. Situated at a distance of around 240 km from the capital of Assam, Chandordinga Pahar (hill) is a part of the border District Dhubri. It is situated in Ward No 5 of Hatipota village of Chapor. On 28^th December, 2016 the District Administration and Forest Department carried out an eviction on forest land and 56 families were evicted while 117 homes were destroyed.

Living just two kilometers away from the river Brahmaputra, these people were mostly Rajbongshis or Assamese Muslims of East Bengal origin. The ethnic tribal people lived in nearby areas and scarcity of land and food pushed them to this hill where they have been living for the last fifty years. The Assamese Muslims of East Bengal origin were inhabitants of nearby Krishtimoni Char and Cholakura Char of Goalpara district. Land erosion rendered these people homeless and they moved to Chandordinga hill which is at most 4 to 5 km away from these two river islands. These river islands were submerged in the Brahmaputra during the floods of 1978-80. A similar eviction drive was carried out in 1997 and around 30-35 families were displaced. However the people had no other place to go and they resettled again in the same place.

Forest Minister Pramila Rani Brahma visited this place twice and hinted on an impending eviction. Such declarations also saw the local people come together and start a movement against such forced eviction without any proper rehabilitation. While political parties fell short of rising to the occasion and stand by these homeless displaced people, the Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti raised a voice for the rights of these people. A mass movement grew up under the leadership of KMSS. The local people raised demands against forced eviction and no eviction without proper rehabilitation of these landless people. However the government and administration evicted these people without providing them any alternative.

Every evicted family of Chandordinga is landless. Lack of land forced them to move away from their ancestral activity of agriculture. Most of these people are fishermen and work as daily labourers in neighbouring areas of Dhubri and Chapor. Apart from these, many of them work in brick kilns and as carpenters in different parts of Assam. Left with no land, these families don’t have the option of going back to agriculture.

There was a primary school by the name of Poschim Chanderdinga Prathamik Bidyalay. Around 120 students were enrolled in the school. The school was not yet provincialised because of land related issues. On 28^th December, 2016 the school was razed to ground and despite repeated requests from the local people, the school was not spared. 120 students are left with a bleak possibility of continuing their education. The people requested the administration to give them 24 hours to shift the school, however in the end it met the same fate like other bulldozed homes. Many students who go to nearby schools in Tilapara are also in a daze. Kodorbhan who will write her tenth board exams has no place to study and is living in a makeshift tent.

According to some news papers, there was a confrontation between the local people and the forest guards during eviction. 8 people were left wounded and the forest guards had to open fire. The immediate cause for this confrontation was a specific incident. According to local people, a family wanted some time to shift their house. While they were discussing this, the forest guards started lathicharging and they hit two women. This led to the violent outburst and army was deployed to control the situation. A local resident, Zakir Hussain was also arrested in connection with the incident.

Almost all the families living in Chandordinga Pahar have moved there after losing everything to the mighty Brahmaputra. Left with no option they tried to rebuild their lives amidst utmost hardship. While politicians and many news outlets have already expressed doubts about the citizenship of these people, the fact that aborigines like Koch Rajbongshis have also faced similar fate needs to be brought forth. The evicted families are living in makeshift tents in this extreme weather. The Rajbongshi families have put up temporary houses in an extremely low flood prone area. Access to clean drinking water is difficult. Use of river water and lack of sanitation facilities have created diseases and health hazards to the people. Their pleas continue to fall on deaf ears of Administration. Banes Ali who has a land patta and claims to have one katha eighteen lasas of land laments that going to court to challenge the eviction will be a costly affair for these poverty stricken people. Chileshwari Devi who also claims to have land patta says that the response of the local BJP MLA to solve the pathetic condition of these people have been lukewarm.

KMSS has been raising the issue that in the name of evicting illegal encroachers, forest department has been harassing common people for quite sometime. The eviction notice issued on 11 November, 2016 by the Salkocha Forest Department giving a maximum of 15 days to the people to leave their homes gave a momentum to the movement started by KMSS. A memorandum was submitted to the Chief Minister of the State demanding an end to the forced eviction and a demand for resettlement. The local people have been approaching the officials for quite sometime with requests to not carry out the eviction. On 28^th November, 2016 a heavily attended public meeting with Joydev Barua as the President was held and a memorandum was submitted to the Deputy Commissioner’s office. However the displaced landless people were evicted without any rehabilitation.

A few years ago, the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) issued a decree prohibiting singers in Assam from singing Hindi songs in cultural nights around the time of the festival of Bihu. While a few applauded this, celebrating it as a revolutionary step towards protecting Assamese culture from being swamped by Indian national culture. Although nefarious designs of the mighty Indian state in its peripheries can not be denied, but what also has to be acknowledged is that organisations like ULFA having any moral or legal entitlement to dictate to people of Assam on how they decide to live their lives. Behind theirdictats lie three decades old mess and crushing of many legitimate voices of dissent.

Debates have started again after when the ULFA chief in his latest notes from underground vowed to register his protest – “that too not in words” – if theatres in Assam decide to take down an Assamese film called Shakira Ahibo Bakultolor Bihuloi / Shakira will be coming to Bakultol’s Bihu in favour of films like Raees and Kaabil.

As figures and viewers suggest, this ‘crowdfunded’ Assamese flick has indeed attracted more audience than usual in the small industry (and even good reviews from the critics). One is optimistic that such works will resuscitate Assamese cinema and its economy. A hum, if not a frenzy, was seen on social media platforms prior to the release of the curiously titled feature. Much of that changed as one saw the open letter written by the film’s director Himangshu Prasad Das to the self-styled commander-in-chief of ULFA asking him to intervene in his film’s distributional travails.

Interestingly, Das began the letter by complementing the outfit for “carrying the dreams of freedom through thick and thin” and equates it with a “cultural war” he dreams to pioneer in order to ensure a strong existence of Assam and the Assamese. “When Assam becomes independent, what will be the self-identity of the community if it cannot live with a sense of selfhood?,” a disappointed Das asks in the letter. One wonders which war of independence Das is talking about. Is it the one that demands bombing dozens of school children? Or is it the one that takes national pride in frequently killing hundreds of poor migrant from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh because some of them speak Bhojpuri, a language from “occupational India”? Maybe it is that war of ‘selfhood’ (to use Das’s word) which reminds each person growing up in villages – and indeed a lot of towns – in Assam in the nineties of gun-toting, motorcycle-riding youths barging into their homes and demanding dinner with chicken curry. And then the next few days would be reserved for Army atrocities. Lives in much of Assam in those years were sandwiched between fear-mongering, extortion, kidnapping, and killing by ULFA and rape and extra judicial executions by Indian Army. We would be lying if we write in our history books that the masses were oppressed and suppressed only by the military, and not at all by the local freedom-seekers.

This is why I have a problem when bodies like ULFA dictate how we should live. Because for long enough they have decided how we should die. Because its report card since inception speaks also of murders, of vivisepulture and of extorted moolah. The least ULFA can now do is be kind and spare us lessons on our taste in art, culture and literature.

Samhita Barooah writes from #Guwahati Queer Pride March 2017

How is ‘Pride’ such a pride for some or rather for a very few of us? There is always much ado about everything. Within the realm of everything, pride of bruised souls, bodies and minds was somewhere lost in the crowd. Such loss was never noticed, addressed or heard with sensitivity but ridiculed with negativity, violence and torturous upturns within both personal and public spheres. Wonder why people are always concerned about the straight flow of nature. Sometimes they flow with the norms to avoid any form of complexity and confusion. People are wired and transmitted into a world which is either/or, this or that, here or there, for or against, yours or mine, us and them and even more precisely right or wrong.

Stories of pride run through layers of multiplicities. They are beyond the comprehension of just being a part of a whole or rather a whole within a part. Pride is aggressive when it is rooted in jealousy and ego centrism but pride is crucial for ensuring human dignity. In the context of India pride is the key to the dalit, adivasi, disabled, hijra, prostituted minors, ex-communicated individuals and any non-conformist whose identity, ethnicity, religion, colour, status and sexuality define everything around the individual. Pride is a celebration of vibrancy, diversity and disassociation for the normative rigidities. Pluralism is today an urgent need in a world constantly turning universal and singular. Pride walk provides such a space which celebrates pluralism under the hawk-eyed panoptic gaze of single lens.

In a world constantly struggling with its layered existence needs to either belong or become the insignificant other in the pursuit of justice, equality and freedom, Queer Pride holds the ground for alternatives. It is not about being, becoming or belonging to the airtight containers or gender binaries or those queering such binaries but more so the move beyond such identity constructions which relieves an individual from every kind of oppression and restricted living. Youth celebrates pride in many countries across the world and even in Guwahati in the past four years Pride was spearheaded by the youth and the matured to be precise. But age is indeed a state of mind. Every stage of life relates to the contours of Pride to be able to embrace it completely.

Sexuality is a concern for many and sometimes it is also a gender expression. Pride celebrates gender expression and diversity within which such expressions are recognised and reflected within the broad spectrum of gender identity formations. Pride empowers people to bring out their intimate, closeted and most vulnerable gender experiences within the public space. Whether individuals or groups are concerned about public, political or professional issues, pride enables people to engage with their own inhibitions with respect to others and also accept the differences with dignity and power.

Guwahati Queer Pride is an effort towards the expression of such diversity enabling every individual and group with choices. Choice is a matter of pride in today’s shrinking world. Choices are pre-determined, destined or manipulated as per the dominant world-view. But queer pride entails opportunities for individuals and groups to explore the possibilities of dissolving the rigid constructs which constantly leads to conflicting paradigms. During the last 4 prides in Guwahati since 2014 when it began for the first time young people, elders, journalists, students, activists and professionals from diverse fields have actively participated. It is also interesting to note that the pride has been self-supported by diverse individuals, groups and voluntary groups without a single group or institution dominating the donations. People within Guwahati city find the pride walk amusing as the music, colourful attires and vibrant youth sometimes with masks and paints raise a lot of curiosity. Bystanders take photos, police personal walk along with the participants at times laughing along with them. For most of the common people the Pride walk is still a matter of amusement, cultural procession, youthful fun activity and nothing to be worried about public action in the light of elitist participation. This year the pride participants had students, some professors from across North East Universities and a few activists from Delhi, Kolkata and Mumbai but very few from the North Eastern States. Sponsorships for persons from the working class alternate sexuality community are also shrinking which explains their absence. Moreover with the incorporation of the third gender category within the constitutional legislation somehow there is a silence from some parts of the community. Pride is also a platform to raise awareness on the atrocities, associations and assertions of sub-altern identities which questions the binaries and norms on the street. Slogans like ‘Kaun sa kanoon sabse battar…377…’, ‘I am gay…its OK’, ‘1,2,3,4…break open the closet door…’kept ringing along with Bhupen Hazarika’s golden melody, ‘Kohuwa Bon Mur Oxanto Mon…’ It was an afternoon with colours of hope, pride and prejudices coming to a halt.