The authors are members of the Guwahati-based Uki Research Collective

The long anti-CAA movement has seen lakhs of people coming out in protest across the country. However, many have also noted a number of political voices that have begun to find themselves sidelined within the movement. Over the last few weeks, a liberal interpretation of this uprising has become the loudest and most visible, spoken for by the country’s most English-articulate and globally-networked voices in the media and academia. Increasingly, the liberal agenda has sought to police voices that are not an echo of its own—“Inshallah” slogans at protests are inappropriate, but expressing solidarity with the persecuted Kashmiri Pandits helps prove the secularism of Muslim women of Shaheen Bagh; Chandrashekhar Azad’s defence of Ambedkarite values becomes a defence of the Constitution as an abstracted ideal; and the Assamese perspective on citizenship and migration is too chauvinist to affirm the idea of India. After the initial euphoria of solidarity in the face of police repression had died down, the liberals have returned to their comfort zone of defending the “secular values of the constitution”, brought to life by songs, slogans and quirky placards, and energised by their selective empathy and outrage.

For protestors across Assam, CAA is most urgently about demanding a redressal of the problems related to long-term, large-scale migration into Assam. What one needs is an engagement with the problematic of political economy of migration since colonial times and Indian nation-state’s governmental attitudes towards resultant issues.But, instead of addressing the socio-historical issues at play, the left-liberals are merely interested in flaunting an ahistorical and politically myopic perspective on migration that only helps to smoothen their self-image of being cosmopolitan.They combine the arrogance of their disengagement with a self-righteous multiculturalism that dismisses the anxieties of the indigenous as misplaced, and their protest misguided. Any number of #Standwith hashtags or solemn statements in solidarity with struggles elsewhere in the country, it seems, is unable to allay suspicions of a chauvinist lurking behind all the solidarity talk.

It is not so much a question of feeling aggrieved, for we see this as a political encounter rather than a personal one among friends. We take this opportunity to call attention to some misrepresentations that have come to enjoy much currency, and demand an end to the politics that seeks to do so.

The Idea of India

In the current wave of protests, there has been a tendency among the metropolitan left and liberals to judge alternative imaginings of nation and nationality as provincial at best and xenophobic at worst. There are also those who claim to stand against all nationalisms – Indian and Assamese. But both these positions seem to miss some key questions – first, the relationship between nationalism as an ideology and the emergence of nationalities as a modern social form; and second, the trajectories of political struggle arising out of this lack of ‘fit’ between the nations and nationalisms.

The colonial encounter with modernity had wide-ranging effects on land ownership, trade and industry, administration and social reform.They had an important role to play in the process of nationality formation in Assam too. The effects included changes such as land becoming commodity; rapid expansion of mercantile capital; administrative unification and bureaucratic standardisation across the subcontinent; and a conservative social agenda. While this set in motion a process of simultaneous expropriation of the means of labour and concentration of capital, it nevertheless always had a caste/community character to it, with limited effects of mobility and democratization. Alongside the expropriation of the labouring castes, we have the formation of an upper caste elite, which eventually became the class that developed all-India political and cultural networks, fleshing out over time its hegemonic discourse—the ideology of an Indian nation, in its Gandhian, Hindutva and Left forms.

This process played out in Assam as well, such that the colonial period can be understood as the rise of Hindu upper-caste class rule.Along with it, a culturalist idea of Assamese nationalism that emphasised tradition, unity, and culture became dominant from the late nineteenth century onwards. There was, however, a point of difference in the rise of the Assamese upper-caste elite. Whereas the ideologues of India were connected by their all-India cultural networks, the Assamese upper-caste elite emerged out of an antagonism with the Bengali-upper caste elite, who had themselves become entrenched in the colonial bureaucracy precisely upon the strength of the already developed nineteenth-century national networks. However, this upper-caste idea of nationalism is itself only a part of the broader process of Assamese nationality formation. Never mind the former’s vociferous claims of representing the whole Assamese nation, the period of nationality formation itself saw the emergence of an Assamese-language public sphere with the participation of a wide range of concerns and voices, especially the critique of social hierarchy and the universal import of the ideas of equality, dignity and justice. Nationalism, then, was only one among many political positions and discourses that were shaping up in the new Assamese language sphere. This became the space in which, and through which, the social antagonisms arising out of colonial modernity and nationality as a social form were formulated, discussed, and challenged.

The period of Congress mass mobilization in the 1930s was fraught with a troubled relationship between Assamese and Indian nationalism. We see, on the one hand, the emergence of a caste-Hindu elite Congress leadership in Assam; but their place within the Indian upper-caste social networks was always precarious. This is reflected in their ambivalence regarding the place of Assamese culture in the grand Indian civilizational narrative, even after the Gandhi-led Congress leadership had agreed to organise the party along the lines of linguistic provinces. On the other hand, the new closeness to the Congress movement also led to the silencing and marginalising of other cultural-political projects that were being imagined at the time within the Assamese-language political discourse.

The departure of the British saw an all-India upper-caste Anglophone elite take control of state power, bureaucracy, the intelligentsia, and industry. The Nehruvian ideology of state-centric development, naturally, was their ideology of choice—simultaneously securing and rendering invisible the class rule of this new Anglophone upper-caste elite. And a centralised state apparatus was their instrument of choice. The political weight of the regional vernacular upper-caste elites was co-opted within a diluted federal structure after the States Reorganisation Act, 1956. However, with regard to Assam, the Commission expressly recommended not reorganising the province along linguistic/ethnic lines in order to prevent the rise of self-determination sentiments in a strategic border region. Thus, structurally, upper-caste rule in post-colonial Assam was maintained, but was to be a shared affair between the Bengali and Assamese upper-castes—a relationship that periodically broke out into conflict throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In tandem with this, we have a post-colonial situation characterised by an extractive, exploitative economic relationship with metropolitan centers and the centralised Indian state; the suppression of political demands and aspirations of national identity for democratisation of political power and society; and the newly acquired legitimacy of a chauvinist upper-caste Assamese nationalismthat sought to find a way out of its fringe position in the national elite by articulating a culturalist definition of Assamese nationality, and suppressing imaginaries that envisaged Assamese nationality as a political community.This chauvinism eventually revealed itself in its most violent form towards the end of the Assam Movement.

But the struggle against this upper-caste Assamese chauvinism has also been ongoing, speaking sometimes in the language of Assamese identity, at other times against and outside it. This came to a head particularly in the years after the Assam Movement, and the post-Accord years marked a period when urgent concerns pushed to the margins returned as articulate critiques that revaluated Assam’s place in regional, national, and global networks of social, political, and economic power. Demands were made for separate states, for inclusion in scheduled lists, for national independence. The demand for a separate state on the northern bank of Brahmaputra valley was accompanied by a renewed assertion of the Bodo nationality. Around the same time, Karbi Anglong and the then North Cachar Hills District saw a different articulation in the form of a demand for an autonomous state within the Assam itself, emerging out of a critical engagement with the idea of a broader Assamese nationality. By the late 1980s, alongside the critique of the Indian state, the ethnic and linguistic issues of Assam were also analysed and the struggle against Assamese upper-caste hegemony was foregrounded  from the vantage point of a federalist politics for the region.

The point of this long description is to show that historically, the idea of Assamese nation is not homogenous—it is riven with contradictions, which make it a social form that is in process. In other words, the historical development of the Assamese nationality is an ongoing process of democratisation of social life, which is being obstructed by the Indian state under the class rule of the all-India Anglophone upper-caste elite. Now, while the metropolitan left-liberals, representatives of this latter class, devote their singular attention to the dominant upper-caste Assamese nationalism, they are oblivious to other voices that have engaged with the idea of an Assamese nation. In the process, they also miss the conjuncture in which this chauvinism (and its critiques) have emerged. Consequently, one must ask why this narrative of ‘the chauvinist Assamese’ has such currency amongst the liberals. We believe there are two reasons for it. First, it helps them in overlooking their own complicity as the upper-caste Indian elite in the emergence of this very chauvinist Assamese nationalism. And second, they can happily remain oblivious to the non-Brahminical articulations of Assamese nationality and thus deny political assertions of such articulations.

Migration and the State

Even more misplaced than the left-liberal description of the chauvinist Assamese is their understanding of migration in the region, which vacillates between ‘the migrants are productive members of society’ and ‘migration is a natural process of human history’ and ‘turning back migrants violates our basic humanity’. Such conceptions are understandable, given that they are sprouted in a liberal ecology. But these lessons in human morality and universal kinship have not accounted for one crucial aspect that differentiates migrations in the last three centuries from all other such movements in human history—namely, they take place within an imperialist political economy of capitalism’s march across the continents. Academic history as well as popular memory bear testimony to the complete transformation of existing regimes of land ownership and use with the expansion of the British empire into today’s north-east. This set in motion a massive process of expropriation of land—either through physical dispossession or by being forced into a new regime of settled agriculture, private property and land revenue. This process was exacerbated by the colonial policy of settling revenue-paying peasantry involved in cash-crop production such as jute, etc. And in so far as ethnic categories were central to the ordering of colonial Assam, this was true in the new land market and expansion of mercantile economy as well. In this restructuring of land, nature, revenue, and property, the indigenous peasantry were conceptualised as primitives, either to be dispossessed or adopted in the colonial epistemic, legal-administrative terms. In the expansive movement of capital, they were relegated to a frontier zone to be annexed and appropriated.

This pattern of dispossession, competition, and conflict took on added dimensions in the post-colonial period. In addition to the oft-named factors such as the Partition, the Bangladesh war and redrawing of state boundaries, one must also note the expanded regime of forest/wildlife protection; natural resource extraction; development-induced displacement; erosion-related displacement; and accelerated sale/purchase of land – all of which created conditions for massive internal and external migration in Assam. The postcolonial state has chosen to deal with these massive displaced populations through the framework of ‘rehabilitation’ and ‘encroachment’. Thus, here too, we find a cycle of dispossession that has its legal and illegal aspects, both of which are directed or sustained through the state. As far as this mode of state-directed dispossession complements the state-directed model of Nehruvian capitalist development, both of them must be understood as part of the class rule of the Anglophone all-India upper-caste elite.

Thus, the historical development of the indigenous-migrant antagonism has been driven not by some deep-seated racial hatred.It is rather the statist visions and state policy that ultimately placed communities in relationships of conflict, competition, and domination. And in all this, the onward march of capital is secure, as it differentially exploits both the migrant and the indigenous—the former amid the precarity of cash-crop production in the chars and flood plains of the Brahmaputra; and the latter smothered by moneylender-traders through whom they are linked to an international commodity market. No doubt, since this process has always played out through an ethnic dynamic, indigenous political discourse too has vacillated between protest against the state’s failure to control migration and the targeting of migrant communitiesfor eviction, discrimination, and violence. And even as we must resist with all means such physical attacks and threats of disenfranchisement, it is equally important to realise that it is impossible to do this with talk of migration and cultural exchange as the essence of human society. In the shadow of their all-embracing universalism, the left-liberal narrative of progress has always considered the indigenous—and their anxieties—an anachronism. And despite noble intentions, these niceties only serve to perpetuate the denial of the real effects of the immigrant-settler antagonism in the historical development of the Assamese nationality.

Returning to the Present

We believe that the debate about citizenship that has emerged in the course of the anti-CAA protests cannot avoid the question of the status and rights of smaller nationalities within the Indian union, just as Assamese nationalism cannot ignore the rights of communities that it claims to be part of the nation. In the context of the protests happening in Assam, this question is all the more urgent. For us, the question of the rights of the Assamese nationality is important for two reasons—first, it challenges the Indian ideology that posits ‘India’ as the only composite nation (and thus political entity) and all others as ‘organic’ (cultural) communities.And second, historically the formation of an Assamese nationality has been a site where Brahminical social power is being resisted and pushed back. Even beyond Assam, it is not surprising that the most serious critiques and debates on Brahminism have taken place not in English but in the vernaculars. It is outside the metropolis that the cultivated networks of the Anglophone upper-caste elite find themselves without defence against the variety of anti-Brahminical forms of resistance.

However, a new ruling bloc has emerged within the upper-caste formation with the ideology of Hindutva. The left-liberal rhetoric of secularism and enlightened humanism sought to render invisible the upper-caste consolidation, while maintaining the Anglophone elite’s hold over the same. The present ruling block has a language of hegemony and dominance marked with resentment, situated in the gap between the mass people and the liberal elites. It would be completely wrong, though, to assume that Hindutva does not provide a unitary rhetoric and strategy. One can notice that the Hindutva bloc is much more flexibile vis-a-vis the vernacular sphere than the Anglophone elites. In Assam, Hindutva has been unfolding in two ways. First, not unlike in the tribal areas of Gujarat or Chattisgarh, the Sangh has been active for decades with social service, education, and cultural activities. It has been working among communities like Mising, Karbi or the tea tribes that have been marginalised in mainstream Assamese cultural politics for long. Second, in recent times, Hindutva organisers have ingenuously coupled its social experiments with the expanding markets and social relations therein—not without significant help from the state’s apparatus of targeted welfare. Through these activities, the RSS-BJP has sought to bypass the deep conflicts that constitute Assam’s social life, and has sought to set up a coalition that brings together the caste Hindu Assamese, indigenous tribes, and the settler Hindu communities across plains and the hills. Of course, in so far as Hindutva is but another version of the Indian ideology, the old project of maintaining these identities as mere culturalist articulations continues. The RSS-BJP has engineered a complex depoliticization of difference through the idea of Hindu essence and superficial ethnic-linguistic difference.

However, the accelerating demand for being part of the Hindu Rashtra has also created situations where the old fissures have re-emerged. The challenge to the Hindutva project would also be situated in such fissures, as we have noticed in the occasional opposition to the Sangh’s socio-cultural activities in Assam. As the CAA initiated a legal-political framework for the Hindutva state, we have noticed the first eruption in Assam against the state apparatus from the indigenous perspective. While tackling the initial upsurge of the movement with ruthless tactics, the government has since sought to ensnare political demands within the labyrinth of weakened community/territorial councils, community welfare measures etc into tools of governmentality. One thing is certain, that a return to a ‘secular’, multicultural state is no longer possible. One must instead take the route of engaging with the political aspect of identity assertions. This engagement has to take into consideration the contentious legacy of the Assamese nationality—in its present multilayered form of internal oppositions as well as new identity formations. Against its dominant culturalist articulation of Assamese identity, we believe that the discourse of nationality/ethnicity must be a space where the existing structures of power within and amongst communities may be confronted and resisted. This is an essential step in moving towards formulations and strategies that are different from Indian leftist, Gandhian, Hindutva or elite Assamese formulations of national identity; for it is in the churnings of nationality/ethnicity that the struggles of the people have found, and will continue to find, their expression and not in the abstractions of liberal humanism. That the government is targeting the progressive peasant organisation KMSS with a singular tenacity is but a backhanded recognition of this history and its possibility. Any formation, that confronts the present fascist regime and is serious about emancipatory politics, must too recognise such possibilities.

In this context, against the sentiment of defending the spirit of the constitution, we affirm the need for its restructuring, such that it acknowledges the rights of nationalities to determine the course of their political future. A total critique, premised on the recognition of the rights of repressed nationalities and identities is the only way forward, the only way to bury for good the Indian ideology.

The post When The Indian Ideology Trips On Assamese ‘Xenophobia’ appeared first on RAIOT.

This memorandum was submitted to the Chief Minister’s Office on March 23, before the statewide lockdown was announced. The demands and concerns raised through this petition, however, remain unaddressed and the government must be pressurised to immediately do so.

Beginning with an outbreak in China some months ago, the Covid-19 pandemic has presently spread to over 180 countries, with countries like Italy and Iran amongst the worst affected. Until a few weeks ago, one held on to the faint hope that India might be spared the devastating the diseases has taken on many societies across the world. But criss-crossed as India is by global networks of trade and travel, this was not to be. But as the spread of the virus abroad and the resulting travel restrictions forced many foreign travellers to return to India, a number of cases began coming to light. In the last week or so, there has been an alarming rise in the number of cases across the country. The government maintains that there is no local transmission of the pandemic yet; but there are already documented cases of persons with positive symptoms being found on trains and another in Pune of a person testing positive despite having no history of foreign travel. From global trends it is evident that only a small percentage of cases require hospitalisation, and few cases require intensive care and ventilator support. That being said, in a country such as India even such a small percentage could place an unmanageable pressure on India’s already weak public health infrastructure. And the rapacity of private healthcare providers has ensured that wellness and disease are weighed on the scale of profit and loss. All of these are cause for grave concern.

It is evident that the government expects this outbreak to take on pandemic proportions in India. As the prime minister made clear in his address to the nation, we must all prepare for a long struggle in the days to come. The ‘janata curfew’ on March 22 was one such effort to create awareness. In a bid to control the spread of the virus, a number of states have already initiated emergency measures. As many as 30 states and union territories have now announced public lockdown until the end of the month. Similarly, railways and bus services have also been temporarily suspended. According to experts, complete lockdown and extensive testing of suspected cases remain the best ways to control the spread of the virus. We are hopeful that with the announced lockdown will also be supported by increased testing, with the government ensuring that adequate numbers of kits are made available free of cost or at nominal prices. These efforts must also be accompanied by massive campaign to spread awareness and combat instances fake news and miracle cures that are being propagated through social media. We believe that India will stand shoulder to shoulder with the international community in the struggle against this ominous threat.

Without any confirmed cases in Assam, it has not yet been considered necessary to establish a complete lockdown.* Many, however, fear the worst is yet to come. The neighbouring states of Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland have already sealed their borders, and Meghalaya has also closed down its tourist hotspots. The threat of a local outbreak due to the virus travelling across state borders has caused much apprehension across towns and villages in Assam. The state administrative machinery has presently mobilised a response, with efforts being made to increase awareness and bolster medical infrastructure. Directives are also being issued to dissuade public gatherings. It would not be inaccurate to suggest that a complete lockdown is imminent. Such sweeping measures seem harsh but the situation, no doubt, demands a swift response. That being said, one cannot deny that these restrictions on social gathering, travel, and business will bring economic life to a standstill. And the most affected in such a situation are always the toiling workers and peasants. On the one hand, some sectors of industry have not ceased production, exposing workers to risk of infection. On the other hand, they are also the ones who suffer most when measures such as lockdowns affect casual employment and create delays in the agrarian cycle. Even the procurement of daily essentials becomes difficult in such times. Lockdown measures in various states across India have forced thousands of migrant workers to return to Assam. At the same time, street vendors are being forcibly evicted across the city, leaving them without any source of income to support them through the uncertain days ahead. Organisations representing street vendors in Guwahati have appealed to the administration to provide them a compensation of Rs 500 per day, but are still awaiting a positive response. Besides the vendors, there are many workers and peasants in the unorganised sector who have been unable to make any such representation.

With an eye on how the disease has spread in various countries, one can expect the present restrictions to be scaled up in the days ahead. In this time of crisis, the government of Assam must rise to the occasion and abide by its duty to the people. Alongside the restrictions on movement and public gathering, the government must also fulfil its responsibilities towards the economically vulnerable sections of society by safeguarding their health and economic wellbeing. We demand that the government implement the following measures:

1. The government must undertake to provide food and essential supplies to the poor and economically vulnerable sections of society.
2. The government must undertake to provide for adequate testing and treatment facilities for the economically vulnerable sections of society. The government must set up arrangements with private laboratories and hospitals to allow for free testing and treatment for the poor.
3. Production operations in tea estates across Assam must be ceased by government order. An emergency fund to support the daily and medical needs of tea garden workers must be jointly set up by the government and tea estate owners.
4. The government must provide a weekly allowance to all workers in the unorganised sector whose source of earning has been disrupted due to restrictions.
5. Disbursements under established schemes such as old-age pensions, etc must be temporarily increased to support the most vulnerable sections of society, including the elderly.
6. The government must direct banks and microfinance institutions to defer repayment of loans, etc until the end of the crisis.

We are hopeful that the government will undertake on an urgent basis these essential steps to secure the health and well-being of the working classes of Assam, who find themselves to be the most vulnerable section of society in this time of uncertainty and crisis.

For Uki Research Collective
Ankur Tamuli Phukan, Convenor
Gaurav Rajkhowa, Convenor

*This signature campaign was carried out on March 22 and submitted to the Chief Minister’s Office on March 23, before the statewide lockdown was announced. The demands and concerns raised through this petition, however, remain unaddressed and the government must be pressurised to immediately do so.

Signatories:

1. Holiram Terang, Diphu
2. Joydeep Biswas, Silchar
3. Debasish, Tezpur
4. Darshan Deep Baruah, Guwahati
5. Trishanku, Tezpur
6. Barnali Barua, Guwahati
7. Tridisha Goswami, Guwahati
8. Dipu Kumar Baruah, Guwahati
9. Rajdeep Pathak, Guwahati
10. Anupam, Guwahati
11. M. R. Hazarika, Guwahati
12. Anupam Saikia, Delhi
13. Linton Saikia, Noonmati
14. Dhanjit baishay, Jorhat
15. Deepjyoti Gogoi, Jorhat Engineering College
16. Kalyanjyoti Chutia, Dhemaji
17. Bharti, Assam
18. Rasidul Alam, Beltola
19. Pratisha Barman, Guwahati
20. Rashmi Rekha Borah, Gohpur
21. Gakul chutia, Dhemaji
22. Tapan Jyoti devnath, Jorhat Engineering College
23. Trinabh Dowerah, Digboi
24. Prithiraj B., IIT Bombay
25. Kangkan Gohain, Sibsagar, Assam
26. Anurita, Guwahati
27. nikhileswar baruah, Guwahati
28. Bikash Kumar Bhattacharya, independent journalist, Tezpur
29. Partha pratim kalita, Guwahati
30. Anowara Begum, Hatigaon
31. Jyotimoy Kakoty, Bengaluru
32. Pallav saikia, Chabua
33. Noni, Guwahati
34. Kashyop Nondon Kalita, Gauhati University
35. Arman Hussain, Dibrugarh
36. Mainu Gogoi, Tinsukia
37. Anamriya Baruah, Guwahati
38. Basanta Choudhury, Dispur
39. Fazla Wahid Ahmed, Dhubri
40. Seema Saikia, Odisha
41. Saidul Islam, NTPC LTD
42. Bijoyendra Sharma, Guwahati
43. Kamal Rajbangshi, SFI, Guwahati
44. Pinku Muktiar, Tezpur University
45. Aditi Gogoi, Jorhat
46. Manash Pratim Barman, Guwahati
47. Jolly, Guwahati
48. Paragamani Bhunya, Nonoi
49. Shilpi Sikha Das, Guwahati
50. Lon, Guwahati
51. Farheen Tabassum, Guwahati
52. Nitul Das, Guwahati
53. Debajit Rajbangshi, Guwahati
54. Bitopi Dutta, Guwahati
55. Ankur Bhattacharya, Silchar
56. Drishana Kalita, Guwahati
57. Shrimanta Sundar Ramchiyari, IIT Roorkee
58. Eyashin Ali, Gauhati Universality
59. Abhinav Das, Guwahati
60. Rashmimala, visual artist, Baroda
61. Baser Ali, Kayakuchi (ATA)
62. Nirban, JNU
63. Aminul Islam, Khardhara, Barpeta
64. Swagat Agarwala, Guwahati
65. Dudulmoni Sarmah, Guwahati
66. Tanmoy Sharma, Yale University
67. Ushamoni Gogoi, Tinsukia
68. Kalyani Barman, Guwahati
69. Rajat Sinha, Bangalore
70. Arusmita, Tinsukia
71. Bitupan Gogoi, AISF, Assam
72. Asif Akhtar, Silchar
73. Bubul Sarmah, Nagaon
74. Maturity Deka, Guwahati
75. Mayuri Deka, Guwahati
76. Bipul Borah, Jorhat
77. Dimpee buragohain, Sivsagar
78. Hirak Jyoti Baishya, IIT Kharagpur
79. Mohit
80. Mehzebin Rahman, Youth for Unity and Voluntary Action, Guwahati
81. Priyam Gogoi, Amguri
82. Partha Pratim Sharma, Kaliabar
83. Dr. Sabina Y Rahman, MGAHD-TISS
84. Rehna Sultana, Gauhati University
85. Deepak Sharma, Udalguri
86. Gazi Rahman, South Salmara, Mankachar
87. Sharpat, Mahchara,Barpeta
88. Mohibul Islam, Chennai, Barpeta
89. Papu, Barpeta
90. Taniya Laskar, Silchar
91. Sultan Mahmud Mirdha, Kayakuchi
92. khandakar jahangir alam, kalagachia
93. Rumina Khatun, Sipajhar
94. Bhaity Chungkrang, Bormukali gaon, Silapathar, Dhemaji
95. Sumonta Kakati, Baihata chariali
96. Rekibul Islam, Barpeta
97. Bhargav Jyoti Borah, Doigrung, Golaghat
98. Randeep Borah, Lakhimpur
99. Meenal Tula, Uki Research Collective
100. Bidisha Barman, Uki Research Collective
101. Sudakshana Gogoi, Uki Research Collective
102. Anshuman Gogoi, Uki Research Collective
103. Bidyut Sagar Boruah, Uki Research Collective

The post The Fight against Coronavirus in Assam cannot Ignore the Economically Vulnerable appeared first on RAIOT.

The home which is now the safest place for all to protect oneself and families from the virus is now turning out to be a nightmare for women who are in abusive relationship.

Now you are locked down, where can you go? An abuser threatened his wife in a remote village in Assam. The violence escalated and was aggravated by the lockdown which is in force now to combat the global COVID-19 pandemic. The woman waited for night to set in. She did not want to be seen by anyone. But would anyone see the violence she was going through? With a five month old infant wrapped in her sador/clothing, she fled. She crossed two paddy fields and reached her natal home. She informed our Gramin Mahila Kendra which offers pysho-social care to women in abusive relationship in remote rural areas . Our helplines are open. We reached out to the woman over phone. The women was counselled and consoled over phone continuously. After about four days, the abuser landed in her natal home, threatening her with dire consequences. As the argument heated up, he snatched the five- month old baby and fled. The women went through immense anxiety and pain. It took us three days to finally restore the baby to the mother. We mobilized the frontline worker such as ASHA and also the village headman who are mobile in the area. However, this cannot be an answer. Any form of violence if not addressed timely could lead even lead to death of such women.

The pandemic will have massive impact on people’s lives and livelihoods; it will have perilous impact on women who are marginalized because of their gender status in harsh patriarchal realities. The associated frustration will be unleashed on women as food, firewood, grocery, medicines, cash, income and other essential necessities start to dwindle in a family. Domestic violence will now be heightened as they are now locked up with abusers. Before we could finish addressing the first case, our helpline rang again. In another district, an aggrieved woman dared to defy the lockdown. Unable to bear the excessive physical assault by her husband, she walked to the local thana to lodge her complaint. She did not want to return home. We swung into action. The police warned the abusive husband after which she hesitantly returned back. We have no choice in this situation but to check with the woman’s well being on a daily basis over phone. We are also trying to support such women with dry ration. A badly beaten up thirteen year old girl and her mother took refuge in a neighbour’s house. The frustration was over inability to earn a daily wage by the man. Women are compromising on their rights and returning to violent homes. The One stop Centres are faraway and not accessible for many such women.

Assam is notorious when it come comes to crimes against women. NCRB 2017 data for Assam says that cruelty by husband rate as reported to police stands at 60 per lakh population. This number will double as more and more are likely to face violence or the ongoing violence will spike up. This violence could be verbal/mental/physical/economic or even sexual. Not all abused women will report due to fear of repercussion of violence on them and their children or their dependents. They also have no access to any complaints mechanism and they will continue to bear up with the abuse in silence. Cases will not be reported and recorded. After restrictions are relaxed, more abused women are likely to share their struggles. Apart from intimate partner violence, there are different women who live in a domestic relationship like minor children, dependent parents, woman siblings, partners and others who are the mercy of the abusers .Insecurity of being deprived of basic necessities like shelter and food prevent women from speaking up . One usual pattern of domestic violence is to socially isolate aggrieved women from talking to or visiting their natal families or their confidantes. With the abuser hovering over her, such aggrieved women will not dare to make a phone call and report. Such cases will remain unnoticed and unrecorded. Domestic violence is all about wielding masculine power to exercise control over a woman’s mobility and freedom. This completely violates her to a right to safety and dignity.

We at North East Network are not able to intervene effectively as our grassroots counsellors are observing lockdown and physical distancing. We are also trying to call and speak to survivors of violence who had approached us earlier, checking on them and assuring them that we are reachable. Some of these service providers are active in remote rural areas and are within reach of aggrieved women where state services are not accessible. Their interventions need to be recognized as essential service . Passes must be immediately issued to organisations which are registered as service providers by Government Social Welfare Department . Many organisations offer shelter, legal aid, counselling, etc.Moreover, it is important to alert all frontline workers such as ASHA, ANM, Panchayat, Village Defence Parties and others to report such cases. District Protection Officers must be equipped with additional powers and resources to reach out to the last woman in the districts.

Given an alarming situation like this, it is extremely important for government to recognize domestic violence which is faced by women in locked up homes.The COVID-19 pandemic is not just a health issue, but it has a massive social, economic and psychological impact with increased stress in families. The challenges of restoration will be huge. Rebuilding measures must be gender responsive. Women and children are the most vulnerable and have the least powers to come up with coping mechanism to fight back in stressful homes.

The epidemic of abuse must be stopped rightaway. Therefore , state COVID19 advisory must include measures to ensure safety and security of women and girls. In this way, we will be able to continue to combat violence on women and save many lives.

The post Lockdown: Locked with the Abuser appeared first on RAIOT.

Recently, three incidents have rocked Assam: a coal mining concession in a part of Dehing-Patkai Elephant Reserve, an oil blowout in Baghjaan, and the extra-judicial killing of an Assamese youth in Jorhat by security forces and police. While the state narrative regarding Jayanta Bora, the deceased youth, seems to connect him with the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) without any conclusive proof, multiple local media outlets have reported a different version of his death. This version states that Bora was seen taking photographs of trucks carrying illegal coal from the adjacent Naga hills, which might have had a role in his death. Meanwhile, different narratives have emerged from Baghjaan oil blowout as well. While one calls for a relook at the extractive economy and its power relations in Assam vis-a-vis the Indian state, another emphasize on reading it as an industrial disaster. In an interview with The Wire a few years ago economic commentator Swaminathan Ankalesaria Aiyar said, “Assamese chauvinism has long come in the way of oil exploration. The government must dismiss it for the narrow-minded silliness that it is,” suggesting how the Baghjaan oil blowout can be plotted in extractive relations of competing groups and nationalist aspirations. This essay seeks to reflect on the extractive economy, the historical and the contemporary, that has been at the centre of the development narrative in Assam.

1. Expectations of Modernity

A bridge on the Surma and making Assam a garden

In late 1884, two young men in their thirties, travelled from the small town of Sunamganj in the plains of Sylhet to Shillong, the seat of colonial administration of Assam province at that time tucked away in the undulating forest-clad Khasi Hills. One of them, Hason Raja had an interesting ancestry: until two generations ago, his ancestors were Hindu Zamindars in Sylhet who later embraced Islam. Raja, who lived from 1854 to 1924, not only saw the decadence of the Zamindari system he was part of, but also witnessed a sea-change in the economic and socio-political life of the Surma Valley. By the time he embarked on his journey to Shillong as a young man, the colonial discourse of development, of reclamation of resources, and of nature serving the nation in a bid to boost the civilizational zeal to improve community life was firmly rooted in the social discourses of the native elites of the resource-scarce Surma valley.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Raja told his companion Kadir Baksh Miyan as they trudged along uphill and approached the denser forests.1. Raja, Ganiur. Tothyokotha

In 1847, thirty-seven years before Raja’s visit to Shillong, Anandaram Dhekial Phukan, one of the first prominent native subjects of mid-nineteenth century British Assam who came to be known as “Assam Raja” when he travelled to Calcutta for attending the Hindu school with an entire ship to himself along with a retinue of Brahmin cooks and a Bengali clerk, wrote in an essay in Orunodoi how he was struck by the technocratic advancements in erstwhile England. “Assam will shed its jungle foliage to become a garden, edifices will rise in place of huts, small boats will give way to steamers, and the whole place will prosper… O merciful God of Creation..,”  wrote Phukan in the essay titled ‘Inglandar Bibaran’ imagining future Assam in the image of the England of his times and exhorting his countrymen to emulate its technocratic-utilitarian model of progress.2Sharma, Jayeeta. Empire’s Garden: Assam and the Making of India, Duke University Press. 2011.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

These narratives of physical (Raja’s) and mental (Dhekial Phukan’s) journeys—of “secular pilgrimage” of sorts in Benedict Anderson’s sense3Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso. London. 2010—tell us at least three things. First, the nineteenth century native elites in the two valleys were brimming with expectations of modernity 4Ferguson, James. Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt, University of California Press. 1999 Second, the native elites of Brahmaputra and Surma valleys had internalised the state’s developmental-modernist notion of progress that was at the heart of colonial modernity and the utilitarian and fiscal logic cardinal to such models of progress. On chancing upon the huge trees, Raja immediately recognized the possibility of using them as raw materials for constructing a bridge—a vital cog in the apparatus of development both in literal and metaphorical senses, and Dhekial Phukan was envisioning a future where jungle-infested Assam (habi) would be transformed into a neat garden (phulbari) bejewelled with all markers of modernity. Third, the disparity of resource in the two valleys: for Raja, the majestic trees of the Khasi hills, scarce in his hometown in the Surma plains, were a treasured resource whereas Dhekial Phukan saw the jungle foliage (habi) in the forest-abundant Brahmaputra valley as something devoid of any positive value. In other words, forests, at the time of Dhekial Phukan, were abundant in the Brahmaputra valley and value had not yet accrued to them.

For the colonial state and its local allies, this disparity of resources in comparison to population in the two valleys would remain the central logic behind a series of land development and reclamation schemes and transfer of population for a century to follow since Dhekial Phukan’s essay was published. But the story doesn’t end there. In the postcolonial, as we shall see, it would have many, multifarious social and political lives. It could also be a lens to understand the extraction economy that took wing in the later part of nineteenth century, when Raja’s time began and Dhekial Phukan’s came to end.

2. The Extraction Regime—Colonial

Creating (waste)lands, deleting subsistence land users

On 7 February, 1904, Andrew Henderson Leith Fraser, the lieutenant governor of Bengal, wrote,5Guha, Amalendu. Planter Raj to Swaraj: Freedom Struggle and Electoral Politics in Assam, 1826-1947, Answesha Publications. Guwahati. 2016

When Assam was annexed to the British Indian Empire through the treaty of Yandaboo in 1826, the colonial officers were struck to see massive tracts of land not being under settled cultivation. By the time of the division of Bengal and creation of Assam and East Bengal Province, the narrative of ‘wastelands’ lying vacant for the ‘enterprising immigrant peasant’ to colonise in the ‘land-abundant Brahmaputra valley’, home to the opium-eating ‘indolent’ ‘lazy native’,6Sharma, Jayeeta. Empire’s Garden: Assam and the Making of India, Duke University Press. 2011 was not only firmly rooted in the popular colonial discourses of the region, but necessary legal-administrative arrangements were already in place to facilitate mass migration of surplus-oriented farmers from East Bengal to Assam.

Francis Jenkins in 1836 had first provided a schema for defining and categorizing ‘wastelands’ lying vacant in Assam (the Brahmaputra valley) for colonization. Jenkin’s theory of the ‘wastelands’ had at least two strands of validation: first, the economic-political that drew heavily from John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government on private property, land, and colonisation; and second, the Judeo-Christian moral-scriptural injunctions such as ‘be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it’.7Whitehead, Judy. “John Locke and the Governance of India’s Landscape: The Category of Wasteland in Revenue and Forest Legislation.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 45, no. 50, 2010.

Wastelands, by the Government of Bengal rules of 1836, meant: forestlands, reed and grass wastes, and grasslands amongst cultivated lands.8Hilaly, Sarah. “Imagining Colonial Assam: The Figuring of ‘Wastelands’ in Its Making,” vol. 51, no. 3, 2016 That the term ‘wastelands’ indeed meant forests and land not under settled cultivation could be assumed from the fact that Atul Chandra Barua, Sub-Deputy Collector of Rangia in the 1950s, translated the word into Assamese as janghal (jungle) echoing similar connotations of Dhekial Phukan’s habi.9Atul Chandra Barua Rachanavali, vol. II. Barua Prakashan. Guwahati. 1996

In 1854 the wasteland rules were revised. The new rules effectively discriminated against the subsistence land users. Only an applicant with capital worth a Rs. 3 per acre was allowed to occupy land, with a minimum limit being fixed at 100 acres. So for reclaiming land one must be able to invest Rs. 300, a prohibitive sum for an average local of the Brahmaputra valley at that time as the valley was still largely non-monetised and un-integrated into the grid of the imperial-mercantile economy. The prospects of making the upper Brahmaputra valley the Empire’s tea production hub, meanwhile, had grown brighter. The new wasteland rules were aimed precisely at drawing European tea planters and speculators to Assam. These rules succeeded. By 1871, 7,00,000 acres of forestland was given in grants to tea gardens in the upper Brahmaputra valley.10Bhattacharyya, Gaurisankar. Bhumiputrar Marmabedana, Jyoti Prakashan. Guwahati. 2015

The colonial state acted primarily on a fiscal logic. While the lower Brahmaputra valley was opened for surplus-oriented immigrant peasants, land concessions were granted to tea planters in the upper part of the valley, which was found to be more profitable. As tea economy thrived and number of workers in the industry swelled, the lower valley districts would be turned into a rice basket by the skilful labour of enterprising East Bengali peasants being settled. This, by and large, was the general line of thinking among the colonial administrators.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Middle class Assamese intellectuals and local elites welcomed immigration along the lines of Dhekial Phukan’s dream, and opined that reclamation of these lands would boost Assam’s revenue. Writing in the 1880s, Balinarayan Bora, the publisher and de facto editor of Mou captured this mood. He appreciated the colonial government’s policies encouraging immigrants to settle in the valley in a bid to transform the assortment of jungles that Assam was (habi) into a modern, developed garden (phulbari).11. Bora, Balinarayan. “Rajasva Kamiti,” Mou. January Issue. 1889

In this colonial modernist meta-narrative of development, at the heart of which was a surplus-oriented economy, a specific category of people was rendered invisible: the subsistence land users who failed to enrol, or resisted integration, into the colonial mercantile economy. That is, when lands were arbitrarily brought under the category ‘wastelands’ and opened for peasantization, the previous land use history was glossed over. For instance, during six years preceding 1936, as many as 59 grazing, forest and village reserves had been opened in Nowgong under the colonization scheme for settling surplus-oriented migrant peasants.12Guha, Amalendu. Planter Raj to Swaraj: Freedom Struggle and Electoral Politics in Assam, 1826-1947, Answesha Publications. Guwahati. 2016 These lands were not ‘lands without people’. When these lands were declared ‘wastelands’ and opened for profit-oriented settled agriculture that would boost the colonial state’s revenue regime, the previous usufructuary history of these lands was effectively erased. Indeed, the process of creating ‘wastelands’ was also a process of deleting pam farmers, graziers, itinerant Nadial farmers, cattle-rearers who used to keep bathans/khutis on riparian tracts, and tribal subsistence hunters.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

That many tracts of lands marked as ‘wastelands’ had existing land use history could be gauged from that fact that when the Barpeta colonization was launched in 1930 Nepali graziers and local peasants registered strong protests. “The strongest opposition to further settlement of immigrant peasants came from Nepali Graziers and local peasants,” noted by W. A. Cosgrave, the Deputy Commissioner of Kamrup, in 1930, when implementing the ‘Colonization Scheme for Barpeta Sub-division in the Kamrup district’.13Saikia, Arupjyoti. Forests and Ecological History of Assam, 1826-2000, Oxford University Press. 2011 In short, the colonial state’s quest for fiscally meaningful subjects, the developmentalist plans ‘to improve the human condition’ and the extraction regime (the tea industry, the jute industry, the oil and coal industries) in the colony, involved a process of invisibilizing and deleting (indigenous) subsistence and non-capitalist land use history and modes of production.14Scott, James. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale University Press. 1999.

3. The Extraction Regime—Postcolonial

The oil-coal-tea-hydropower hegemony

Hegemony, as has been amply shown by Antonio Gramsci, is often in the realm of the invisible. Gramsci’s work primarily deals with cultural hegemony, which states that cultural norms are constructs subject to framing and restructuring by the elite. In Gramscian sense, hegemony can be roughly understood as a tool for ruling people through power and ideas framed, embraced, and restructured by elite classes. Drawing from Gramsci, John Gaventa in his Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley (1982), in the context of the early coal camps of West Virginia, frames a concept called ‘coal hegemony’ 15Gaventa, John. Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley, University of Illinois Press. 1982to understand life in these coalfaces. He explains ‘coal hegemony’ as a process in which coal mine owners, operators, investors, and their companies shaped and continue to shape life in and around coalfields by creating a dominant ideology that benefits the coal extraction economy; coalfield residents then internalize this ideology and treat it as their own set of ideas. We can extend Gaventa’s concept of ‘coal hegemony’ to ‘oil-coal-tea-hydropower hegemony’ in order to understand the ideologies of the extraction economy in Assam which involves the oil-coal-tea-hydropower assemblage. Like any other industry, the production of ideas and ideologies is an essential part and parcel of the extraction industry. One would not be hard-pressed to locate the dominant ideologies of the extractive regime within the modernist meta-narrative of development. Just a day after temporary suspension of all operations by the Northeastern Coalfields (NEC) of Coal India Limited (CIL) on 8 June 2020 after coming under a public outrage for the coal concessions in Saleki, many banners in Margherita read: “NEC CIL bandha hale Margheritar unnayan bandha haba” (If NEC CIL stops operation, the development of Margherita will stop). Similarly, the emerging discourses of support for mega hydropower projects in the region is virtually a mainstream development-speak. “Uttar-pubar unnayanar swarthat nadi-baandh xamarthan karu aahak” (Let’s support mega-hydropower projects for the sake of development of the Northeast) read many exhortations on social media, mostly in pro-government Facebook pages and Twitter handles.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

What I am tempted to call the oil-coal-tea-hydropower hegemony, these dominant ideologies, suitable to the extraction economy, are produced by the power elites from the region in collusion with the revenue-oriented, centrist state. One example will suffice to understand the colonial continuity of the extraction regime in the modus operandi of the postcolonial state. While almost all other subsidiaries of the CIL are transparent about their land acquision process, the NEC, according to their prospectus, follows a policy of off-the-court negotiations for acquiring lands from the Tangsa and other tribals, underneath whose jhum fields many of the coal deposits are located.16Coal India Limited (CIL) Prospectus The miniscule local tribal elites, who do not find themselves favourably placed in the power relations vis-à-vis CIL, play a significant role in such land transactions. Reminiscent of nineteenth century colonial ‘wasteland’ narratives, one of their project reports of the Lekhapani Open Cast Mine (proposed) says that the land acquired for that project is of no value as such as it was a “mere abandoned jhumland.” Here one could not miss the tone of condescension towards the subsistence land user—an echo of the colonial narrative of ‘wastelands’ of Assam.

4. The Assemblage of Environmentalism—Continuity of a Colonial Discourse

Government-speak, a maze of categories, and environmental NGOs

When the British Indian colonial state needed to divert forestland for revenue-oriented use in a bid to fillip the extraction economy, as a rule they first changed the category of the land in question. In 1915, George Hart, the Inspector General of Forest (1913-21), protested against the arbitrary practice of changing of, and assigning categories to, a particular piece of land from a revenue-oriented vantage point. Arguing against the practice of peasantization of Unclassed State Forests (USFs), Hart said the Assam Land and Revenue Regulation 1886 and the Assam Forest Manual should not run counter to each other17Saikia, Arupjyoti. Forests and Ecological History of Assam, 1826-2000, Oxford University Press. 2011

When coal mining concession was given in the Saleki Proposed Reserve Forest (PRF) in the Dehing-Patkai rainforest complex in April, 2020, sparking a digital protest, certain conservationists argued that the protesters are misinformed and that they are misleading the people as the government hasn’t permitted any mining activity inside Dehing Patkai Wildlife Sanctuary (WLS) and the site of mining concessions is in Saleki PRF, which comes under Dehing Patkai Elephant Reserve (ER). So, according to them, the confusion started with these three bureaucratese: ‘Wildlife Sanctuary’ (WLS), ‘Proposed Reserve Forest’ (PRF), and ‘Elephant Reserve’ (ER). While the first has legal standing i.e. it is a legally recognized protected area (PA), the second and the third don’t have any legal standing as such. Ecologically, the first two are generally contiguous, un-fragmented forests; and the third, an ‘Elephant Reserve’ is not one unbroken and contiguous forest. Rather it’s a vast elephant occurring landscape spanning up to hundreds/thousands sq. km, which might include protected and non-protected forests, agricultural fields as well as human habitats (given that the elephant is a long-ranging animal).

It is worth noting that this government-speak that creates a maze of categories, isn’t an indispensable part of forest governance per se. It emerged as a conscious strategy, as a tool of colonial governance that helped befuddling the colonial subject and enabled the state to extract forest/ natural resources in the garb of a ‘legal discourse.’

It has not changed in the postcolony.

Let’s look at how and why categories such as RF, PRF, and WLS—the protected areas—came into being in the first place and evolved, and what functions these categories serve. The forest department in Assam was formed in the 1870s and soon it began to take over the enormous forests that dot the landscape. Thus, what previously were public commons became the colonial state’s property. From a purely fiscal logic, the colonial forestry regime categorized forests under different labels: ‘classified’, ‘unclassified’, ‘reserved’—some open to diversion and some not. When tea and mineral resources were discovered in the upper Brahmaputra valley, the colonial state reasoned between the revenues to be earned from forests vs. that from tea or mineral extraction, and whichever seemed to fare better in terms of revenue was decided to opt for. Evidently, in most cases tea and mineral resources speculators won the race, and forests were diverted. The amount of forests thus diverted was so huge that the landscape of the upper Brahmaputra valley altered forever: ecosystems transformed into agroecosystems and teascapes.18Saikia, Arupjyoti. Forests and Ecological History of Assam, 1826-2000, Oxford University Press. 2011

In simpler terms, and from an inverse logic, when the colonial state declared a reserve forest it didn’t mean forest conservation as such. What it actually meant was this: in vast a forestscape, a small forest patch has been ‘reserved’ for future use and the rest opened for diversion for tea or coal or whatever it maybe. That’s why Dibrugarh and Tinsukia, the two most resources-rich districts of Assam, boast so many reserve forests. Whenever any plan of forestland diversion was up the sleeve, the state declared an RF, meaning opening more forest patches for diversion in the landscape in return for ‘conserving’ a certain relatively small forest.

There is, however, one more caveat. Once a forest was inscribed with one of the labels of protected forest, that forest was imagined and rendered as ‘inviolate’, ‘pristine’, ‘people-free’ and ‘disturbance-free’ in a strategy to shut the local people out and curtail their previously existing rights, including the most contentious of them: grazing rights. Berthold Von Ribbentrop, a forester in colonial Assam, had a particular disdain for goats and cattle which for him was the “universal destroyer” of forests. It is, therefore, not surprising that most of the early forest cases in Assam were about grazing cattle inside protected forests19Saikia, Arupjyoti. Forests and Ecological History of Assam, 1826-2000, Oxford University Press. 2011

That these policies have been continued in the postcolony is exemplified in the process of facilitating coal extraction in the Dehing-Patkai forestscape. The Dehing-Patkai coal mining controversy also helps us understand how the assemblage of environmentalism works as a mercenary of the postcolonial extraction regime.

How are (certain) actors in the ‘assemblage of environmentalism’ co-opted in this strategy/process?

Conservationist Anwaruddin Choudhury, who played a critical role in notifying the Dehing Patkai WLS, was recently seen lamenting the fact that out of 320 sq. km. forests only 111 sq. km. could be declared a WLS and the rest of the forests were to be gradually absorbed, which hasn’t happened anyway. Why it hasn’t happened we can only speculate. One reason could be: when coal was nationalized in 1973, the state knew where exactly the coal deposits are located and the forests with coal deposits underneath were taken off the table when declaring the Dehing Patkai WLS. All such forests were studiously left out as non-protected areas, so that any future legal impasse doesn’t occur. Meenaxi Barkataki-Ruscheweyh in her Dancing to the State: Ethnic Compulsions of the Tangsa in Assam (2017)20Barkataki-Ruscheweyh, Meenaxi. Dancing to the State: Ethnic Compulsions of the Tangsa in Assam, Oxford University Press. 2017presents evidence suggesting that the Tirap coal area, also called Rangpang, was transferred from the erstwhile Tirap Frontier Tract to the plains district jurisdiction with a motive to facilitate unhindered future coal exploration which would have been difficult had it remained in a tribal Sixth Scheduled area. Understandably, the ‘conservation vs development’ choice is a tough and tricky slippery slope for a developing country like India.

Be that as it may, in my understanding, declaring Dehing Patkai WLS served two things at least. First, it assuaged the psyche of the liberal middle-class environmentalists, wildlife enthusiasts, and others of that ilk. One would be tempted to recall the ‘eco-heroism’ narrative of Nature’s Beckon in getting WLS status for a part of forests (111 sq. km.) in the Dehing Patkai forestscape and the jubilation thereof in various discursive sites. Second, and most important, it smoothened for the state the way to open the vast biodiversity-rich non-protected forests in the Dehing-Patkai landscape for resource extraction and other concessions on the logic that ‘Dehing Patkai WLS has already been conserved.’ Choudhury, who laments the inability to conserve the non-protected forests of the Dehing-Patkai landscape, was present as a representative of The Rhino Foundation for Nature in NE-India, a conservation non-profit, and member of the State Board for Wildlife (SBWL) in its 9th meeting on 20/09/2016 which “recommended the project [the Tikak open cast mining project at Saleki PRF that has stirred the current NEC CIL controversy] subject to implementation of a set of mitigation measures.” The minutes of the meeting do not show any note of dissent from Choudhury. It needs no reiteration that Saleki PRF is evidently one of those forests that Choudhury publicly lamented couldn’t be protected in the Dehing-Patkai landscape.

Similarly, when Nature’s Beckon and its founder-chief Soumyadeep Datta said that no permission has been given to mine in a protected area—the Dehing Patkai Wildlife Sanctuary—and that the government hasn’t flouted any law/norm, they weren’t wrong. But it belied more than what it laid bare.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Moreover, when conservationists and environmentalists and others in the assemblage of environmentalism speak and imagine the forest as a ‘pristine’, ‘inviolate’ space, they deny the history of forest (resources) use by the people living in and around the forest. They sound no less than Berthold Von Ribbentrop, the colonial forester, in doing so. This also brings us to the root of why the assemblage of environmentalism is so keen to ‘depoliticize’ their works and to portray themselves as a cog in an ‘anti-politics machine’ of conservation/environmental protection.21Ferguson, James. Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho, University of Minnesota Press. 1994

5. Beyond the extraction regime

Questioning (under)development first

Anthropologist James Ferguson in his book Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (1994) has critically looked at the development discourses forged and promoted by the international development agencies, NGOs, and INGOs in Lesotho, a small land-locked country surrounded in all sides by South Africa. One of the key findings of Ferguson’s research in Lesotho was how the country was portrayed in the various discursive sites of development as a ‘pastoral’, ‘traditional’ space removed from the modern world (and hence non-modern; and a relic of the past in the spatiotemporal sense)—all the qualifiers of underdevelopment—whereas in reality the country was far from being so as Ferguson found in his ethnographic study. The takeaway here is that, in the mainstream development discourses a space is first discursively rendered underdeveloped which would then be shown as a space requiring developmental intervention. If we are to see things beyond the extraction regime, which is at heart of the meta-narrative of development in Assam and which, to a large extent, follows a colonial model in its function and in its imagination vis-à-vis Assam (and the Northeast), we must start with unpacking the discourses of (under)development first. Only then can we hope to leave behind the legacy of Dhekial Phukan’s mid-nineteenth century dream of colonial modernity and the kind of development that was at the heart of it.

The post [LONGREAD] Expectations of Modernity : Extractive Economy of Assam appeared first on RAIOT.

Recently I got an opportunity to interact with an official of National Highway Authority (NHAI) in a television debate on an Assamese news channel. In that debate broadcast from Guwahati, Mr. Alok Kumar, Regional Officer, North East Zone, NHAI, while justifying the opening of new toll gates in the state of Assam, admitted that the Indian government has no money to construct new roads and maintain those periodically. Therefore imitating the models of some developed countries the government of India is now trying to create a fund to construct and maintain the highways and therefore toll gates have been installed in every corner of this country. As a part of this initiative, during the Corona pandemic related lockdown the Assam state government and National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) have opened up a new tollgate at Nazirakhat near Sonapur, a decision that attracted vehement opposition from both the commuters as well as the local residents. With the opening of the Nazirakhat toll plaza, there will be two such gates (another one is at Raha) within 100km of each other and people heading from Guwahati towards Nagaon or vice-versa will have to pay double toll tax in their respective single journey. Another toll gate construction started Deudaur near Changsari, some 35 kms away from Guwahati, after the central government announced lockdown from 24 March. The local residents while protesting the opening of the new Nazirakhat toll gate have revealed that the concerned authorities have introduced this new gate without any notice and it would definitely push the people and commuters to face another economic hardship whose lives are already being severely affected due to the lockdown. Assam currently has the following functional tollgates —– Nazirakhat (Kamrup) and Raha (Nagaon) on NH 37, Patgaon (Kokrajhar), Dahalpara (Bongaigaon) and Madanpur (Kamrup) on NH 31 and Mikirati Hawgaon (Hojai) on NH 36 and Manderdisa (Dima Hasao). The Mr. Alok Kumar of NHAI earlier stated during the TV debate that the total revenue collection from all these toll plazas is likely to be around Rs 60 lakh per day.

Now the question is why should people pay toll tax for using the highways , why are citizens compelled to buy every service that are deemed to be provided by a state that is established on the principle of welfare economy and why do people have to face overburdened tax impositions on almost all utilities? Nitin Gadkari, the Minister of Road Transport and Highways, has often stressed that government’s resources is limited and hence toll revenue is essential. The minister told the Lok Sabha in July 2019 during a discussion that “toll collection cannot be done away with, ever. The government doesn’t have money. If you want good services, you have to pay. The toll system is here to stay.” Whenever there is any opposition to the toll system the easiest available response of the Indian State and ‘experts’ aligned to the state has been that the state treasury is shrinking because of the unlimited welfare measures adopted right from its formation and that the state cannot not sustain such measures in a competitive and liberal economy. Therefore like the governments of the developed capitalist world, to grow and sustain, every government has to adopt market oriented policies in every sphere where people get a service only after paying the stipulated price or tax. But, is this statement true and reliable? Does every developed country impose tax or price for every service that are provided by the state? Here, in the context of these claims, let us look at the examples of toll tax free road system of the United Kingdom and Germany.

In the United Kingdom ‘road tax’ doesn’t actually exist. It was abolished in 1937, along with the ‘road fund licence’. The existing car tax is imposed on tailpipe CO2 emissions above 100gm per km.This tax cannot be considered as a tax or toll for using the roads. Similarly, proceeds from Vehicle Excise Duty – a tax on vehicles, has never been considered in UK as a payment for use of roads. Such tax goes into the Consolidated Fund – the coffers of the Treasury, and all roads of the country are developed and maintained from the money of this treasury. The treasury is consisted of the contribution of those who pay income tax, council tax and VAT. Businesses which pay business taxes also contribute into the national coffers. Therefore this consolidated fund, the treasury’s pot of cash is what has been used to pay for everything in United Kingdom.

Germany also does not have a dedicated fund for building and maintaining highways.  The annual federal budget incorporates all road construction projects and the country has listed certain revenues that have been used for highway construction and maintenance.The most important of the fixed revenues is the toll imposed upon freight traffic on federal highways. Though there has been an intense debate in Germany on the matter of introducing tolls for passenger cars on federal highways, still the country has not contemplated alternative means of highway funding, such as a vehicle-miles-travelled (VMT) tax. Moreover the German Government is thinking to introduce a toll scheme only on passenger cars registered in other countries, based on the theory that Germans already pay enough for automobile usage through the taxes on motor vehicles and gasoline.

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the first phase of national lockdown in the evening of 24 March, immediately after that the Road Transport and Highways Minister had asked NHAI to suspend toll on all National Highways to ease transportation of essential goods and supplies. Apart from closing the toll gates the Union Minister Nitin Gadkari also asked NHAI Chairman and toll operators across National Highways to provide food, water and other necessary support to migrant workers who are facing severe hardship while being stranded at various parts of the country on account of a nationwide lockdown in the wake of corona virus pandemic. It is a pertinent question to ask that if the Central Government had decided in the very beginning of the first phase of the national lockdown to shut down all the toll gates in this country for reducing inconvenience of the people, how could the same government or the state governments re-open or construct new toll gates when the lock down is still in operation?

It is also worth mentioning that Nitin Gadkari’s oft repeated assertion – “… if you want good road, you have to pay” runs contrary to a 2018 judgement by Bombay High Court. A division bench of the Bombay High Court while hearing a PIL observed that properly maintained roads is a part of fundamental rights guaranteed by Article 21 of the Indian Constitution of India. The Division Bench Observed-“Right to have roads in reasonable condition is a part of the fundamental right guaranteed under Article 21 (Right to Life) of the Constitution of India. Existence of such fundamental right creates corresponding obligation in all the authorities … All steps should be taken to see that the citizens are not deprived of their rights.”

So if our roads have been constructed by using money from the government treasury and the state is obliged to provide good roads to its citizen as it’s fundamental right, then how is it that the state machinery imposes levy or tax from the citizen for using those very roads ?

Also the malicious act of re-opening and construction toll gates while a national lockdown in times of a global pandemic is in progress, when people cannot voice their disagreements or lodge their protest, is a backdoor fascist attack on the very idea of democracy and citizenry. It is a clear signal that the Indian state will, by hook or crook, relegate it’s citizenry to the status of a consumer bereft of any quality service and rights that is enshrined in the constitution.

The post Should We Pay Toll Tax? appeared first on RAIOT.

চʼতৰ বিহুত বৰদৈচিলা মাকৰ ঘৰলৈ যায়/Sotor bihut Bordoisila maakor gharaloi jaai
গছ গছনি ঘৰ দোৱাৰ নিয়ে উৰোৱাই।/Gos Gasani Ghar duwar niye uruwaai.
Every Bohag Bihu, Bordoisila sets out for her maternal home 
Uprooting trees and destroying houses.

As Baghjan burns I find myself (almost like everyone of us) entangled in heap of anxieties that comes from my association and experience with societies and institutions across the region. As Baghjan is not a case in isolation I find myself compelled to inform what cause my anxiousness. I should add, reliving and writing the self is not always a happy exercise even when one knows one is politically and morally obliged to do so. Yet, I write because much about Baghjan will be determined by what we choose to see in the sufferings and loss. What we see determines how we respond, how we care and for how long. It will decide what we will fight for in the various phases of its healing/curing. It will tell us when we will choose to withdraw our love and responsibilities. It therefore, calls for an effort to know what people will need in the course of time. It will require active processes of listening, observation and engagement in oder to identify what is being grieved over as Baghjan mourns. What more than numbers (of species of flora and fauna, of households and people) will we try to see, recognise, acknowledge when we talk of the place and its people. Maguribeel is indeed more than a tourist spot offering a decent means of livelihood to its boatmen, fishermen and others. Generations of people lived, entered into relations, left the place, and many perhaps returned in the spirit of a Bordoisila looking for ties, love, livelihood. A thought lingers; how many Bordoisilas- the spirit, the joy and the expectations that the idea of Bordoisila entails- lay dead today in the fire and how many does it give birth to.

Indeed, everyone is a Bordoisila when one rushes for the place she thinks she belong. But every Bordoisila has her own season to hurry in the speed and spirit of a tempest in order to live and relive this sense of belongingness. A few years ago, I met a cousin sister in law who knowing that I had spent the previous nights in a village by the bank of the Dighalee exclaimed explaining how she made it a point to visit her natal home every year when people fished Dighalee. It was undoubltedly her season to be the Bordoisila. There would be many Bordoisilas- young and old. People from distant villages gathered at around that particular time of the year. It wasn’t just fishing happening there! The spark in her eyes and the joy in her being as she narrated how people gathered, fished and feasted made clear the sense of identity, unity and membership Dighalee ensured for the people living along the long Dighalee. However, it was not the first time I witnessed people sinking into the sea of memories as they narrated their times with their Dighalee- the abundance, the variety, size of the Borali, friend, family, guests, exchanges, quarrels and the list goes. But these are all a matter of the past now. Dighalee lives no more requiring people to rethink on a good time of visit, sources of happy exchanges. My sister in law seemed confused on what this proper time could actually be for her to rush like a tempest. Home going is no longer like before an individual isolated affair

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Huge deposit of sand year after year in the late 90s took life out of Dighalee. Although people narrated endlessly their joyous times, the spontaneity of the flow of stories and emotions is disrupted at once whenever I tried asking how Dighalee came about to its present form. People’s expression of pain however, has countered my process of knowing more of their experiences of Dighalee. Or perhaps it has more to do with me. If I was a different person with different experiences knowing erosion and rivers only through books and class rooms gathering information would had been an easier task, I believe. As someone growing up by a river in a river island witnessing paddy fields turned barren within hours, perhaps I over read their anxieties in recollecting and narrating their experiences. More likely that I begin to relive my own trauma. Perhaps I fear that I will end up creating the same the stories about such times that frustrates me. Labour and loss only of a certain kind recorded! Almost always; in media and academia alike. Why? Efforts made only by the government highlighted. In the age of the social media a few non-governmental organisations have managed to draw some attention.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

What goes missing from the reports and researches? This takes me back to the day that night in August 1998. People in the entire locality run looking for used cement bags wherever constructions were going on. We counted this many from Girls High School, that many from our school until we got the news that there aren’t any more. Perhaps not a single in the island as all were used to prevent a possible breach of some road or an embankment. But we feared, if it breaks in Kumarbari where extensive erosion was taking place entire Jengraimukh could possibly be swiped out of the map. That night around 2 am the road broke a few kilo meters ahead. We left home in the darkness of the night and for the next one month we found ourselves occupied with too many things. Something happened before 2 am when the entire villagers were worrying about the unavailability of sacks- women handed out their new hand woven mekhelas from their peras (wooden box). I remember my mother mentioning this to me once. I lived another 9 more years there never getting to hear of this contribution for once in any meeting or in any casual conversation. It was probably too insignificant to be discussed and acknowledged in public and find representation in data we come up with in our researches. ‘Accidental activism’ not deliberate and consciously done, this is how we tend to deny dignity of these efforts. Even if they were counted only the monetary value would had been. Who wove it for which occasion, where did the money for the thread come from, for how long did someone wait before actually having woven one, the colour and the design. What negotiations and compromises were made if one didn’t have a loom of ones own. Forms of labour invested in each one of these exercises goes unseen, unfelt, unrecognised. Reminds me of a friend (writing activates memory, I see!) who once did a small cultivation of garlic selling which she planned to buy thread for her most desired and awaited pair of sador mekhela. Can’t these forms of labour be recorded or we choose not to. What stops us from recording (read as valuing) them? Do they mean nothing when placed aside monetary value? How are meanings given to these various forms of labour and how do we then engage ourselves in this meaning giving exercises is what I want to ask.

Similar are the accounts of loss- number of houses, number of walls, number of tin sheets meant for roofing, number of pigs, cows and the list goes (apart from personal experiences my spontaneity here comes also form the many research methodology lectures and workshops that we often get to attend). I lost a bundle of letters from my grandfather and my brothers. A loss I regret. But indeed not countable or worth counting. What about the ones that are counted, what of it is recorded, valued? My friend lost her father during flood. A few months later, in between classes she was summoned for home. She was my benchmate for the month. She retuned an hour or so later. She told me the family had shifted her father’s graveyard. She had to be there for some ritual. Not a word was spoken about it. With no proper place for burial during flood he was buried in the backyard of a school. Such are desires and helplessness. Such are the ways of coping. How do we address these mechanisms of recovering? What does it say about our inadequacies in telling, listening and recording loss?

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Today as Baghjan burns, I am told people there once longed and wished that their land turn oil rich. A piece of land to OIL ensures them a future. It would bring them and their family closer to what we call development. Many a class hierarchies of the everyday they will be able to overcome with this. Their expectations are understood. It is us not them who create these expectations for them. A lot of our/your belittling looks, gestures, taunts, rejections. Who suffers during a crisis like this? What are the local power dynamics that distributes loss and suffering unevenly in Baghjan as an oil well burns swallowing agricultural land, wetlands and rivers in and around the area. Takes me back to my childhood again. Once in a while we did get to hear of roads deliberately cut to deter a possible breach around some wealthy or well to do person’s house or cultivable land. Rumours they are/were I want to believe but speaks sufficiently of hierarchies and vulnerabilities, of fears and uncertainties, of power and loss.

Everyone suffers but suffers unevenly! Differently.

These unevenness and differences in the distribution of suffering needs to be acknowleged at every stage our enagement; now as we grive along with Baghjan and later when we will decide to withdrawing believing all loss has been repaired.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

The post Love, Labour and Loss in Baghjan appeared first on RAIOT.

“As a consequence, the ongoing operations had to be immediately suspended and the well started releasing natural gas in an uncontrolled manner.” (27/05/2020)

This is from an official press release from OIL right after the leakage started on the 27^th of May, 2020. There is no mention that along with “natural gas” there was a release of natural-gas condensate, a harmful by-product of natural hydrocarbon.

On 27^th of May 2020 gas and condensate started to leak from a well of the Baghjan oil field, located in the Tinsukia district of Assam, India. This oil field lies dangerously close to the ecologically-sensitive Dibru-Saikhowa National Park and the Maguri-Motapung wetland. The leakage went on for two weeks and on the fourteenth day (9^th of June, 2020) it caught fire. The fire is still burning, gulping down houses and vast patches of the Dibru-Saikhowa National Park. Yet again, we are forced to revaluate functioning of the energy sector.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

Aerial view of the Maguri / Baghjan Oil Blowout. It shows the destruction of the nature . #savemaguribeel #istandwithmaguribeel #savemaguri #habitatloss #endangeredspecies #birds #birdindanger #indianwildlife #wildlifeindia #dibrusaikhuanationalpark #oil #oilblowout #oilblowoutbaghjaan

A post shared by SACHIN BHARALI PHOTOGRAPHY Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. (@sachin_bharali) on Jun 11, 2020 at 8:11am PDT

Patches of Dibru-Saikhowa burnt from the blowout

Reading in between the lines of the five official press release, this essay will examine the secrecy behaviour of the Oil India Limited (OIL) in light of the Baghjan case. For the company, it appears that this disaster was less out about the event of blowout itself than how to keep under covers the private reaches of their corporate behaviour.

Secrecy behaviours are far more common around accidents. These behaviours are intentional and strategic. The main idea is to manage the impression made of others by limiting unwanted scrutiny of the “back stage”. Secrets are maintained regarding the exact reason of the leak to maintain the sanctity of objective and scientists at stake. Fear of stigma serves as the motivation of maintaining the “front” and “back” stages of the event, now commonly done by the “public relations team” or the “official spokesperson” through a series of press releases. These custodial documents are in charge of presenting the ‘partial truths’ in a calibrated way, often under the pretext of technical jargon.

Secrecy – Before the blowout

A closer look into their EIA (Environment Impact Assessment) report shows that there was a minimal push to resolve any potential blowouts before giving the clearance, despite this being a high pressure well. Section 7.5.3. notes:

“An appropriate Emergency Response Plan be finalized and implemented by OIL.”

This uncertainty could be anything. Propitiatory techniques that the company may not want to disclose. Or, simply reflecting gaps in the preparedness of the company to mitigate disasters. The EIA report shows a certain casualness – ‘whatever be it we will manage the situation’. This represents that even the regulatory stakeholders responsible for preparing the EIA report did not feel the necessity of putting in place the public and environmental safety at first. “High risk” scenarios are somehow confused with “impossible”, despite a case of such being registered with the company not far from now – 2005 Dikhom fire incident. No wonder an onlooker remarked “Civil engineers of this company receive paychecks for doing nothing”. The Baghjan event reveals this faith that when a high-risk worst-case scenario becomes reality, and no concrete mitigation plans seems to be in place. This perhaps could happen due to the surreptitious replacement of the New Exploration Licensing Policy (NELP) with the Hydrocarbon Exploration and Licensing Policy (HELP), along with the Open Acreage Licensing Policy (OALP) that eased much of the rules for allocation and access of natural resources. A detailed overview of the current political economy of the oil industry – “oil complex” – has already been outlined here.

Secrecy – during the blowout

On the morning of 9^th of June, the well no. 5 of the Baghjan oil field burst into fire. Before that, the well was continuously leaking gas and condensate since the morning of 27^th of May. The company had been using “water umbrella” technique since the leakage, but simultaneously maintaining that fire was inevitable. The fire took along two lives of firefighters from the company, injured a few, took home of hundreds, and marooned the ecosystem. The authorities maintained Covid-19 situation for their unsatisfactory efforts.

What we see unfolding through their official press releases is an attempt to play down the event and withheld key information. The public has been told that situations like these are common in the energy sector, and it is getting under control. They are deflecting from the main concern “How did initial the leak happen?”. From the very first press release on this event, it is evident that OIL does not want anyone to focus on this “how” question, instead of saying “suddenly became active”. It was presented as a routine natural event that had been unleashed with no immediate remedy. There was also an attempt to shift the blame to the third party despite themselves agreeing that the third party was under the supervision of OIL.

“OIL has already given show cause to M/s John Energy Pvt Limited and actions will also be initiated on employees of OIL if there is any prima facie evidence of human error for which a five-member inquiry committee has been formed” – 1/06/2020

Meanwhile, on the 11^th of June, two officials from OIL had been found guilty and suspended.

“The workover operations were being carried out by Chartered Hire Rig owned by M/s John Energy under the supervision of OIL”. – 27/05/2020

A careful reading of this press releases shows that there have been procedural faults. As per OIL’s own EIA (Environment Impact Assessment) report of Mechaki Area (covering Mechaki, Mechaki Extension, Baghjan and Tinsukia Extension) in high pressure well, like this one, BOP should be installed in due process of well excavation as a secondary barrier, and not later. But this case points a procedural lapse as it says that only after the gas leak the BOP was being installed as a mitigation measure.

“Taking all adequate safety measures, install BOP (Blow out Preventer)” (27/05/2020)

Existing distortion, secrets, and blame games that is usual in the “oil complex” has been laid bare by this Baghjan blowout.

Secrecy – after the blowout

As the disaster unfolded, OIL took urgent steps to maintain secrecy to make it as acceptable and normal as possible.

OIL in its 4^th of June, 2020 press release mentioned that it had approached CSIR – National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI), Nagpur and Wild Life Institute of India, Dehradun for conducting detailed impact assessment studies. But again on 9^th of June, 2020 they have released a press report which mentioned: “A team from Assam Agricultural University, Jorhat reached Duliajan for an impact assessment on vegetation”. It remains a puzzle as to why the institute-in-charge was changed and the impact assessment was limited to only vegetation, and not for the fauna and humans as well.

OIL’s press releases mark this incident as unfortunate but hardly a catastrophic situation. When in reality, Table 7.2. of their EIA report defines this as a catastrophe.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

There is a systemic underestimation continued in parallel to the images/videos in all media of the raging fire gulping down houses and patches of the national park.

An oil well explosion in Assam has been polluting the land and killing wildlife.

Now the well is ablaze. @chandranisinha1 reports

Full story: https://t.co/l6KhCKYf9D pic.twitter.com/h1rZsez1J9

— The Third Pole (@third_pole) June 11, 2020

Post-Blowout: Condensate slicked Maguri-Motapung

Post- Blowout: Condensate slicked wetland

Then, there was the complete U-turn when OIL deleted the 9^th of June press because they had mentioned “Ignite Well” option in that published a fresh one where the “Ignite Well” option as a possible way to tame the blowout was omitted. Here, it is already documented that OIL staff were already engaged in ‘clearing operation’ suspiciously near the blowout site prior to the ignition, when OIL maintained elsewhere that any task undertaken around the blowout site is risky given lack of open space. This leaves many unanswered queries, one pointing to if OIL had allegedly already opted for the “Ignite well” option while putting up the “front stage” of “Capping Stack Guide Rail” mechanism.

“While chalking out plans with ALERT team in the morning five options were presented by ALERT team which included “Capping Stack Guide Rail” Mechanism and “Ignite Well” options. ONGC and OIL teams had made considerable progress with the “Capping Stack Guide Rail” mechanism and it was decided to proceed with same.” (09/06/2020– original press release)

“While chalking out the plans with ALERT team in the morning, they presented alternate options which also included “Capping Stack Guide Rail” Mechanism. ONGC and OIL teams had made considerable progress with the “Capping Stack Guide Rail” mechanism and it was decided to proceed with same” (09/06/202 –revised press release)

As more press releases emerge, it became evident that OIL was underestimating the damage.

“Around Six Hundred & Fifty (650) families (2500 persons) have been evacuated from the nearby affected areas and are camped in three relief camps set up at (i) Baghjan Dighulturrang M.E School. (ii) St. Joseph School – Baghjan Tea Estate and (iii) Gateline LP School, Dighultarrang. All necessary supports for stay, food (including baby food), water, toilets, electricity and medical have been provided at the relief camps with support from District Administration and local organizations. A team of officials from OIL is at site to look after the relief camps. Ambulance with Para-Medical staffs are kept as standby. Alternate relief camp at Bandarkhati High School, Bandarkhata Village has been kept ready as standby relief camp to accommodate more people, if required.” (01/05/2020)

While speaking to Jolly Saikia of NEADS (North-East Affected area Development Society) who had visited the four relief camps for assessment, the following came to light. The camp lacked gendered segregation causing severe distress and lack of privacy. There was no provision for physical distancing, masks or hand sanitiser keeping in mind the COVID-19 situation, and while there was no food shortage cooking and consumption was taking place in an unhygienic manner near the toilets. To top are the visuals in the local media we saw on the day of the blowout of people running out of their houses with bare essentials. These people already knew that if a fire breaks it will touch their radius. So the question arises: What was the radius used to select families for evacuation? There is no mention of exact radius in any of the press releases. This was when OIL was saying the safety of the ecosystem was their top priority.

Food being prepared in one of the relief camps near the toilet. Source: Jolly Saikia, NEADS

Even to this date OIL’s effort to contain or even reduce the effects of the blowout seems insincere. Expert onlookers feel the same. Several on ground reports showed that locals do not feel OIL had done enough. Everyone expressed puzzlement on why thirteen days elapsed with the leakage and nothing was done to prevent the fire. The meta-message one gets from this public outcry was that OIL had failed to manage the risks. Even if they are frantically trying to put the opposite picture, with the situation just slipping out of their hands. They released the following few hours after the fire:

“..it is now a safe environment for working and are confident that the situation can be controlled..” (09/06/2020).

It was much later in the 4th of June press release presence of natural-gas condensate gets mentioned in the Press release for the first time. The effects of this release were yet to be ascertained, although the possibility is that it is harmful to the ecosystem due to its chemical composition. There are certain reports of nausea amongst the locals but remains absent in the press releases of the company.

End thoughts

In 2005 when the Dikom fire happened there were very few online portals. Television news ran a passive story. But now in the time of online portals and social media where people can engage in interpretations and commentaries, it might not be easy for OIL to keep the secrets for long. This is not to say that secrets are overwhelmingly negative. Instead, as sociologist George Simmel would argue secrets has a generative potential for constituting self, society and culture. But importantly, when institutional secrets overlook space and time, it runs the risk of jeopardising knowledge with loss and hauteur. But those working in the energy sector opine the opposite. They still believe that, in this era of post-extractivism, it will take years of litigation, like that of Chernobyl, BP Oil Spill or Exxon Valdez to get an answer to the simple yet most pressing question of “How did the leakage happen?”

Baghjan burning

The post Reading the press releases by OIL about the Baghjan blowout, Assam, India appeared first on RAIOT.

What does it take to build a nation? Hiren Gohain and Sanjib Baruah once had a prolonged debate on the stakes of nationalism during the Assam Movement in the 1980s. Professor Gohain, broadly skeptical of the Assam Movement, argued that it was a bourgeois reaction to the consolidation of communist organizing in the region. Professor Baruah, more sympathetic, suggested that it was a strategic mobilization responding to India’s continued treatment of Assam as a colony. Revisiting that debate, one is struck less by their disagreements— which were many and profound—but by the impossibility of that argument today. This is partly because of the intervening forty years, of course, especially the collapse of the organized Left, the rise (and betrayal) of ULFA, and the saffronization of nationalism, such that even imagining it could be an emancipatory vision seems ludicrous these days. It is also because, as both Professors Gohain and Baruah emphasize in their recent books, the rest of the country never grasped the sheer novelty of the Assam Movement. Most of us today remember the Assam Movement only insofar as it led to the Assam Accord, which we in turn blame for the NRC and the CAA. Read together, Professors Gohain and Baruah offer us an important corrective to that narrow and self-serving narrative, even as they highlight different aspects of the complex history and consequences of that moment in Indian history.

Professor Baruah’s new book, In the Name of the Nation, is (in my reading) the final book of a trilogy that began with India Against Itself. In that book, he discusses extensively the trajectory of the Assam Movement, starting with colonial mapping and settlement policies and concluding with the rise of SULFA, the demand for Bodoland, and the fracture of what he calls (in that work) Assamese sub-nationalism. His next book, Durable Disorder, expanded the discussion to contemporary northeastern India more broadly. It ends with a justly famous (and prescient) call for layered sovereignty and a political order that recognizes rights on the basis of both residence and origin— a new “grammar of citizenship” that undoes the imperial association between territoriality and indigeneity.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

In the Name of the Nation is Professor Baruah’s most wide-ranging and erudite book yet, offering a sweeping denunciation of both “development” and “border security” as oppressive frameworks through which to view the region. The conceptual core of the book, however, remains his unflinching interrogation into the question of homelands: can we theorize a politics of indigeneity in places where the claim to aboriginality is impossible to establish? How do nations, those unwieldy amalgamations of people and places, get built and dismantled? How was it that, for a few decades in the middle of the 20^th century, someone could be Assamese and Ahom, Assamese and Bodo, Assamese and Miya? Can we recapture that lost imagination? Should we? Can a political concept as tarnished as self-determination achieve anything besides further fragmentation?

Assam, Professor Baruah reminds us, is as complex a construction as India itself. It can be useful to think of nations as forms of political gravity, drawing communities together into a mutual frame of reference. At its height, the Assam Movement incorporated caste-Hindus, Assamese Muslims, Plains Tribes, Hill Tribes, (some) Tea Tribes, and Miya Muslims. The movement identified, rightly or wrongly, a shared set of grievances (dispossession) and isolated certain causes for it (migration) around which an agitation was mounted. Much of the debate between Professors Baruah and Gohain back then was about the validity of this causal reasoning, the stratification within the movement, and about the nature of the violence the movement engendered. They certainly agree, however, about the fact of dispossession— and that the Assam Accord has been unsuccessful at addressing it. In the decades since, the coalition underpinning Assamese nationalism has fallen apart, resulting in considerable bloodshed as well as some remarkable Constitutional innovations, such as the extension of the Sixth Schedule to the Bodos, a plains tribe (bypassing the ethnographic logic of the schedule itself, but that is another essay.) In any case, the center did not hold, and we now live in the shadow of that fallen hegemony. Yet, as we all know, the center never holds; what is interesting, rather, is the scatter pattern it leaves in its wake— and it is here that Professor Gohain has such rich insights to offer us.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Struggling in a Time Warp is an anthology of Professor Gohain’s essays across the last three decades. It is an eclectic and fascinating glimpse into a powerfully curious mind, including essays on matters as diverse as the Bhakti movement, Rabindranath Tagore, and Marxist theory. Most of the book, however, is proof of Professor Gohain’s sustained and granular engagement with Assamese history, especially after 1930. He is thus deeply attuned to the fault lines of Assamese nationalism: why it was, for instance, that it bolstered the fortunes of certain communities (such as Assamese Hindus), left others unsatisfied (such as Bodos) and sacrificed some (such as Miyas). “The history of the Assamese middle class” he writes in one essay “is one of tragic deformation under imperialist rule.” In this way it remains, as he reiterates in several essays, a mirror to the Indian nationalism which it both challenges and incorporates— and it is just as plagued by sanguinary anxieties about purity and unity.Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

The broad contours of Professor Gohain’s argument resonate with the famous Naxal thesis that India is a “prison-house of nationalities,” though the conclusions he draws from that analysis are very different from the armed insurrection advocated by earlier generations of radical thinkers. Tempered by decades of insurgency, his essays urge us, rather, to imagine new forms of solidarity that are less hampered by the violent exclusions of nationalisms. The depredations of global capital, he reminds us, are neither distributed nor contained by nation-states— a fact that the pandemic has made even more evident— and neither should we be. The way forward demands a return to our shared past, so that we may write fresh histories that include people formerly relegated to the footnotes.

In the introduction to Time Warp, Professor Gohain describes the formation of the Plains Tribal League in late colonial India and the pivotal role it played in Assamese politics during the turbulent decade before Partition. First allied with the Muslim League, which formed the provincial government in 1937, the Tribal League shifted its allegiance to the Indian National Congress after the Cabinet Mission Plan in 1946, thereby making the INC the dominant actor in local politics. Without this support, northeastern India might well be a part of Bangladesh today, or even, as the British once intended, remained a crown colony. Yet this crucial political intervention was quickly forgotten, as racist stereotypes about the “primitive” tribes of Assam were restored in the imagination of the new nation— a forgetting that, unfortunately, the Assam Movement did little to remedy.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Nations are betrayed even as they are imagined, and Professor Gohain documents the manner in which the Assam Movement was steadily co-opted from the moment of its inception: by electoral politics, class opportunism, and the central government. He teaches us, further, that such patterns are neither random nor inevitable: history sediments, but it does not repeat. Nations might be forged by incorporating existing communities with distinctive networks of association and exchange, but no nation leaves either those networks or those communities unchanged. One of the great flaws of nationalist historiography is essentialism: it first posits the timeless unity of the nation it seeks to accomplish and then assumes it. In doing so, it disguises the compromises and changes national inclusion demands, blinding us to the reality that when nations fall, they leave behind new histories and utterly transformed political communities.

It is in the fate of nations to fall. This is easy to forget when one conflates nations with nation-states, which combine the fragile imaginary of nationhood with the sturdy apparatus of statehood. Yet, to paraphrase Foucault, when the nation first spoke, it spoke against the state. This is the legacy “sub-nationalisms” remind us of: that there is no such thing as a natural nation that survives history unscathed. Nations are constantly being imagined, contested, betrayed, and ultimately forgotten. India has been re-imagined countless times in the decades after Independence; as we are all bitterly aware, we are living through a comprehensive reinvention of what it means to be Indian. Yet the solution to our present crisis isn’t to be found in a nostalgic return to an older “idea of India” that was magically more inclusive or less cynical— both these books demonstrate that it absolutely was not. India breaks Assam to build itself, and it is doing so yet again. In the months and years to come, we will undoubtedly debate how we can build a better nation, and even whether we should. But perhaps the question to ask first is: what did it take to build the nation we have?

The post How to Make and Unmake India and its Northeast appeared first on RAIOT.

Greetings like “Comrade” or “Lal Salam” can land one in jail under the UAPA as per NIA’s chargesheet against Bittu Sonowal. When greetings start triggering anti-terror laws, it becomes important to revisit the definition of ‘anti-terror’. Every right guaranteed to citizen comes with a caveat taking away the absoluteness of such laws. For example, Article 19(1)(a) of the Indian Constitution guarantees the freedom of speech and expression and at the same time Article 19(2) allows for reasonable restrictions to be imposed on the same freedom to speech and expression. While in principle, exceptions might not be problematic, yet exceptions are usually used to quell voices of the opposition.

Extra-ordinary laws are not uncommon in the region. Starting from colonial times extra-ordinary laws have been part of Indian legal system. It is also important to reiterate here that, it is not only the current Government that has invoked UAPA, during the regime of UPA too, it has been invoked to suppress the voices of many. In last few years, there have been a series of arrests of the human rights activists in the Bhima Koregaon case to Meeran Haider and Safoora Zargar, student activists from Jamia Milia Islamia, in relation to anti-CAA protests. Adding to the list are the two student activists from Jawaharlal Nehru University associated with Pinjra Tod who have been slapped with UAPA. Gautam Navlakha who surrendered before the NIA headquarters in Delhi on 14 April 2020, wrote, “Under this double whammy (of the provisions under UAPA) jail becomes the norm, and bail an exception. In this Kafkaesque domain, process itself becomes punishment”. The arrest of Navlakha to Safoora Zargar including the previous arrests of human rights activists, none of whom have been granted bail, it appears all chaotic. But in this apparent chaos, there is an order. The order to suppress the voices of human rights activists or people in general who have voiced their opinion for the people otherwise excluded by the development agenda of the Government.

This order started off with discrediting of the term intellectual, as if being an intellectual or a thinking individual was criminal. Janaki Nair wrote in this context referring to the Gurmehar Kaur’s case, “One of the main casualties of this rising anti-intellectualism is the refusal of those attacking our institutions, individuals and practices to engage with the fullness of speech, its metaphoric nuances, its cadences and abstractions, even its confusions” (Indian Express, March 10, 2017). When the term “Urban-naxal” was used for the five activists arrested in the Bhima-Koregaon case, no one knew what it really meant. In fact in a recent RTI filed by India Today Group, the Left Wing Extremism Division in the Union Home Ministry did not have any information on who are “Urban Naxals” and where they operate inspite of the repeated use of the term by many in the Government (India Today, February 7, 2020). So where do we locate the term ‘Urban Naxal’ ? Vivek Agnihotri used the term “Urban-Naxal” hours before activists such as lawyer Sudha Bharadwaj, poet P. Varavara Rao and journalist Gautam Navlakha were arrested on the charge of being conspirators in the Bhima-Koregaon violence in 2018. Agnihotri, in his book titled “Urban Naxals” apparently “exposes” the nexus between an India-wide Maoist terror movement and their supporters in urban centres such as academia and media. It needs to be noted here that the role that intellectuals from the academia or media played in negotiating the space between the people excluded by the State and the State itself is not unknown; the only thing that is new here is the criminalisation of the role played by intellectuals. Nirmalangshu Mukherji, wrote in 2013, “Given the role of the media and the official political order, who will assist the people to resist? This urgent question reopens the old issue of responsibility of the intelligentsia interpreting and changing the role. In particular, intellectuals in academia and mainstream media — teachers, writers, journalists and other managers of ideas— enjoy, perhaps, the maximum benefits of the combined effects of democracy, freedom of expression, globalisation of knowledge and skewed economic development”(N. Mukherji, The Maoists in India, p. 76).

The genesis of UAPA

How is UAPA different from other extra-ordinary laws? If we dig the history of extra-ordinary laws we can go as back as colonial laws, but the laws that were similar in nature of UAPA is TADA and POTA which were also anti-terror laws. The Indian parliament till today has so far enacted three anti-terror laws, the Terrorist and disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA) in 1985, the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) in 2002 and the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) in 2004. TADA lapsed in 1995 and POTA was repealed in 2004. The repeal of POTA was also followed by amendment of an existing law- the Unlawful Activities prevention Act, 1967 (UAPA). This amendment of 2004 made changes to the definition of “terrorist act”, “terrorist organisation” from the repealed POTA and included POTA provisions pertaining to punishment for terrorist activities and organisations. UAPA (2004) therefore, absorbs the provision of both TADA and POTA.

Changes since 2019

The UAPA too has been amended on multiple occasions. The most recent amendment came in 2019 (UAPA, 2019) which dealt with expanding the definition of “terrorist” to include individuals. The amendment does not specify the grounds of terming an individual as a terrorist. Prior to the Amendment, only organisations could have been designated that way and individuals were not covered. This has the effect of allowing the National Investigation Agency much greater scope to take control of cases that would otherwise fall under the domain of the police in individual states. Those arrested under UAPA can be in prison up to 180 days or more without a charge sheet being filed. The case filed against Akhil Gogoi affirms this point. Akhil Gogoi was initially arrested for his alleged involvement in the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) protests in Assam last year but later on he was brought under the custody of NIA and charges were levelled against him under UAPA. A report of December 2019 said, “The NIA has formally taken up the investigation in the case and has booked Gogoi for waging a war against the Nation. The investigation in the case has been formally transferred to NIA, who will now look into the case.” (The Print, 15 December 2019).

In addition to above, the ‘sunset clause’ also differentiates UAPA from TADA and POTA. Inspite of wide misuse of TADA and POTA laws, it had a ‘sunset clause’ according to which these laws can be repealed if it is established that their existence is no longer required. Under a ‘sunset’ provision, a law will cease to be in operation after a fixed point of time unless further legislative action is taken to extend the law but the UAPA is a permanent statute.

The process shouldn’t become punishment

The recent unrest in Assam is associated with the arrest of Bittu Sonowal, a close aide of Akhil Gogoi. NIA, in its chargesheet against Sonowal, mentioned that he has referred to some of his friends as ‘Comrade’ and used words such as ‘Lal Salam’ among others. In the chargesheet filed on May 29, it was also mentioned that Sonowal uploaded a photo of Lenin with the words, ‘The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them’ (Outlook, June 4, 2020).

#lalsalaamComrade was trending on twitter ranked as number one on 10th Jun 2020. This was the response from the activists to these categorisation of “terrorist” by such laws. The problem with these laws is that it has a scope of misuse. The above mentioned incident appears farcical. Another primary critique of anti-terror laws is that it bypasses constitutional safeguards that are provided in the constitution for a fair trail. The anti-terror laws should be implemented with utmost seriousness, such incidences make a mockery of theses laws. The blatant use of the UAPA should not make way for everyday violations of human rights, especially when the entire country is going through a period of crisis owing to the pandemic.

The post #Comrade #LalSalam #UAPA #Terror appeared first on RAIOT.

In the evening of 25 May 2020, George Floyd, a 46 years old African-American man was choked to death by Derek Chauvin, a white police officer of the Minneapolis Police Department, an incident that sparked massive outrage and protest demonstrations against police brutality and lack of police accountability and racism, in the United States of America and around the world. Subsequently, Chauvin had been initially charged with manslaughter and third-degree murder, which was later elevated to second-degree murder, and three other accomplices – Tou Thao, Thomas Lane, and J. Alexander Kueng – were charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

At around 00:30 AM on 15 June 2020, a team of Indian Army personnel under Major Sachin Sinha of 244 Field Regiment based in Charaideo assisted by a team of Assam Police under Amit Kumar Hojai, Sub-Divisional Police Officer, Titabor and Mintu Kumar Handique, Officer-in-Charge (OC) of Borholla Police Station (PS) picked up Jayanta Borah, 25 years old son of late Hem Borah who had served in the Indian Army, from his home at Balijan Gabhoru Ali, Kakodonga Habi Gaon, Borholla in Jorhat district in Assam where he lived with his old mother, Lila Borah. At the time of taking Jayanta Borah into custody, no arrest warrant was shown or handed over to Lila Borah, nor were the village headman and the Village Defence Party (VDP) informed by the joint team of the Indian Army and Assam Police. Instead, Mintu Kumar Handique allegedly made Jayanta Borah’s illiterate mother sign on a paper with a heading “No Objection (Military Custody).”

After he had been brought to Borholla PS, Jayanta Borah succumbed to death in police custody on that very night, almost within an hour, because of heinous custodial torture. The register entry of Jayanta Borah at Borholla Community Health Centre (CHC) records the time of admission as 01:15 AM on 15 June and according to Dr. Dolen Borah, who was on duty when Jayanta Borah was taken to Borholla CHC, there was no consciousness, no pulse rate, no blood pressure, and no nerve pulse in his body and he died midway to the Jorhat Medical College Hospital (JMCH). This is also confirmed in the Medico Legal Case (MLC) record in the JMCH. The photographs of the dead body of Jayanta Borah prove that he had been a subject to vicious and fatal assault by the Indian Army and Assam Police while he was in custody (there were severe injuries on his head and ear, and the result of severe blows to his genitalia could be clearly seen).

Once details of Jayanta Borah’s extrajudicial killing came to light, his family members and the villagers refused to receive the dead body unless preliminary investigation began after identifying the perpetrators of custodial violence and murder within 24 hours. Lila Borah filed a first information report (FIR) at Borholla PS on 15 June 2020. However, instead of swiftly and impartially probing into Jayanta Borah’s death, Deputy Inspector General (DIG) of Police, Shiv Prasad Ganjawala attempted to downplay the custodial murder as baseless and defend and protect the culprits who are otherwise supposedly the custodians of law and order by brazenly lying in front of the media that Jayanta Borah was alive when the team of Indian Army admitted him in the JMCH.

Despite concerted efforts to pacify the agitated family and the protesting villagers by the district administration, high ranking officers of Assam Police as well as local representatives of the government, the people refused to be silent over the custodial murder of an innocent youth. At the behest of the Chief Minister of the state, Sarbananda Sonowal, a couple of ministers in the Assam government and a Member of Parliament visited Jayanta Borah’s house. Subsequently, three police officers – Sub-Divisional Police Officer of Titabor, Amit Kumar Hojai, Borholla PS OC, Mintu Kumar Handique, and Bekajan Police Outpost In- Charge, Gopal Doley – were suspended. However, the suspended police officers have not yet been arrested or taken into custody for interrogation, nor has any action been taken against Major Sachin Sinha and his team of 8 Indian Army personnel.

But, mere suspension of the three police officers cannot be accepted as consolation. The officers of Assam Police and the Indian Army personnel, including Major Sachin Sinha must be charged with murder, and the others who stood by and did nothing should be charged as accomplices to the murder. They must be immediately terminated and arrested for their crime.

While the murder of George Floyd saw the American State apparatuses work swiftly to terminate and charge the perpetrators for their crime, the extrajudicial killing of Jayanta Borah is yet to be acknowledged by the Indian State apparatuses as an institutional murder. Instead, what we have seen are despicable attempts by the concerned authorities to downplay the murder and conciliate the agitating people that invariably lead us to question the role of the law and its legitimacy. There is almost an everyday history of extrajudicial and custodial killings especially by the armed forces empowered by the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) in the northeastern region of India (and indeed in Jammu and Kashmir) that always keep reminding us of the authoritarian and violent qualities of the law.

What we have seen time and again is that the law is always asymmetrical in its application – those who are not deemed to be police property, that is, those who occupy a privileged position as custodians and representatives of the formal legal system are treated differently by the law. In the “India: Annual Report on Torture 2019” recently published on 26 June 2020 by the National Campaign Against Torture (NCAT), it was brought to light that 125 people died in police custody in 2019, while 1606 people died in judicial custody in the same year. According to the “India: Annual Report on Torture 2018” published by Asian Centre for Human Rights (ACHR), 147 people died in police custody and 1819 people died in judicial custody in 2018. In the Indian context, it is very rare to find instances where the institution of law opens itself to legal scrutiny, allowing its own rules – with their seemingly, and suspiciously ‘clear’ demarcations of what kind of treatment is reserved for what kind of actions – to apply to itself. Instead, absolute impunity is granted to the perpetrators of custodial torture. But, those who are deemed to be police property – the unprivileged, the lesser privileged, the migrants, the workers, the dissenters, the minorities, etc. – always encounter the law in its direct and violent form, while its own custodians and representatives are always granted exemptions not afforded to anyone else, thus establishing institutionalised inequality.

While demanding justice for Jayanta Borah and his family, as well as exemplary and appropriate punishment for his murderers, we must reflect on the legal system that operates by a form of preventive repression – that is, the law operates by instilling a fear in its ‘subjects’, in the form of a perpetual, really existing ‘threat’ of punishment if one is not deemed to be a ‘law-abiding citizen’ – which is an exercise of direct, brutal repression for one category of people and that of an exemption for another category of people. The law as a non-contradictory, comprehensive system is only tendentially true. Therefore, it is also not wrong to say that most of the times, the law operates illegally.Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

The armed forces are institutionally trained to kill. The police forces are trained to institutionally represent the law. It is precisely the nature of this ‘training’ which necessitates that human rights education be imparted to all personnel in both the forces. Only then the law could be accepted as legitimate and deemed to be equal for everyone. Otherwise the old Orwellian metaphor – all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others – would continue to haunt the society and the state.

The post You have heard of George Floyd from USA but what about Jayanta Borah of Assam? appeared first on RAIOT.

On June 29, 2020; the Minister of Industries and Commerce of Assam released a series of tweets announcing that the Council of Ministers had approved an ordinance by which industries could be set up in Assam by just “one self-declaration” and land would be deemed converted for industrial purpose. The Ordinance presently awaits the approval of the Governor of Assam.Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

In law, land as a natural resource is considered to be held in public trust by the State. The State holds land for the enjoyment by the citizen at large. This essentially means that there is an embargo on the State transferring public properties such as Government held land to private parties if such transfers affect the public interest. This principle also implies that there is a burden on the Government to ensure affirmative action for effective management of land resources. This principle had been first formulated authoritatively by one of the pioneers of environmental law, Professor Joseph L. Sax in an article called “The Public Trust Doctrine in Natural Resources Law: Effective Judicial Intervention” (1970). Over the years, this principle has been brought into Indian law by several judgements of the Supreme Court of India.

Land in Assam has had a contentious history. It has remained a permanent fixture in the political discourse of the State over the years and much blood and ink have been spilt over it. Like other natural resources, land is intrinsic to the identity of a community and it is not surprising therefore, that the land question in Assam has always come intertwined with the fierce identity related contestations that the State has witnessed through its history. Strenuous claims by communities over title to their land exist till this day.

What is seriously disturbing about this proposed Ordinance is that it runs contrary to the unanimity seen concerning alienation of agricultural land in Assam arrived at historically through informed, transparent and in-depth debate and discussion. Community organisations representing indigenous communities, expert committees and the average citizen have all been unanimous that any provision for alienation of agricultural land belonging to the indigenous people of Assam will need adequate safeguards. The concept of deemed conversion of agricultural land is alien to this total unanimity across the entire spectrum.

The legal history of the land law regime bears testimony to this unanimity. The principle that agricultural land cannot be converted for a non-agricultural purpose without adequate safeguards has always held true. A hundred years earlier, an Executive Instruction issued on 27.09.1919 by the Government of Assam under the British authorities had enshrined this principle. The said Executive Instruction still holds the field. Subsequently, noting that issues such as continued encroachment of community/government lands had further complicated protection of land rights of the indigenous people, the Government of Assam constituted a Seven Member Committee headed Mr. Hari Shankar Brahma, former Chief Election Commissioner of India to examine various aspects of administration of land including the protection of land rights of the indigenous people of Assam on February 6, 2017.

The Committee for Protection of Land Rights of Indigenous People of Assam headed by Mr. Hari Shankar Brahma provided several wide-ranging recommendations but also recommended that the principle that agricultural land cannot be converted for a non-agricultural purpose without adequate safeguards should be made part of the new Land Policy and the amended Assam Land and Revenue Regulation, 1886. To address this question of alienation of agricultural land, the Assam Agricultural Land (Regulation of Reclassification and Transfer for Non-Agricultural Purpose) Act, 2015 had earlier been brought into effect with one of the stated objectives being to “enable judicious growth and simultaneous preservation and furtherance of agricultural sector for overall economic development in the State”. Inspite of this legislation, the contestation concerning alienation of agricultural land remain unaddressed in its true effect. In fact, the 2015 Act received severe criticism, so much so, that the Brahma Committee provided a recommendation for its repeal as it allowed reclassification of agricultural land as non-agricultural land either on the ground that it had not been cultivated for the past ten years or because it had become unfit for agriculture. According to the Brahma Committee, the decision in this regard had been left to the Deputy Commissioner of the district which was arbitrary and non-transparent. Among other factors, it had the potential to reduce indigenous cultivators into a class of landless people.

The Land Policy, 2019 of the Government of Assam which claimed to bring into effect some of the recommendations of the Brahma Committee also contained portions dealing with “allotment/settlement of land for other non-agricultural purposes like industries, public institutions, hospitals, dispensaries etc.” Paragraph 7.1 of the Land Policy, 2019 is quite relevant in this regard:

“7.1 No agricultural land will ordinarily be allotted or settled for establishment of industry, construction of public institution/offices, hospital, dispensary etc. The Land Advisory Committee may examine the land unsuitable for agricultural purposes identified by district/sub-division authority placed before it and may recommend to Government for establishment of public institution, industry, hospital etc. Considering the scarcity of land, minimum requirement may be allotted/settled on rational basis.

Endeavour shall be made to have a survey and mapping of land in the Districts not suitable for agricultural purpose in order to prepare special zone for industrial and other institutional infrastructure development in the State.”

Apart from this clearly stated policy of the Government itself, the Report of the Committee on Implementation of Clause 6 of the Assam Accord constituted by the Government of India, headed by Justice Biplab Kumar Sharma, Former Judge, Gauhati High Court also made several unanimous recommendations concerning alienation of land for industrial purposes. The Committee had received several representations from community and student organisations which had claimed that land in the Tribal Belts and Blocks under Chapter X of the Assam Land and Revenue Regulation, 1886 had been alienated to non-indigenous people by exploiting loopholes in the law. It had also been pointed out that several communities such as the Koch Rajbongshi had been forced by economic compulsions to sell off their land.

As a result, one of the recommendations of the Committee concerned Section 8 of the Assam Agricultural Land (Regulation of Reclassification and Transfer for Non-Agricultural Purpose) Act, 2015 which dilutes the provisions in Section 3 and 4 of the same Act and allows conversion of agricultural land for non-agricultural purposes without following provisions of the same Act. The Committee while categorically rejecting any deemed conversion of agricultural land recommended that this specific provision of the Act be repealed and that the opinion of the local Gram Sabha be sought whenever re-classification of agricultural land is deemed necessary. It had also recommended that land which was deemed unfit for agricultural purposes will have to be initially identified by a land survey within a specified period and only thereafter may be declared as industrial area. It was around this time that the Council of Ministers of the State Government had announced publicly in December, 2019; that a Cabinet decision had been taken to the effect that a legislation ensuring that land rights are reserved exclusively for the indigenous people by giving them the sole right to buy or sell land in Assam would be enacted.

It is in the light of these policy developments, that the proposed Ordinance announced on June 29, 2020 seems perplexing and is a complete U-turn on the Government’s own public declarations as late as in December, 2019. It is evident that there is a clear hidden agenda behind the move and it is not the product of the policy paralysis which has plagued the land question in Assam over the last few years. Leaving aside the unconscionability of such a decision, it also violates the legal principle that land which is held in public trust by the Government cannot be transferred against the public interest. It is also noteworthy that the Government of India and the Government of Assam have not clarified its stand on the Report of the Committee on Implementation of Clause 6 of the Assam Accord which it had promised to implement in letter and spirit during the peak of the CAA, 2019 agitation. While the proposed Ordinance is quite clearly a betrayal of the public trust vested in a democratically elected government, it also flies in the face of the law apart from endangering the land rights of the indigenous farmers who have traditionally borne the brunt of the land question.

The post The Proposed Land Ordinance, 2020 in Assam: An Abdication of Public Trust? appeared first on RAIOT.

Torrential rains, this monsoon like every other has worsened the flood situation in Assam. This year already around 1.1 million people have been affected in 23 districts and the fatalities due to flood this year has gone up to 24 and counting. While the state administration is doing its best to tackle the situation, locals of villages near the rivers are being moved to safer places as their villages are being inundated by flood waters. Soon the public cry will be about the ineffectual bureaucracy and aid programs on the ground as lakhs of rupees will be once again spent and pocketed.

māti is a short documentary film (22 minutes) that attempts to understand this annual cycle. This film is in Assamese and English (with subtitles in English) and remains institutionally unfunded, made in partnership with the local communities by the river.

Kaziranga is home to several ancient riverine communities of Assam and the one-horned rhinoceroses. Therefore this national park receives maximum protection under the Indian law for wildlife conservation. One such ‘effort’ is the construction of globally funded, embankment building to protect villages and the demise of several species during the annual floods. “māti” is Assamese for land.

Local communities resist these attempts stating, these efforts do not yield any results and consume vast tracts of their agricultural land. In addition, the sanctuary extends deep into the Karbi hills, being mined for various minerals. A highway now runs through the park altering the geography of the area whereby animals drown during the flood, crossing over to higher planes, now occupied by hotels and tea gardens.

The geo-spatial architecture, food, clothing (ethno-technologies) and even crops (environ) revolve around the floods. This seasonal flood brings with it several schools of freshwater fish that lay their eggs. Local fishing communities thereby also find sustenance through this environmental cycle until the winter, by when the cropping season arrives. This annual flushing of the lakes inside the park also clears various kinds of debris, which eventually makes it beneficial for various animals enabling the continuity of food webs. Communities fear that they lose their own riverine habitat as previous experience of dealing with embankments lead to unemployment and displacement devaluing traditional skills and knowledge for many.

This film has been made through a process of ‘co-labour-abling’. While we began a process of documentation and construction of an archive, we began this initiative through a sharing of skills between the ‘filmmakers’ and communities.

We strongly believe collaboration is a process of meaning creation and generation, through a call for action, addressing a shared concern through various stakeholders, communities and partners constructing multiple alternatives through an evaluative process, building a collective knowing – ‘Knowledge’. A rendering proposed is working together with the other in cooperation (bringing into action/contact), against the constructed norm – ‘co-labor’ and ‘co-labor-ableing’. ‘Co-labor-ableing’ thus may construct and build an empowering and enabling “commune” from within, one that owns the means of production and controls the modes of dissemination through a constant negotiation between the co-laborers and a ‘commune’ ownership of the production thereby no longer on constructing a communication/message/code derived from and only speaking back to a particular class and caste. Importantly, this process allows for sharing and reciprocation of knowledge, allowing for all (from a community) to contribute, each to their own personal means, time, purpose and commitments. It is in this process of co-laboring that we believe, māti and its dissemination also lies within the domain of the commons (Creative Commons, attribution, share alike, non-commercial, 2020).

The post Watch māti to Understand the Cycle of Flood and Displacement in Assam appeared first on RAIOT.

Way back in 1937, Axomiya Sangrakhyani Sabha [Society for the Protection of Assamese], a group within the Assam Pradesh Congress Committee raised the issue of land alienation of indigenous people of the state by submitting a representation to the then president of the All India Congress Committee, Jawaharlal Nehru. Through their representation they expressed their resentment to the British policy of granting lease of huge tracts of fertile land to European tea cultivators. By the same memorandum this motley, but influential group of leaders raised their apprehension about continuous British sponsored migration of Bengali settlers from East Bengal (present Bangladesh) which, according to them had resulted in alienation of land of indigenous tribal communities in Assam. Without delving much into the historical background, it can just be said that these apprehensions led to the creation of line system in Assam and finally culminated in the creation of tribal belts and blocks under Chapter X of the Assam Land and Revenue Regulations, which allows only the exempted classes of people to purchase land within tribal belts and blocks.

Another important legislative measure for protection of agricultural land of the locals from speculative traders was the Executive Instruction No. 6 issued under the Assam Land and Revenue Regulations, 1886. The Executive Instruction No. 6 issued on 2 August 1948 reads as follows: “Restriction on Transfer of Periodic Khiraj Leases: Periodic Khiraj leases issued after the 27^th September 1919 contain a clause which forbids transfer, if the holder is a professional cultivator, to a person who is not a professional cultivator, without the previous sanction of the Deputy Commissioner.” A note was added that reads: “After considering all circumstances, Government has consented to the enforcement of the clause in all districts where the Assam Land and Revenue Regulations is in force to prevent land passing on a large scale from cultivators to speculators and non-cultivators.”

The purport behind such a measure can be gauged from the language of the instruction itself. Firstly, the instruction uses the phrase “land passing on a large scale” and secondly, it uses the term “speculators.” We don’t need to elaborate on who the speculative traders were, as at that point of time it was only the non-Assamese or the non-indigenous traders who had the financial capacity to indulge in speculative trading of land. Thus, clearly the purpose behind the said instruction is to protect the land belonging to the locals.

In spite of there being such provisions in the law, the transfer of land, more particularly of agricultural land, mostly from indigenous communities to others in violation of the law continued. Flouting the law continued with active connivance of local level revenue officials and politicians. Such transfer of land has reached alarming levels during the fifteen years of Congress government in Assam. Facing wide spread criticism and because of unrelenting protests by the Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti (KMSS), a mass peasant organisation led by Akhil Gogoi, the then Tarun Gogoi led Congress government of Assam brought the Assam Agricultural Land (Regulation of Reclassification and Transfer for Non-Agriculture Purpose) Act, 2015. The said Act, while prohibiting transfer of agricultural land for non-agricultural purpose laid down the circumstances under which such transfer can be effected. One of the important circumstances laid down by the law is that such land should not be used for agricultural purposes at least for ten years.

Now, the present regime led by the BJP is seeking to amend this piece of legislation by bringing an ordinance, and thereby ensuring automatic reclassification of agricultural land once the purchaser makes a self-declaration to the effect that the land is purchased for establishing an industry. The Cabinet decision on the proposed ordinance was disclosed by the State Industry Minister, Chandra Mohan Patowary through a tweet that reads as follows: “In a historic and far reaching decision to ease out the process of setting up industries in Assam, state cabinet has approved an ordinance today. Now any one will be able to set up industries in Assam just by submitting one self-declaration. No permission, clearance or licence will be required for three years. Land will also be deemed converted for industrial purpose. Such bold and advantageous change is expected to accelerate the industrialisation process in Assam.” This tweet of the Minister created furore in the state. One can have a fair idea about the proposed ordinance even by going through the tweet itself and can at once conclude that the proposed ordinance is an ominous sign for the state and its people. But how?Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

The word ‘industry’ is a generic term. A car producing unit is an industry and under pollution control statutes, a ‘rice mill’ or a ‘stone crusher unit’ is also an industry. Now, any one by declaring that they are going to set up a rice mill or stone crusher unit will be able to purchase agricultural land and then got it reclassified. Once this is done, after one or two years they can declare the business bankrupt and use the land for speculative profit. Once this ordinance is passed this will be the norm. Moreover, huge tracts of agricultural land by the side of the National Highways in Assam had already got transferred to non-Assamese or non-indigenous traders. The verification of revenue records will make it crystal clear. These traders have been waiting for an opportunity to regularise their irregularity and the proposed ordinance will be giving them a legal route to do this. The mainstream Assamese speaking and the tribal people will be the worst sufferers of this decision. The migrant population of the state also known as the na-asomiya [new Assamese] or pamuas have their life embedded in agricultural economy and they are not going to sale their land to anyone. It can be taken away from them only through coercive measures. But so far as the rest of the population, particularly the tribal people and the Assamese speaking communities are concerned, they are still being fascinated by “the cash money” and will definitely transfer their land even for a paltry amount of cash. We have been witness to such transfers. I leave it to experts to analyse this fascination for cash, but suffice to say that ultimately because of this decision the precious piece of land which binds us to the root is going to slip away from us.

Secondly, the issue of land protection to the Assamese and indigenous communities of the state is part of the report of the Expert Committee constituted for implementation of Clause 6 of the Assam Accord. The Committee has already submitted its report but no one has any idea about its fate till date. The Home Minister of the country made public declaration about implementing the recommendations of the Committee without any change. Although people do not know whether the Home Minister could spare some time to go through the recommendations of the Committee, yet in absence of any declaration rejecting the recommendations, it has to be presumed that it is under consideration of the Central Government. Why, then so much hurry on part of the state government to promulgate this ordinance? Is it to pre-empt the recommendations of the Committee at the behest of certain quarters with vested interests?

The third important point relates to the right of workers of industry proposed to be set up. As per the tweet of the Minister for setting up industry, no licence, permission etc. will be required. This means that these industries will be allowed to operate without any compliance of the labour laws. During the time of pandemic we have already seen attempts by various state governments to tinker with the labour laws and the proposed ordinance is undoubtedly a part of the same agenda. In their jest for attracting industries the government is going to make the labour laws and the labourers the scapegoat. It is part of the war unleashed by the ruling elite on labour. The manner in which the government is proposing to frame the ordinance will surely lead to primitive accumulation resulting in benefits for a select few elites and doom for many.

Fourthly, why this route of an ordinance? And why this hurry? This is a decision which is going to have impact on the state’s future and therefore the government cannot be the only stakeholder. Before taking such a major policy decision, it is incumbent upon the government to go for public debate and discussion. Leave aside the common public, the present regime even avoided discussion in the Assembly, although this is purely a legislative measure. Article 213 of the Constitution of India relates to power of the Governor to promulgate an ordinance, and it says that before promulgation of an ordinance there must be satisfaction about existence of circumstances which render it necessary to take immediate action. Thus it is clear that the ordinance route can be taken only in cases of emergency and not otherwise. But the present regime in Assam taking cue from their leaders in Delhi has adopted this ordinance route just to thwart a public discussion on the issue. This is nothing but subterfuge of constitutional mechanism.

In Assam, indigenous communities are living under constant threat of eviction. Even after living for generations they are still not getting settlement for their land. Landless farmers are demanding land. But this government which stormed to power by promising to protect indigenous interests are now becoming the major threat to the indigenous people. From bringing in the CAA to the Ordinance for Automatic Reclassification of Land, we are witnessing a series of decisions by the present regime which will ultimately destroy our collective existence.

The post Is Assam Govt. Trying to Dispossess People of their Land? appeared first on RAIOT.

It is an annual episode that plays itself out. Assam is, once again, reeling under flood – loss of human and animal life, severe damage to agricultural crops, property, millions of people displaced from their homes, absence of flood preparedness or early warning systems, delayed relief action by the government and the silent apathy of the mainstream media.

This time, however, it’s a double whammy for Assam, as the floods wreak havoc against the backdrop of the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak. It is a crisis that calls out for necessities like safe water, sanitation, and physical distancing to be in order.

A flood-like situation definitely compounds the vulnerabilities of the people. For the communities who have lived alongside rivers for decades, the disaster is not merely the rushing waters of the flood, but also the reduced capacity to cope with them.

In these series of photographs, Akash Basumatari, a film-maker, and photographer based out of Assam captures this lived reality of the people in Matia and Simlitola areas of the Goalpara district.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

The post Assam Floods | Pandemic | 2020 | Photo Feature appeared first on RAIOT.

One of the Cabinet Ministers of Assam Shri Chandra Mohan Patowary has recently revealed a decision of the Assam government in his official twitter handle that has sparked a row and has drawn flak from opposition parties.Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

According to the statement of this senior minister the state cabinet had approved an ordinance on 1^st July – the Assam Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (Facilitation of Establishment and Operation) Ordinance, 2020, that would allow micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) to set up industries by only submitting a self-declaration. The tweet of the Industries Minister Chandra Mohan Patowary read as-“In a historic and far-reaching decision to ease out the process of setting up industries in Assam, the state cabinet has approved an ordinance today. Now, anyone will be able to set up industry in Assam just by submitting a self-declaration. No permission, clearance, or licence will be required for three years. Land will also be deemed converted for industrial purposes. Such bold and advantageous change is expected to accelerate the industrialisation process in Assam,”

From a plain reading of the above tweet we may presume certain propositions that can be summarised as follow:

• Now any person can purchase land in the state of Assam without facing any legal or administrative bar and the existing legal obstacles with regard to land alienation such as restriction of land purchasing in the tribal belt and block and in the sixth schedule areas will no longer be a hindrance in near future.
• The Minister has stated that to start up an industry in the state, no permission, clearance or licence will be required for initial period of three years. It means that the notifications like Environment Impact Assessment and other environmental laws, different restrictive provisions under various land laws will not be applicable in such cases.
• As the proposed ordinance (which is not yet public) contains a easy provision of land conversion from agricultural to Industrial, it will definitely accelerate the industrialisation process in the state and eventually these industries will be owned by traders and industrialists from outside of Assam.

If the above presumptions are true then why the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led state Government has been incessantly uttering assurances to protect the land of the indigenous people of the state? Why the same government had declared the Land Policy 2019 by which it had again declared its commitment to protect indigenous land right? Why did the state government constitute the Committee for Protection of Land Rights of the Indigenous People of Assam headed by former CEC Hari Shankar Brahma? Similarly we may also pose doubts regarding the high-powered committee which was constituted by the Central Government in July2019 for the implementation of Clause 6 of the Assam Accord of 1985. ((The Assam Accord was signed as a result of Assam Movement that contains a clause 6 that envisages constitutional, legislative and administrative measures to safeguard, protect, preserve and promote the cultural, social, linguistic identity and heritage of the Assamese people. It also seeks to ascertain who fits into the definition of an Assamese).

Historical Apprehension and Legal Restrictions of Land Alienation:

Since the days of the colonial takeover of this part of the country by the British Administration the native people of Assam as well as North East India have been facing indiscriminate land aggression by outsiders. From the very days of the colonial administration and even after independence, the land has become the central issue of conflict between subject versus subject and also the subject versus state. The legal changes that began in the colonial age that do not recognize the difference between the tribal tradition and the formal law are basic to all forms of land alienation. The processes that result in land alienation in Assam could be summarized into the following forms:

• Encroachment by the immigrant: Immigration into Assam from East Bengal/ Bangladesh and other parts of India. The migrants have occupied very large areas of indigenous lands, taking advantage of the lack of awareness and legal title of the indigenous communities. They have exploited loopholes in the law, or in some areas have simply violated the law, in order to take over indigenous lands.
• Transfer of the community as well as tribal land to the non-tribal and also to immigrants and outsiders who are non-indigenous of this region. Takeover of lands for infrastructure, industrial, development, military and other projects has also adversely affected the indigenous communities. Much of the land acquired for these projects was either the private property of indigenous people or the common lands that they utilized. The latter have been diverted for these projects without any form of consultation or legal process whatsoever, as they are treated as government lands.
• Land acquisition by the government for various projects without recognizing community rights,
• Formal and non-formal takeover of land within the geographical jurisdiction of the state by the concerned government without recognizing the traditional community rights over land and natural resources. The forest laws have been used to expand reserved forests across Assam, further depriving indigenous communities of their forest rights. Jhum cultivation has also been declining, primarily as a result of restrictions placed on it by forest laws.

The apprehension of loosing lands in the hands of aggressive outsiders had also been reflected in the land policy of pre-independence India. The extracts of the proceedings of the Government of Assam in the Revenue Department No R.C8/42/19 also mentioned about the above mentioned aggression as-:

“The problem of the immigrants is not by any means a new one, and has been exercising the minds of district officers ever since cultivators from East Bengal began, over 20 years ago, to arrive in large number and to settle in the districts of Lower Assam, spreading subsequently up to the districts of Upper Assam. Things went sufficiently well so long as these cultivators were engaged in filling up the vacant spaces in the riverain area. But as they drew nearer to the areas held by the indigenous people signs soon became apparent of the clash of interests between them and the local people and of the dangers to the internal life and habits of the latter. In the submontane area in particular, which were predominately peopled by tribal and backward classes, apprehensions were entertained that the introduction of a foreign, advanced and pushing element, if permitted, would spell disaster to the local population. District officers, therefore, in the absence of any clear-cut direction from Government adopted such measures as seemed most likely to prevent, or at any rate check, the spread of immigrants to areas where their entry would have had these detrimental results. In pursuance of this policy, the submontane areas were more or less closed to them; elsewhere where there was a demand for land from the immigrants and the local people, areas in individual villages open to each were delimited by “Lines” and, where the demand for land from the local people was negligible, large blocks extending over several squares miles were constituted into “Colonisation areas” for settlement of immigrants. This is in general outline what is known as the “Line System” a system which, though it has been extensively criticised, has served its purpose as a method of controlling the influx of immigrants and directing it to more or less compact areas instead of allowing indiscriminate squatting all over the province.”

Similarly, most of the policies drafted in the post Independent India centred around the issue of allocating or settling land to the indigenous people and to protect the land of the tribal people. The 1989 Land Policy which was drafted during the regime Asom Gana Paarishad (AGP) government had also specifically spelled about the land allotment/settlement to the indigenous landless people. The relevant portion of the said land policy reads as-“Land at the disposal of the Government for ordinary cultivation may initially be given by way of allotment to indigenous landless persons. After 3 years continuous physical possession by cultivating the same, the land may be settled with allottees, provided the land is found to have been used for the purpose for which it was allotted.”

Now let us come to the legal provisions that restrict agricultural land conversion to non agricultural purposes. The principle that agricultural land cannot be converted for a non-agricultural purpose without adequate safeguards has always held true. A century ago, an Executive Instruction issued on 27.09.1919 by the Government of Assam under the British authorities had enshrined this principle. The said Executive Instruction still holds the field. The executive instruction no 6 enacted under the provisions of Assam Land Revenue Regulations 1886 reads as-“Restrictions on transfer of periodic khiraj leases: Periodic Khiraj Leases issued after 27^th September, 1919 contain a clause which forbids transfer, if the holder is a professional cultivator, to a person who is not a professional cultivator, without the previous sanction of the Deputy Commissioner.

After considering all circumstances Government have consented to the enforcement of the clause in all district where the Assam Land and Revenue Regulation in force to proven land passing on a large scale from cultivators to speculations and non cultivators”

Pertaining to this executive instruction, the Land Policy 2019 of the Assam Government contains provisions that exclusively restrict the transfer of agricultural land to any other purposes. Section 9.of this policy reads as:-

9. RESTRICTIONS ON TRANSFERS OF AGRICULTURAL LAND:

9.1.In order to maintain the basic permanent crop land in the State ,the Deputy Commissioners with the assistance of the Agricultural Department shall carry out survey to identify the prime agricultural land parcels of the districts depending upon the fertility of the land, irrigation facility, cropping intensity and annual yield records of such land. Such prime agricultural land of the districts shall be digitally mapped and recorded distinctly in the land records. Deputy Commissioners shall not accord approval for transfer of such land without prior approval from the Government.

9.2. Further, the Deputy Commissioners shall not accord permission for transfer
of land under periodic lease belonging to an agriculturist land holder to a person who is not an agriculturist in contravention of provisions of Executive Instruction-6 under the Assam Land and Revenue Regulation,1886 and other land laws, Endeavour shall be made to bring suitable amendments in existing laws if necessary to further strengthen the measures to check transfer of agricultural land belonging to the agriculturalist to the non-agriculturalist and also for protecting land belonging to indigenous communities of the state.

 Before the declaration of Land Policy of 2019, the Government of Assam constituted a Seven Member Committee headed Mr. Hari Shankar Brahma, former Chief Election Commissioner of India, to examine various aspects of administration of land, including the protection of land rights of the indigenous people of Assam on February 6, 2017. The report submitted by Dr. Rohini Kr. Baruah, Shri Anil Kr. Bhattacharyya, Shri Ajoy Kr. Dutta and Dr. Romesh Borpatragohain recommended ban on Transfer of Land in any form from a Citizen to Non-Citizens, Agricultural Land for non-Agricultural Purposes, from Indigenous to Non-Indigenous and from Protected Class to Non-protected Class of Persons. The question of putting restrictions on transfer of lands in any form from a citizen to non-citizen, from an agriculturist to a non-agriculturist, from an indigenous to a non-indigenous person and from a person belonging to a protected class to one of the non-protected class under Chapter X of the ALRR, 1886 has been discussed and justified by the Committee.

But contravening all the said recommendations and restrictions, the Government of Assam is bypassing the state legislative body and ignoring a healthy public debate on the issue, and thereby enacting the said ordinance that deems to ease out the restrictions of land reclassification. It will definitely open up a land market for the big corporate and land brokers, the process that eventually will uproot lakhs of indigenous small and medium size land holders from their native land.

Rebutting the apprehension raised by the common citizen of the state about this ordinance , State Industry and Commerce Minister Chandra Mohan Patowary on 3rd July made a clarification that the Assam Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (Facilitation of Establishment and Operation) Ordinance, 2020 is not going to affect the land rights of the indigenous people in any way. Asserting the need of this ordinance to “ease of doing business” in the State, Patowary also said that the ordinance will not affect the restrictions on sale or transfer of agricultural land for non-agricultural purpose as protected under the Assam Agricultural Land (Regulation of Reclassifications and Transfer for Non-Agricultural Purpose) Act 2015. According to this Cabinet Minister the Ordinance does not allow any person to buy or sell any agricultural land for non-agricultural purpose. The bar of agricultural land used or transferred for non-agricultural purpose as provided under the aforesaid Act shall remain as it is and this Ordinance will not affect it at all. He repeatedly emphasised before the media that agricultural land will remain with the agriculturalists only.”The Ordinance does not allow any person to buy or sell any agricultural land for non-agricultural purpose. Therefore, any apprehension that an entrepreneur under the provisions of this Ordinance will buy agricultural land for non-agricultural purpose is totally unfounded…. Instead, if any genuine owner of the agricultural land intends to set up an MSME unit, his agricultural land which is eligible and capable of reclassification as per the provisions of Assam Agricultural Land (Regulation of Reclassifications and Transfer for Non-Agricultural Purpose) Act 2015 will be deemed to be non-agricultural land only for three years,” he said.

Unfortunately the particular provision that enables the conversion of agricultural land to non agricultural category is portraying a totally contradictory picture. According to Section 6(1) of the Ordinance whenever an agricultural land will be used for entrepreneurship purposes it will automatically be converted into non-agricultural land. The relevant section reads as-“ Provided further that any agricultural land on which a person wishes to start an enterprise shall be deemed to be a non-agricultural land under the provision of section 2(p) of the Assam Agricultural Land (Regulation of Re-classification and Transfer for Non-Agricultural Purpose)Act,2015”. It means that the concerned minister is unfolding a different version than the original one. Nowhere in the ordinance has mentioned that only the indigenous person or person belonging to the state of Assam will get the opportunity to start MSME in his/her individual agricultural land. The ordinance and the concerned minister are also silent about the probable environmental consequences of any industry if it is established amidst agricultural land.

The state government has openly made a declaration that for creating an environment for boosting industry in the state, government has brought this Ordinance so that migrant labours who have returned to their native areas during the pandemic could get an opportunity to start industry or any entrepreneurial work in their respective native villages. Surprisingly the state government has yet not announced any special package for these migrant workers to start any industry. So the pertinent question is how these people will establish any industry without having any capital? Had the Assam government thought about these migrant workers,- maximum of which worked outside of the state with minimum salary, it could have announced a proper financial package for these workers before it decided to bring the Ordinance. So, the real motive of enacting this ordinance is something different. If the real intention of this ordinance is to relax or diminish all restrictions regarding land alienation then the land of this frontier region will no longer remain in the hands of its indigenous population.

The post A Design to Uproot the Natives appeared first on RAIOT.

Writing the Northeast India, often leads to misrepresentation, distortion, misinformation of the places, peoples and resources. These are not merely floating around in popular mentality, these stereotypes are consciously constructed and maintained in films and also in academic discourses. This particular Call for Paper (CFP) for a journal issue, entitled “Assam: A Citizenship Battleground” (Cached link)to be published under University of York project entitled Rethinking Civil Society: History, Society, Critique caught our attention and quite a few of us discussed it and decided to address the issue.

The result was a statement of concern, which is not about a closed academic discussion but more about placing the northeast of India, Assam in particular in a more complex frame of reference for a global readership. This was also making people of the region aware of the developments taking place in academic circles in the West. The NRC and CAA has captured a lot of global press and as it happens, the margins get distorted in the generalised narrative.

The original Call for Papers  cannot be accessed now, because after we sent our letter of concern to  Prof. Timothy Stanton, The Chief Investigator, Rethinking Civil Society: History, Society, Critique, University of York, the original call was taken down and it seems they are working on a new Call for Papers.

Screenshots of the original announcements and the original Call for Paper document which are no longer available online.

If you have any concerns about the statement, please address them to concernedcitizensofassam@gmail.com

OUR STATEMENT OF CONCERN

Prof. Timothy Stanton,
The Chief Investigator,
Rethinking Civil Society: History, Society, Critique
University of York

Date: 14 July, 2020

Subject: Note of urgent concern regarding the proposed journal titled ‘Assam: A Citizenship Battleground’ under your project

Dear Prof. Stanton,

The Call for Papers (CFP) for a journal issue, entitled “Assam: A Citizenship Battleground”, published on various social media platforms by Dr. Rudabeh Shahid, a Research Fellow in the project ‘Rethinking Civil Society: History, Society, Critique’, of which you are the Chief Investigator, has come to our notice. The authors of this CFP are, Dr. Shahid and Dr. Mohsin Alam Bhatt, Associate Professor at Jindal Global University, India.We the undersigned, are alarmed at the disinformation and manipulation of facts pertaining to not just the Northeastern state of India, Assam, but the laws and state processes that the journal purports to examine academically.

Through this statement we would like to highlight the disinformation and collapsing of complex historical and political terms into seemingly falsified categories intended to create misleading narratives, which will in turn only work against the fragile peace and delicate multi-ethnic ethos of the frontierised regions of Assam and the Northeast of India as a whole. Below we list out in detail the multiple issues with the framing and construction of the CFP which leads audiences to certain preconceived biases against a large chunk of people in South Asia consisting of many indigenous communities.

1. The NRC (National Register for Citizens) and the CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) are separate legal processes. They are clubbed together as if they were conceived of by the state together. The NRC in Assam again is completely different from the proposed all-India NRC. The authors misleadingly state that ‘the government had already implemented NRC’ in Assam. The NRC in Assam was a long standing demand from all sections of the society going back to the mid 1980s. The NRC was started under direct supervision of the Honorable Supreme Court of India, and under the then Congress led state government in Assam. The current government in both the state and the centre, do not have any role in the implementation of the NRC in Assam. It is the Supreme Court which initiated and oversaw the whole NRC process till its culmination in 2019.
2. The authors state in the CFP that ‘critics have argued that these policies are discriminatory and violate Article 14 of the Indian Constitution that prohibits arbitrary targeting based on religion’. While there may be justified reasons why the religious minority communities in India oppose the all India NRC, the argument presented by the authors are misleading. The NRC in Assam was not based on religious identities or was constructed to identify people on the basis of their religions. It is the CAA which has been rightly critiqued as being discriminatory since citizenship is being offered to refugees of neighbouring countries on the basis of their religion. It seems there has been an apparently casual but, a deliberate mixing up of two different laws to suit a confirmation bias which goes against academic ethics.
3. The authors repeatedly combine the NRC and CAA as if they are the one and same process. It is thus important to state once again that the NRC in Assam is due to a long standing political demand by the people of the state which was finally approved by the Supreme Court of India and which had the political consent of all political parties and organisations operating from Assam. This process started during the UPA rule in India. The all-India NRC and the CAA were devised by the current BJP regime under Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
4. The history of conversion to Islam and migration is not uniform across India. And migration from erstwhile East Bengal, later East Pakistan and now Bangladesh does not affect parts of India as it does to Northeast (NER) India. While the CFP does not critique the current Modi government for its policies it goes on to call Assam as a battle ground for citizenship. To conflate the political stance in Assam with the larger and more sinister communal design of the BJP is a dangerous generalisation. We are sure not all Americans of New York believe in the racial politics of President Trump.
5. The authors signpost the violence in Delhi in February 2020 as a warning of future such events that may harm the secular characteristic of the Indian nation-state. What remains unclear is how is this explicit religion based violence in Delhi being linked to Assam or the NER. This CFP purports to be about citizenship in Assam, but the authors remain clueless on the issues that are of concern to Assam and the NER when it comes to citizenship. If the authors are interested in discussing the  inter-community relations in Assam or the NER, there are several entry points to it. But first let us be very clear that the communal binary of mainland India is not a frame of reference for Northeast India. A study of inter-community relations in the context of Northeast India would mean the relationship between dominant communities and marginalised communities, like different tribes. Thus, this conflation of religious based violence in Delhi to Assam points towards unnecessary but provocative and incendiary arguments that have no basis in the communitarian discourses in the  Northeast.
6. The authors’ arguments on ‘hostility’ and ‘resentment’ against communities deemed to be Bangladeshi, hides much more of the political and cultural struggles in Assam than they reveal.They argue that this is a resentment which has been witnessed since the last three decades. What the authors do not reveal is that the indigenous people of Assam have expressed their anxieties against settler colonialism that was in force ever since the British colonial administrations started on the colonial extractive economic policies in Assam and in the rest of the Northeast by the late 19th  century. This is the period where the British declared the official language of Assam to be Bengali rather than Assamese or any of its variants, the common lingua-franca in the region and it remained so for forty years. This was due to the British settling middle rung colonial administrative employees in Assam from Bengal. The British annexed the Bengali majority Sylhet district in East Bengal to Assam in the 1870s without consultation with native indigenous communities of Assam. In the mid 20th century, the East Bengali political and religious leader Maulana Bhashani, publicly exhorted East Bengali peasants to forcefully occupy lands in Assam. Under the highly controversial Grow More Food campaign, British officials followed the policy of settling more peasants from East Bengal into Assam by arguing that there was always abundant land to settle in the immigrants. Village commons were categorised as ‘wastelands’. The indigenous people are opposed to undocumented and illegal immigrants for very valid reasons like scarcity of lands and resources.This movement of people did not stop with partition, it continued over the decades.Contrary to what partition narratives speak about, not all of them were refugees. Speculation on land continued even after 1947. The earthquake of 1950 changed the course of the Brahmaputra leading to massive erosion and landlessness, due to which many indigenous peoples had to ‘encroach’ on forests and live in forest villages. There are even many contemporary examples of how present government policies have forced landlessness upon indigenous communities who have been forced to live in relief camps for years. One example is that of two forest villages inside Dibru-Saikhowa National Park–for due to unavailability of land, the government has failed to relocate the indigenous Mising villagers though they were promised relocation two decades ago. Thus, this is not hostility or resentment against settlers, but more of anxieties of indigenous people of Assam who are faced with a loss of natural resources, including land.
7. Violence became a marker of the postcolonial period in Assam due to the struggles of the marginalised people against the more powerful Indian nation-state. Several draconian laws were enforced and people killed arbitrarily over the issues of ethnicity and identity. This violence was marked in almost all the states in the NER and not just in Assam. People in this region have lived under the shadow of armed forces.  This is where the tragic 1983 Nellie massacre needs to be located. This period of violence also saw indigenous people from Assam being killed by migrants. This period also led to a massive state repression where officially over 800 Assamese youth were killed by the Indian state, with many more maimed and left physically handicapped for life. The post-colonial politics also led to the rise of the insurgent group ULFA in Assam, which ultimately led to many deaths, including Assamese people in the decade of the 1990s up to the early 2000s. An honest academic assessment of the violence in Assam in this period would beg for a look into the whole history of violence and trauma among the many different communities in Assam. These facts are crucial and they do not take away from the other fact that the BJP does indeed engage in anti-minority politics not just in Assam, but across the country.
8. We also would like to point out the false equivalences that are being drawn in context with the illegal immigrants/undocumented migrants and the Rohingya situation. The NRC in Assam is not based on religion as pointed out repeatedly. Such an articulation, we believe, borders on ‘fear-mongering’. If such violence were to happen as has been predicted by some vested interests since the last two years, it has happened in Delhi in 2020 not in Assam. Bengalis are already the dominant community in Tripura, another state of the Northeast where the indigenous communities now have been reduced to a miniscule proportion of the demography.
9. The first resentments against the settlement of the surplus-oriented Bengali Muslim peasants emerged in western Assam’s Barpeta in 1930s. The Gorkha graziers and local farmers registered strong protests when the colonial government appropriated public commons under a land development scheme to open these lands for capitalist commercial agriculture by settler peasants from East Bengal. In the process of imposing the grid of ‘wastelands’ on public commons and opening these lands for “productive use” the revenue-oriented colonial government glossed over the local usufructuary history of these lands as grazing and local itinerant farming (pam kheti) tracts, which contributed in sowing seeds of conflict between the local land users and immigrant settlers from East Bengal. Another example of this sort of conflict, one of the earliest, can be traced to 1920s when Gorkha graziers in Burpachapori Professional Grazing Reserve of erstwhile Darrang district were evicted by the then Muslim League government of Assam to settle Bengali Muslim immigrant peasants on the grazing lands. Historian Amalendu Guha in his Planter Raj to Swaraj notes that between 1930-1936, 59 such grazing and village reserves were opened for settlement of immigrant Bengali peasants. These settlements, it is not hard to conceive, curtailed existing usufructuary rights on these lands. When looking at the “hostility” towards the Bengali Muslim peasants, one has to take into consideration this historical context. Besides, Guha also notes forceful occupation of forest commons by Bengali Muslim peasants under the leadership of Maulana Bhashani under the program “Direct Action” just before the partition. In the process, in many areas, the Bengali Muslim settler peasants enchroched on local land/forest use rights in one way or the other. Therefore, framing this conflict  as a “three decade of hostility against the Bengali Muslim peasants” is not only misleading, one-sided and out of the context, but would tantamount to instrumentalist and selective use of history.
10. We note a glaring disregard for the questions of frontierisation and militarisation which has plagued the Northeast in both the colonial and postcolonial period. What is explicitly argued in the CFP is a concern for bilateral relations with a complete disregard towards the violence and trauma that the constant militarisation has unleashed on the indigenous peoples of Assam as well as the rest of the Northeast. This CFP disregards any self-determination movement by the people of these frontier regions and thinks of them as a ‘law and order’ situation which needs cross border assistance to inflict further violence. The cycle of violence has claimed a generation of indigenous youth of Assam and the scars remain in the psyche of the people till date. Even as recently as December 2019, there was widespread militarisation of the state due to the protests against CAA which led to anxiety among the indigenous communities if the violence of the 1990s were to return. We are shocked at this casual dismissal of the violence and trauma by academics purporting to express empathy for the marginalised. The lens of looking at marginalisation needs to be broadened for this study, religious binary as proposed by the CFP is too simplistic as a frame of reference for understanding Assam. One needs to locate ethnicity and resource use as key entry points.
11. Lastly, even with the potential sub-topics, we would like to ask what does the umbrella term, Muslims, really mean. Because for the indigenous Muslim communities of Assam, such as the Goriya, Moriya, Deshi etc, the NRC was  welcomed and even today there is mass support for the NRC. If the CFP is concerned about settlers rather than the indigenous people, then the distinction should be made clear. There was also consensus among the migrant Muslim communities when the NRC process in Assam started.

Through this statement, we would like to make it clear that we do not oppose any academic engagement with Assam and its multitude of issues including the NRC and CAA. What we strongly object to are the bad-faith arguments leaning heavily on confirmation bias. We are aghast at this misleading agenda of the authors and would request you to kindly re-look and re-frame the objective of this project.

Yours’ Sincerely,

1. Holiram Terang, Veteran Karbi Leader, Political Activist
2. Harekrishna Deka, former DGP of Assam and Sahitya Akademi Award winning author and public intellectual
3. Rajeev Bhattacharyya, Senior Journalist and Author, Guwahati
4. Moinul Islam, General Secretary (i/c), Sodou Axom Goria Moria Deshi Jatiya Parishad (An Indigenous Assamese Muslim Body)
5. Nhkum Nongpion Singpho, Vice-president Pan Singpho Student Union, Margherita, Assam
6. Jayanta Kalita, Independent journalist and author; former Associate Editor, Hindustan Times
7. Santanu Borthakur, Senior Advocate, Gauhati High Court
8. Kamal Kumar Medhi, Poet, Social Activist and Spokesperson for Assam Pradesh Congress Committee
9. Kamal Nayan Misra, Teacher and Cultural Activist, Assam
10. Upamanyu Hazarika, Senior Advocate and Convenor of Prabajan Birodhi Manch, Assam
11. Kishor Kumar Kalita, Advocate and Writer, Guwahati
12. Sanjib Pol Deka, Assistant Professor, Department of Assamese, Tezpur University
13. Dwipen Bezbaurah, Professor, Department of Anthropology, Gauhati University
14. Suryasikha Pathak (Faculty, Centre for Tribal Studies, Assam University)
15. Bikash Kumar Bhattacharya (Independent researcher from Assam)
16. Sandipan Talukdar, Science Consultant and Researcher
17. Indraneel Agasty, Assistant Professor of Petroleum Engineering, Presidency University, Bengaluru
18. Kaustuv Saikia, District Museum Officer, Diphu, Karbi Anglong
19. Shaheen Ahmed, PhD Candidate (Cultural Studies), Monash University
20. Bidyum Medhi, PhD Candidate, Department of Modern Languages & Literatures, Johns Hopkins University
21. Gaurav Rajkhowa, Research Fellow, Dept. of Cultural Studies, Tezpur University
22. Sujata Hatibaruah, Assistant Professor, Puthimari College, Assam
23. Bonojit Hussain, Independent Researcher & farmer, Nalbari, Assam
24. Tonmoyee Rani Neog, Doctoral Fellow, Jawaharlal Nehru University
25. Sabina Yasmin Rahman, Assistant Professor, MGAHD-TISS
26. Ankur Tamuli Phukan, Independent Researcher
27. Sarat Phukan, Professor, Department of Geological Sciences, Gauhati University
28. Gargi Gayan, Assistant Professor, Krishna Kanta Handiqui State Open University
29. Rimpi Borah, Doctoral Fellow, Jawaharlal Nehru University
30. Shyamjyoti Saikia, PhD Candidate, Jawaharlal Nehru University
31. Abhijit Kamal Bhuyan, Chief Convener, Assam People Action Committee
32. Chinmoyee Das, Doctoral Fellow, Jawaharlal Nehru University
33. Abhishek Chakravarty, Advocate, Gauhati High Court
34. Daisy Barman, PhD Candidate, Gauhati University
35. Anonymous
36. Kuldeep Patowary, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Gauhati University
37. Anonymous
38. Meenal Tula, Senior Research Associate, North Eastern Social Research Centre, Guwahati
39. Kaustav Padmapati, Assistant Professor, The Royal Global University, Assam
40. Himangka Kaushik, Research Analyst, TERI School of Advanced Studies, New Delhi
41. Dhanmani Kalita, Assistant Professor, Dept. of History, Bikali College, Assam
42. Kaushik Talukdar, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Philipps University, Marburg
43. Rhiddhis Chakravorty, Journalist
44. Noihrit Gogoi, Student, Delhi University
45. Rituraj Dewan, Co-founder, 7WEAVES Social Pvt Ltd,Guwahati Assam
46. Beda Prakash Dutta, Junior Research Fellow, Jawaharlal Nehru University
47. Akhyai Jyoti Mahanta, MPhil Student, Dibrugarh University
48. Lizashree Hazarika, PhD Research Scholar, Jawaharlal Nehru University
49. Indrani Baruah, Architect, Designer and Visual Artist, San Francisco/Berkeley Bay Area
50. Simanta G. Sharma, Healthcare Professional
51. Anonymous
52. Silpisikha Baruah, Research Scholar, Jawaharlal Nehru University
53. Neil Baruwati, Finance Consultant
54. Arijeet Boruah, Energy Consultant, Assam
55. Reme Boruah, Deputy Manager, GIC Re, Mumbai
56. Hrideep Das, Educator and Social Activist
57. Jahnabi Chakravarty, PhD Scholar, NIT Meghalaya, Shillong
58. Tarun Gogoi, Research Scholar, Jawaharlal Nehru University
59. Shikha Moni Borah, Research Scholar, Jawaharlal Nehru University
60. Nikhil Malakar, Doctoral Candidate, Jawaharlal Nehru University
61. Homen Saikia, MA Student, University of Hyderabad
62. Sanghamitra Gogoi, MBA student, Assam Don Bosco University
63. Raj Shekhar Nath, MA Student, Jawaharlal Nehru University
64. Subrat Talukdar, Political Activist, Guwahati
65. Ajitabh Hazarika, PhD candidate, Tezpur University
66. Aniruddha Bora, Public Health Professional, Assam
67. Porosha Sonowal, PhD candidate, Tezpur University
68. Bornil Jonak Phukan, PhD candidate, Tezpur University
69. Piyush Joshi, Energy Sector Professional
70. Syed Shakeel Imdad, Management Consultant
71. Chinmoy Madhurya Deka, MA Student, University of Delhi
72. Shruti Bora, Student, Calcutta University
73. Jayanta Gogoi, Software Engineer, Mumbai
74. Shilpi Sikha Das, Research Scholar, Jawaharlal Nehru University
75. Aryan Baruah, IT Professional
76. Dimpi Saikia, Engineer
77. Munmi Pathak, PhD Candidate, Jawaharlal Nehru University
78. Aditya Bakshi, Student
79. Kuldeep Bhattacharjya, Independent Researcher based in Delhi from Assam
80. Afrida Hussain, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, INSIDENE
81. Bidit Deka, Advocate, Delhi High Court

The post How Global Academia Represents Assam & Northeast India appeared first on RAIOT.

Comment on In the Name of the Nation: India and its Northeast, by Sanjib Baruah; Stanford University Press, 2020.

A “war of all against all” is a constant possibility in what the 17^th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes called the state of nature. In the Hobbesian state of nature, individual human heads risk being chopped off any time because a coercive and singular sovereign head is yet to arise, through a social contract, to rule over people. Hobbes famously described life in such a condition as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. The concept of the state of nature might appear hypothetical or a thing of the past, but Hobbes was sure that one of its examples was to be found among “the savage people in many places of America”, who, he claimed, “have no government at all, and live at this day in that brutish manner”. These days, political commentators use the phrase “war of all against all” mainly to describe violent group conflicts, rather than strife among supposedly self-interested individuals. In so doing, many of them tend to imply that the actors caught up in these clashes also belong in a war-prone state of nature.

This premise is not uncommon for the representation of events in Northeast India. Reflecting on the horrific Nellie massacre of 1983 —which had left more than 2000 people dead – an editorial in The New Republic once declared: In much of the “third world”, “[t]he idea of the nation competes with the idea of the tribe. In places like Assam it is losing the competition”. Swinging haphazardly between news analysis and political theory, the editorial emphasised that “Indians do indeed have an obligation to their constitution”. “But”, it asked, “what is a constitution to a place like Assam?”

One need not only be a high-hat constitutionalist to arrive at such questions – or conclusions. Many opinions converge on the proposition that the roots of violence in Northeast India lie in the fierce communal loyalties that drive the locals. Since the belligerent “natives” are by nature averse to modern democracy – it seems to be assumed – a social contract remains elusive. Such commentary, however, has offered astonishingly little other than stale conjectures about the inherent tribalism of certain communities.

What if the violence suspected to be symptomatic of an alleged state of nature is also caused, in no small part, by the demands of the constitutional nation-state? One way to read In the Name of the Nation: India and its Northeast (Stanford University Press, 2020)– the latest book by political scientist Sanjib Baruah – is as a compelling account of how that may have been the case in India’s Northeast.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

In 1978, S. L. Shakdher, India’s then Chief Election Commissioner, made a series of public statements, reporting the “large-scale inclusion of foreign nationals in the electoral rolls” of Assam. In a rare display of alarm, the commissioner went on to warn that “a stage would be reached when the state [Assam] may have to reckon with the foreign nationals who may in all probability constitute a sizeable percentage, if not the majority of the population”. Shakdher drew attention to “the disturbing…demand made by the political parties for the inclusion in the electoral rolls of the names of such migrants who are not Indian citizens without even questioning or properly determining their citizenship status”. This he called “a serious state of affairs.”

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Assamese civil society organizations interpreted this “state of affairs” as the most recent and glaring instance of what they considered a longstanding indifference of the Indian political establishment to the state’s concerns. In the ensuing public deliberations in an embittered Assamese public sphere, the memory of various regional struggles of the preceding decades was invoked. In popular memory, the most significant among these was the battle fought by the Assam Provincial Congress leaders for the inclusion of the province within the Republic of India at Partition, as against the competing plans of the Muslim League. By now, to a large segment of Assam’s citizenry – historian Ramachandra Guha once described – the state’s place in the republic appeared to be nothing more than that of “an ‘internal colony,’ supplying cheap raw materials for metropolitan India to process and profit from.” The Chief Election Commissioner’s words thus provided ample fuel for a volcanic eruption of what Baruah, in this book, calls “regional patriotism”.

Ironically, the stance taken on unauthorized immigration by leaders of what became the Assam Movement was, for all practical purposes, almost indistinguishable from that of the Government of India until the early 1970s. Assam was already identified by several agencies of the Government of India as facing “the problem of illegal immigration” from present-day territories of Bangladesh – erstwhile East Pakistan – ever since Partition. In 1964, the Government of India introduced a judicial process for the suspected unauthorized immigrants by enacting The Foreigners (Tribunal) Order. Unchecked immigration into Assam through the porous international borders thus had all the ingredients forconsiderable conflict, especially considering the continuous assertions and counter-assertions of Assamese and Bengali activist groups over the linguistic identity of Assam. Yet, a lid was put on the issue by the ruling Congress Party in Assam, Baruah contends, once “the tensions over refugee settlement in the immediate post-Partition years subsided”. They did it through creative management of what Baruah terms “the ambiguities of citizenship”. This involved the adoption of a “nondiscriminatory and open-to-all approach to the franchise”.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

What the statements from the Election Commission and the public reaction to them did was flag an under-noticed legal fact – “the exercise of franchise in India does not depend on formal certificates of citizenship,” to quote Baruah. For the longest time, a wide variety of documents, including the “ration card”, could qualify a person to exercise franchise in India. What this meant for Assam has been described by political scientist Kamal Sadiq in the following way: “Bengali speakers were overwhelming Assamese-language speakers, and as a result of the successful illegal immigration of Bengali Muslims, they were influencing regional elections in modern Assam, an indication of their full membership as suffraged noncitizens”.  As political theorist Niraja Gopal Jayal once observed, “kinship networks and money were reasonable guarantees of registration on the electoral rolls” for such suffraged noncitizens. “Assiduously courted by the Congress Party,” Jayal noted, “the vulnerability of these people on account of their religious identity had made them Congress sympathizers and eager voters”.

The moral foundations of a movement calling for the electoral disenfranchisement and subsequent deportation of “suffraged noncitizens” – in order to protect indigenous identity, land, and resources – remained debated throughout. However, “the fault lines between the normative definition of citizenship in Indian law and the actual exercise of franchise being based on rudimentary documents”, Baruah writes, became “the epicenter of a veritable political explosion”.

Fundamental to the Assam Movement was the opposition to the holding of elections in Assam without a corrected voter list. This opposition was soon fused with demands for greater local control over land and natural resources and the protection of the identity of the Assamese people. The matter of who all constitute the Assamese has unsurprisingly remained contested till date. Be that as it may, according to the agitation leaders, not less than 4.5 to 5 million people in Assam – which would constitute 31 to 34 percent of Assam’s population in 1971 – were “illegal immigrants”. The leaders claimed that the state’s electoral rolls were filled with names of hundreds of thousands of unauthorized foreigners.

The Movement’s key demand being the deletion of the names of such persons from the electoral roll, its ideologues and leaders based their arguments in good part on India’s legal and constitutional frameworks. However, this presumed legality did not prevent the appearance of dangerous schisms in the Brahmaputra valley, the geographical theater of the agitation. As Baruah notes, “the labels that gained currency – Bangladeshi, illegal immigrant, and foreigner –sounded menacing to many.”

With the intensification of the Movement came repeated rounds of President’s Rule to Assam. By December 1982, it somehow appeared to the Congress’s national leadership that the party stood a chance of returning to power in the state if the elections were held then. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi soon called for the elections to the Assam State Assembly. A political resolution to the issues raised by the movement was yet to be reached, including that of the revision of electoral rolls. Agitators who had lost their lives were by then declared martyrs. “To almost no one’s surprise, the leaders of the Assam Movement called for a boycott of the elections,” notes the book.

The book presents a reported conversation – from when the elections were about to be announced – between a journalist of a New Delhi-based publication and a senior national leader of the Congress Party. The Congress leader, a close political associate of the Prime Minister, confidently claimed that people wanted elections in Assam. The journalist – alert to the reality of the political situation – replied in disbelief: “But who told you that? There will be bloodshed”. The Congress leader however shrugged off the journalist’s concerns and said: “If you put 5,000 of them in jail for the election period, the problem is solved. It is only the mischief-mongers you have to tackle. The rest of the people will have a sigh of relief. You don’t know how powerful the government can be”.

The alleged “mischief-mongers” – recognized more widely as the frontline leaders of a mass movement —were indeed put in jail. While the leaders of the Movement deemed the election boycott as Assam’s “final fight for survival” and characterized the resistance in a regional patriotic idiom, politicians of the national parties framed the migration-centered conflict in Assam predominantly within, what Baruah would call, “the Indian discourse of “communalism” – the bureaucratic euphemism for Hindu-Muslim conflicts”. In the run-up to the election, New Delhi-based politicians arrived in Assam and made fervent speeches – and not infrequently in violence-provoking language – for and against the election.

In its official pronouncements, the central government cited “constitutional compulsion” for holding the elections. The manner in which they were imposed patently flew in the face of the constitutional ideal of “free and fair” elections.

The elections were indeed held, despite the popular boycott in the Brahmaputra valley.

Carnage followed.

“[A] blood-spattered vindication of a heartless government’s sudden constitutional piety”, was how an India Todayreport on March 15, 1983 characterized the violence. On May 31, 1983, the magazine carried a detailed investigative report that described the events in these words:

In Nellie Lalung tribals killed Bengali Muslims; in Kokrajhar subdivision Boro Kacharis fought Bengali Hindus and Muslims; in Goreswar and Khairabari Sarani and Boro Kacharis fought Bengali Hindus; in Gohpur Boros fought Assamese Hindus; in Dhemaji and Jonai Mishing tribals fought Bengali Hindus and Muslims; in Samaguri Muslims killed Hindus; in Dhaila and Thekrabari again Muslims killed Hindus; in Chawlkhowa Chapori, Assamese Hindus and Muslims together killed Bengali Muslims. And each community that was a victim in one place was the predator in another.

This latter report concluded with a pessimistic assessment: “The elections in Assam mark not the culmination of a process but just a milestone: should they prevail, they shall certainly become a precedent. Hence it is that if the Assam elections survive, democracy cannot.”

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

The post The Bounds of the Nation appeared first on RAIOT.

What does it take to build a nation? Hiren Gohain and Sanjib Baruah once had a prolonged debate on the stakes of nationalism during the Assam Movement in the 1980s. Professor Gohain, broadly skeptical of the Assam Movement, argued that it was a bourgeois reaction to the consolidation of communist organizing in the region. Professor Baruah, more sympathetic, suggested that it was a strategic mobilization responding to India’s continued treatment of Assam as a colony. Revisiting that debate, one is struck less by their disagreements— which were many and profound—but by the impossibility of that argument today. This is partly because of the intervening forty years, of course, especially the collapse of the organized Left, the rise (and betrayal) of ULFA, and the saffronization of nationalism, such that even imagining it could be an emancipatory vision seems ludicrous these days. It is also because, as both Professors Gohain and Baruah emphasize in their recent books, the rest of the country never grasped the sheer novelty of the Assam Movement. Most of us today remember the Assam Movement only insofar as it led to the Assam Accord, which we in turn blame for the NRC and the CAA. Read together, Professors Gohain and Baruah offer us an important corrective to that narrow and self-serving narrative, even as they highlight different aspects of the complex history and consequences of that moment in Indian history.

Professor Baruah’s new book, In the Name of the Nation, is (in my reading) the final book of a trilogy that began with India Against Itself. In that book, he discusses extensively the trajectory of the Assam Movement, starting with colonial mapping and settlement policies and concluding with the rise of SULFA, the demand for Bodoland, and the fracture of what he calls (in that work) Assamese sub-nationalism. His next book, Durable Disorder, expanded the discussion to contemporary northeastern India more broadly. It ends with a justly famous (and prescient) call for layered sovereignty and a political order that recognizes rights on the basis of both residence and origin— a new “grammar of citizenship” that undoes the imperial association between territoriality and indigeneity.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

In the Name of the Nation is Professor Baruah’s most wide-ranging and erudite book yet, offering a sweeping denunciation of both “development” and “border security” as oppressive frameworks through which to view the region. The conceptual core of the book, however, remains his unflinching interrogation into the question of homelands: can we theorize a politics of indigeneity in places where the claim to aboriginality is impossible to establish? How do nations, those unwieldy amalgamations of people and places, get built and dismantled? How was it that, for a few decades in the middle of the 20^th century, someone could be Assamese and Ahom, Assamese and Bodo, Assamese and Miya? Can we recapture that lost imagination? Should we? Can a political concept as tarnished as self-determination achieve anything besides further fragmentation?

Assam, Professor Baruah reminds us, is as complex a construction as India itself. It can be useful to think of nations as forms of political gravity, drawing communities together into a mutual frame of reference. At its height, the Assam Movement incorporated caste-Hindus, Assamese Muslims, Plains Tribes, Hill Tribes, (some) Tea Tribes, and Miya Muslims. The movement identified, rightly or wrongly, a shared set of grievances (dispossession) and isolated certain causes for it (migration) around which an agitation was mounted. Much of the debate between Professors Baruah and Gohain back then was about the validity of this causal reasoning, the stratification within the movement, and about the nature of the violence the movement engendered. They certainly agree, however, about the fact of dispossession— and that the Assam Accord has been unsuccessful at addressing it. In the decades since, the coalition underpinning Assamese nationalism has fallen apart, resulting in considerable bloodshed as well as some remarkable Constitutional innovations, such as the extension of the Sixth Schedule to the Bodos, a plains tribe (bypassing the ethnographic logic of the schedule itself, but that is another essay.) In any case, the center did not hold, and we now live in the shadow of that fallen hegemony. Yet, as we all know, the center never holds; what is interesting, rather, is the scatter pattern it leaves in its wake— and it is here that Professor Gohain has such rich insights to offer us.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Struggling in a Time Warp is an anthology of Professor Gohain’s essays across the last three decades. It is an eclectic and fascinating glimpse into a powerfully curious mind, including essays on matters as diverse as the Bhakti movement, Rabindranath Tagore, and Marxist theory. Most of the book, however, is proof of Professor Gohain’s sustained and granular engagement with Assamese history, especially after 1930. He is thus deeply attuned to the fault lines of Assamese nationalism: why it was, for instance, that it bolstered the fortunes of certain communities (such as Assamese Hindus), left others unsatisfied (such as Bodos) and sacrificed some (such as Miyas). “The history of the Assamese middle class” he writes in one essay “is one of tragic deformation under imperialist rule.” In this way it remains, as he reiterates in several essays, a mirror to the Indian nationalism which it both challenges and incorporates— and it is just as plagued by sanguinary anxieties about purity and unity.Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

The broad contours of Professor Gohain’s argument resonate with the famous Naxal thesis that India is a “prison-house of nationalities,” though the conclusions he draws from that analysis are very different from the armed insurrection advocated by earlier generations of radical thinkers. Tempered by decades of insurgency, his essays urge us, rather, to imagine new forms of solidarity that are less hampered by the violent exclusions of nationalisms. The depredations of global capital, he reminds us, are neither distributed nor contained by nation-states— a fact that the pandemic has made even more evident— and neither should we be. The way forward demands a return to our shared past, so that we may write fresh histories that include people formerly relegated to the footnotes.

In the introduction to Time Warp, Professor Gohain describes the formation of the Plains Tribal League in late colonial India and the pivotal role it played in Assamese politics during the turbulent decade before Partition. First allied with the Muslim League, which formed the provincial government in 1937, the Tribal League shifted its allegiance to the Indian National Congress after the Cabinet Mission Plan in 1946, thereby making the INC the dominant actor in local politics. Without this support, northeastern India might well be a part of Bangladesh today, or even, as the British once intended, remained a crown colony. Yet this crucial political intervention was quickly forgotten, as racist stereotypes about the “primitive” tribes of Assam were restored in the imagination of the new nation— a forgetting that, unfortunately, the Assam Movement did little to remedy.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Nations are betrayed even as they are imagined, and Professor Gohain documents the manner in which the Assam Movement was steadily co-opted from the moment of its inception: by electoral politics, class opportunism, and the central government. He teaches us, further, that such patterns are neither random nor inevitable: history sediments, but it does not repeat. Nations might be forged by incorporating existing communities with distinctive networks of association and exchange, but no nation leaves either those networks or those communities unchanged. One of the great flaws of nationalist historiography is essentialism: it first posits the timeless unity of the nation it seeks to accomplish and then assumes it. In doing so, it disguises the compromises and changes national inclusion demands, blinding us to the reality that when nations fall, they leave behind new histories and utterly transformed political communities.

It is in the fate of nations to fall. This is easy to forget when one conflates nations with nation-states, which combine the fragile imaginary of nationhood with the sturdy apparatus of statehood. Yet, to paraphrase Foucault, when the nation first spoke, it spoke against the state. This is the legacy “sub-nationalisms” remind us of: that there is no such thing as a natural nation that survives history unscathed. Nations are constantly being imagined, contested, betrayed, and ultimately forgotten. India has been re-imagined countless times in the decades after Independence; as we are all bitterly aware, we are living through a comprehensive reinvention of what it means to be Indian. Yet the solution to our present crisis isn’t to be found in a nostalgic return to an older “idea of India” that was magically more inclusive or less cynical— both these books demonstrate that it absolutely was not. India breaks Assam to build itself, and it is doing so yet again. In the months and years to come, we will undoubtedly debate how we can build a better nation, and even whether we should. But perhaps the question to ask first is: what did it take to build the nation we have?

The post How to Make and Unmake India and its Northeast appeared first on RAIOT.

Greetings like “Comrade” or “Lal Salam” can land one in jail under the UAPA as per NIA’s chargesheet against Bittu Sonowal. When greetings start triggering anti-terror laws, it becomes important to revisit the definition of ‘anti-terror’. Every right guaranteed to citizen comes with a caveat taking away the absoluteness of such laws. For example, Article 19(1)(a) of the Indian Constitution guarantees the freedom of speech and expression and at the same time Article 19(2) allows for reasonable restrictions to be imposed on the same freedom to speech and expression. While in principle, exceptions might not be problematic, yet exceptions are usually used to quell voices of the opposition.

Extra-ordinary laws are not uncommon in the region. Starting from colonial times extra-ordinary laws have been part of Indian legal system. It is also important to reiterate here that, it is not only the current Government that has invoked UAPA, during the regime of UPA too, it has been invoked to suppress the voices of many. In last few years, there have been a series of arrests of the human rights activists in the Bhima Koregaon case to Meeran Haider and Safoora Zargar, student activists from Jamia Milia Islamia, in relation to anti-CAA protests. Adding to the list are the two student activists from Jawaharlal Nehru University associated with Pinjra Tod who have been slapped with UAPA. Gautam Navlakha who surrendered before the NIA headquarters in Delhi on 14 April 2020, wrote, “Under this double whammy (of the provisions under UAPA) jail becomes the norm, and bail an exception. In this Kafkaesque domain, process itself becomes punishment”. The arrest of Navlakha to Safoora Zargar including the previous arrests of human rights activists, none of whom have been granted bail, it appears all chaotic. But in this apparent chaos, there is an order. The order to suppress the voices of human rights activists or people in general who have voiced their opinion for the people otherwise excluded by the development agenda of the Government.

This order started off with discrediting of the term intellectual, as if being an intellectual or a thinking individual was criminal. Janaki Nair wrote in this context referring to the Gurmehar Kaur’s case, “One of the main casualties of this rising anti-intellectualism is the refusal of those attacking our institutions, individuals and practices to engage with the fullness of speech, its metaphoric nuances, its cadences and abstractions, even its confusions” (Indian Express, March 10, 2017). When the term “Urban-naxal” was used for the five activists arrested in the Bhima-Koregaon case, no one knew what it really meant. In fact in a recent RTI filed by India Today Group, the Left Wing Extremism Division in the Union Home Ministry did not have any information on who are “Urban Naxals” and where they operate inspite of the repeated use of the term by many in the Government (India Today, February 7, 2020). So where do we locate the term ‘Urban Naxal’ ? Vivek Agnihotri used the term “Urban-Naxal” hours before activists such as lawyer Sudha Bharadwaj, poet P. Varavara Rao and journalist Gautam Navlakha were arrested on the charge of being conspirators in the Bhima-Koregaon violence in 2018. Agnihotri, in his book titled “Urban Naxals” apparently “exposes” the nexus between an India-wide Maoist terror movement and their supporters in urban centres such as academia and media. It needs to be noted here that the role that intellectuals from the academia or media played in negotiating the space between the people excluded by the State and the State itself is not unknown; the only thing that is new here is the criminalisation of the role played by intellectuals. Nirmalangshu Mukherji, wrote in 2013, “Given the role of the media and the official political order, who will assist the people to resist? This urgent question reopens the old issue of responsibility of the intelligentsia interpreting and changing the role. In particular, intellectuals in academia and mainstream media — teachers, writers, journalists and other managers of ideas— enjoy, perhaps, the maximum benefits of the combined effects of democracy, freedom of expression, globalisation of knowledge and skewed economic development”(N. Mukherji, The Maoists in India, p. 76).

The genesis of UAPA

How is UAPA different from other extra-ordinary laws? If we dig the history of extra-ordinary laws we can go as back as colonial laws, but the laws that were similar in nature of UAPA is TADA and POTA which were also anti-terror laws. The Indian parliament till today has so far enacted three anti-terror laws, the Terrorist and disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA) in 1985, the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) in 2002 and the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) in 2004. TADA lapsed in 1995 and POTA was repealed in 2004. The repeal of POTA was also followed by amendment of an existing law- the Unlawful Activities prevention Act, 1967 (UAPA). This amendment of 2004 made changes to the definition of “terrorist act”, “terrorist organisation” from the repealed POTA and included POTA provisions pertaining to punishment for terrorist activities and organisations. UAPA (2004) therefore, absorbs the provision of both TADA and POTA.

Changes since 2019

The UAPA too has been amended on multiple occasions. The most recent amendment came in 2019 (UAPA, 2019) which dealt with expanding the definition of “terrorist” to include individuals. The amendment does not specify the grounds of terming an individual as a terrorist. Prior to the Amendment, only organisations could have been designated that way and individuals were not covered. This has the effect of allowing the National Investigation Agency much greater scope to take control of cases that would otherwise fall under the domain of the police in individual states. Those arrested under UAPA can be in prison up to 180 days or more without a charge sheet being filed. The case filed against Akhil Gogoi affirms this point. Akhil Gogoi was initially arrested for his alleged involvement in the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) protests in Assam last year but later on he was brought under the custody of NIA and charges were levelled against him under UAPA. A report of December 2019 said, “The NIA has formally taken up the investigation in the case and has booked Gogoi for waging a war against the Nation. The investigation in the case has been formally transferred to NIA, who will now look into the case.” (The Print, 15 December 2019).

In addition to above, the ‘sunset clause’ also differentiates UAPA from TADA and POTA. Inspite of wide misuse of TADA and POTA laws, it had a ‘sunset clause’ according to which these laws can be repealed if it is established that their existence is no longer required. Under a ‘sunset’ provision, a law will cease to be in operation after a fixed point of time unless further legislative action is taken to extend the law but the UAPA is a permanent statute.

The process shouldn’t become punishment

The recent unrest in Assam is associated with the arrest of Bittu Sonowal, a close aide of Akhil Gogoi. NIA, in its chargesheet against Sonowal, mentioned that he has referred to some of his friends as ‘Comrade’ and used words such as ‘Lal Salam’ among others. In the chargesheet filed on May 29, it was also mentioned that Sonowal uploaded a photo of Lenin with the words, ‘The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them’ (Outlook, June 4, 2020).

#lalsalaamComrade was trending on twitter ranked as number one on 10th Jun 2020. This was the response from the activists to these categorisation of “terrorist” by such laws. The problem with these laws is that it has a scope of misuse. The above mentioned incident appears farcical. Another primary critique of anti-terror laws is that it bypasses constitutional safeguards that are provided in the constitution for a fair trail. The anti-terror laws should be implemented with utmost seriousness, such incidences make a mockery of theses laws. The blatant use of the UAPA should not make way for everyday violations of human rights, especially when the entire country is going through a period of crisis owing to the pandemic.

The post #Comrade #LalSalam #UAPA #Terror appeared first on RAIOT.

In the evening of 25 May 2020, George Floyd, a 46 years old African-American man was choked to death by Derek Chauvin, a white police officer of the Minneapolis Police Department, an incident that sparked massive outrage and protest demonstrations against police brutality and lack of police accountability and racism, in the United States of America and around the world. Subsequently, Chauvin had been initially charged with manslaughter and third-degree murder, which was later elevated to second-degree murder, and three other accomplices – Tou Thao, Thomas Lane, and J. Alexander Kueng – were charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

At around 00:30 AM on 15 June 2020, a team of Indian Army personnel under Major Sachin Sinha of 244 Field Regiment based in Charaideo assisted by a team of Assam Police under Amit Kumar Hojai, Sub-Divisional Police Officer, Titabor and Mintu Kumar Handique, Officer-in-Charge (OC) of Borholla Police Station (PS) picked up Jayanta Borah, 25 years old son of late Hem Borah who had served in the Indian Army, from his home at Balijan Gabhoru Ali, Kakodonga Habi Gaon, Borholla in Jorhat district in Assam where he lived with his old mother, Lila Borah. At the time of taking Jayanta Borah into custody, no arrest warrant was shown or handed over to Lila Borah, nor were the village headman and the Village Defence Party (VDP) informed by the joint team of the Indian Army and Assam Police. Instead, Mintu Kumar Handique allegedly made Jayanta Borah’s illiterate mother sign on a paper with a heading “No Objection (Military Custody).”

After he had been brought to Borholla PS, Jayanta Borah succumbed to death in police custody on that very night, almost within an hour, because of heinous custodial torture. The register entry of Jayanta Borah at Borholla Community Health Centre (CHC) records the time of admission as 01:15 AM on 15 June and according to Dr. Dolen Borah, who was on duty when Jayanta Borah was taken to Borholla CHC, there was no consciousness, no pulse rate, no blood pressure, and no nerve pulse in his body and he died midway to the Jorhat Medical College Hospital (JMCH). This is also confirmed in the Medico Legal Case (MLC) record in the JMCH. The photographs of the dead body of Jayanta Borah prove that he had been a subject to vicious and fatal assault by the Indian Army and Assam Police while he was in custody (there were severe injuries on his head and ear, and the result of severe blows to his genitalia could be clearly seen).

Once details of Jayanta Borah’s extrajudicial killing came to light, his family members and the villagers refused to receive the dead body unless preliminary investigation began after identifying the perpetrators of custodial violence and murder within 24 hours. Lila Borah filed a first information report (FIR) at Borholla PS on 15 June 2020. However, instead of swiftly and impartially probing into Jayanta Borah’s death, Deputy Inspector General (DIG) of Police, Shiv Prasad Ganjawala attempted to downplay the custodial murder as baseless and defend and protect the culprits who are otherwise supposedly the custodians of law and order by brazenly lying in front of the media that Jayanta Borah was alive when the team of Indian Army admitted him in the JMCH.

Despite concerted efforts to pacify the agitated family and the protesting villagers by the district administration, high ranking officers of Assam Police as well as local representatives of the government, the people refused to be silent over the custodial murder of an innocent youth. At the behest of the Chief Minister of the state, Sarbananda Sonowal, a couple of ministers in the Assam government and a Member of Parliament visited Jayanta Borah’s house. Subsequently, three police officers – Sub-Divisional Police Officer of Titabor, Amit Kumar Hojai, Borholla PS OC, Mintu Kumar Handique, and Bekajan Police Outpost In- Charge, Gopal Doley – were suspended. However, the suspended police officers have not yet been arrested or taken into custody for interrogation, nor has any action been taken against Major Sachin Sinha and his team of 8 Indian Army personnel.

But, mere suspension of the three police officers cannot be accepted as consolation. The officers of Assam Police and the Indian Army personnel, including Major Sachin Sinha must be charged with murder, and the others who stood by and did nothing should be charged as accomplices to the murder. They must be immediately terminated and arrested for their crime.

While the murder of George Floyd saw the American State apparatuses work swiftly to terminate and charge the perpetrators for their crime, the extrajudicial killing of Jayanta Borah is yet to be acknowledged by the Indian State apparatuses as an institutional murder. Instead, what we have seen are despicable attempts by the concerned authorities to downplay the murder and conciliate the agitating people that invariably lead us to question the role of the law and its legitimacy. There is almost an everyday history of extrajudicial and custodial killings especially by the armed forces empowered by the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) in the northeastern region of India (and indeed in Jammu and Kashmir) that always keep reminding us of the authoritarian and violent qualities of the law.

What we have seen time and again is that the law is always asymmetrical in its application – those who are not deemed to be police property, that is, those who occupy a privileged position as custodians and representatives of the formal legal system are treated differently by the law. In the “India: Annual Report on Torture 2019” recently published on 26 June 2020 by the National Campaign Against Torture (NCAT), it was brought to light that 125 people died in police custody in 2019, while 1606 people died in judicial custody in the same year. According to the “India: Annual Report on Torture 2018” published by Asian Centre for Human Rights (ACHR), 147 people died in police custody and 1819 people died in judicial custody in 2018. In the Indian context, it is very rare to find instances where the institution of law opens itself to legal scrutiny, allowing its own rules – with their seemingly, and suspiciously ‘clear’ demarcations of what kind of treatment is reserved for what kind of actions – to apply to itself. Instead, absolute impunity is granted to the perpetrators of custodial torture. But, those who are deemed to be police property – the unprivileged, the lesser privileged, the migrants, the workers, the dissenters, the minorities, etc. – always encounter the law in its direct and violent form, while its own custodians and representatives are always granted exemptions not afforded to anyone else, thus establishing institutionalised inequality.

While demanding justice for Jayanta Borah and his family, as well as exemplary and appropriate punishment for his murderers, we must reflect on the legal system that operates by a form of preventive repression – that is, the law operates by instilling a fear in its ‘subjects’, in the form of a perpetual, really existing ‘threat’ of punishment if one is not deemed to be a ‘law-abiding citizen’ – which is an exercise of direct, brutal repression for one category of people and that of an exemption for another category of people. The law as a non-contradictory, comprehensive system is only tendentially true. Therefore, it is also not wrong to say that most of the times, the law operates illegally.Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

The armed forces are institutionally trained to kill. The police forces are trained to institutionally represent the law. It is precisely the nature of this ‘training’ which necessitates that human rights education be imparted to all personnel in both the forces. Only then the law could be accepted as legitimate and deemed to be equal for everyone. Otherwise the old Orwellian metaphor – all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others – would continue to haunt the society and the state.

The post You have heard of George Floyd from USA but what about Jayanta Borah of Assam? appeared first on RAIOT.