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Umh!, Whats this? |
Special Report /
February 2001
Agenda Assam
Who is responsible for the unprecedented attacks on Hindi–speaking
Biharis and Marwaris in Assam since November? ULFA backed by the ISI, says
the Indian State, but less partisan reports are sceptical
BY SARBARI BHAUMIK
The Assam governor lieutenant general
SK Sinha (retd) has taken several initiatives
in the strife–torn state ever
since he took charge. He tried to get the parents of ULFA leaders to agree
to a long march for peace from Upper Assam to the capital in Guwahati.
He got the chief minister to announce safe passage for the rebels so that
they could come home and stay with their families, unhindered by security
forces, for three months. He got the National Defence Academy at Khadakvasla
to agree to install a statue of Lachit Barphukan, the legendary Ahom general
who stopped the Mughals at Saraighat, giving this Assamese regional hero
a pride of place along with Shivaji and Rana Pratap in the national hall
of fame.
All these heroes have made comparable
contributions to history. In popular and political parlance they are placed
in the same bracket, regional heroes who resisted Muslim invaders from
outside India, it is not difficult to see why the BJP is pleased to look
for more and more Lachits.
General Sinha would have further
pleased the powers in Delhi when Biharis and Marwaris throughout the state
came under attack by unidentified rebels and Sinha suggested the Biharis
should form self–defence groups and strike back at those who attack them.
The state’s leading rebel group, the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA),
have been blamed for these attacks — a charge the ULFA has steadfastly
denied. Posters in the name of the Asom Tiger Force have been found from
the sites of the massacres of Biharis and Marwaris, more than 120 of whom
have been killed in these attacks during the last three months alone.
For those of us who started our
career in journalism covering the fierce ethno–communal riots of the early
1980s, the last few months have been a grim reminder of how often history
repeats itself, at short intervals. Attacks on ethnic or religious minorities
have not stopped in Assam after the fierce riots of Gohpur, Nellie and
Chaulkhowa Chapori, what with the Bodo rebels attacking Bengali Hindus
and Muslims, Nepalis and then the so–called tea tribes from central India.
With the ULFA clearly announcing it would not target any community in particular,
killings of innocent civilians were limited to the Bodo areas in recent
years. This was until the last quarter of 2000, when such attacks began
to multiply.
General Sinha has formulated an
interesting theory to explain these attacks. The ULFA, he says, has to
please its “masters in Bangladesh and Pakistan” — so, it is attacking Marwaris
and Biharis in a bid to force them to flee. The motive? To enable “Bangladeshis”
to take over Assam. He has even made public statements to this effect.
Chief minister Prafulla Kumar Mahanta, the man who led the violent anti–foreigner
agitation in Assam in the early 1980s, has repeated these arguments at
the grassroots, in speech after speech, whipping up the Bangladesh bogey
again. Local groups have intensified their demand for repealing the IMDT
(Illegal Migration, Determination by Tribunals) Act that the Bengalis Hindus
and Muslims feel is their only defence against a parochial bureaucracy
and police who would like to throw all of them into Bangladesh. The whipping
up of the foreign infiltration bogey on the eve of Assam’s forthcoming
assembly elections due in May this year bears substantial potential for
ethno-communal violence.
General Sinha’s focus is to get
the “boys back into the mainstream”. He says he has no problems with the
ULFA if it returns to normal politics and tries to defend the “vital interests”
of Assam like stopping infiltration from across the borders. The trouble
is the ULFA still does not agree to sit on the table with him or with anyone
from Delhi or Dispur and it attacks (if the charges are true) Sinha’s own
country cousins. So it must be the ISI’s agenda implemented by the ULFA,
the governor reasons.
The ULFA itself grew out of the
anti–foreigner agitation. In the initial stages of its armed action, it
attacked the United Minorities Front with a vengeance. The UMF secretary
general Aliped Seen was killed and its chairman Barrister Golem Osmania
escaped a few attempts on his life. But once the ULFA took on the Indian
State in a full–scale bush war, it focused on the “exploitative Indian
State” as its main enemy. In a publication Probojon Loi (Regarding
Infiltration) in 1992, the ULFA lauded the Bengali Hindus and Muslims from
Eastern Bengal, now Bangladesh, for their role in developing Assam’s agriculture,
professions and services in a “major way.” Indian intelligence would explain
this shift in the ULFA’s line as necessitated from the compulsion to retain
their bases in Bangladesh. But those who know the ULFA closely realise
that the ascendancy of the “Left faction” in the rebel outfit was
responsible for this change.
Traditionally, the ethnic Assamese
have treated the “outsider” or the “settler” as the main enemy. Driving
him out would solve all of Assam’s woes was the reasoning of a large section
of the Assamese leadership and intelligentsia. But the “left “ in the ULFA
saw Assam’s primary problem as “colonial exploitation” by the Indian State.
And the Probojon Loi document said it in as many words. “Migration has
led to the growth of many countries like USA but Assam is unable to handle
the load of influx because it has failed to develop economically. And that
is because of colonial exploitation by the Indian state,” the document
said.
It was in such a situation that
the Indian state came to face the guns in Assam; guns that had been, until
then, trained on the hapless settler, whose ancestors had come to Assam,
turned the difficult chars (river islands) into golden fields and even
set up schools and colleges. It is no wonder then, that the ULFA is projected
as the ISI’s main proxy in Northeast India. It is projected as a “stooge
of Bangladesh”. And it is seen as committing a crime when it does not kill
Bengalis, Hindus and Muslims, but trains its guns on communities that the
BJP feels are dear to its heart and pockets.
Three years ago, the Indian army’s
eastern command did a situation gaming (intelligence inquiry into the emerging
problems of the region). The hypothetical scenario was the emergence of
the Bengali militant groups in Assam and Tripura who were seen as not only
fighting nativist insurgents but also fighting the Indian security machine.
The army game paper said that Bengalis, both Hindus and Muslims, are being
often falsely branded foreign agents, denied electoral rights and often
pushed back to Bangladesh as unwelcome foreigners. So, the army paper predicted
that it was likely they would form militant groups and attack both nativist
insurgents like the Bodo and Tripura groups and may also attack the Indian
security machine.
Two months ago, something close
to what the army’s eastern command had predicted, actually happened in
Tripura. Frustrated by the attacks on the Bengali villages by the National
Liberation Front of Tripura (NLFT) and the All Tripura Tiger Force (ATTF)
that had left more than 80 Bengalis dead in two months, Bengali villages
all along the border with Bangladesh raised the Bangladeshi flag and kept
it flying for 15 days. The BSF did not dare bring the flag down. Not one
of this was a Muslim village. These were Hindus whose ancestors had left
East Pakistan or Bangladesh either facing or fearing persecution — but
the persecution they have faced in Indian states like Tripura or Assam
have been worse than any experienced before (under Pakistan).
No wonder, attitudes towards India
have changed. The infantile United Bengal Liberation Front (UBLF) set up
in 1998 has not yet attacked the Indian security forces but they have warned
the Indian army of “massive attacks on the scale of the LTTE” if their
cadres continue to be arrested. The UBLF chief Bijon Basu says theirs is
a resistance force formed to defend Bengalis in keeping with a call by
the local military commander Brigadier Basant Kumar Ponwar.
Ponwar, on taking over charge, had
said the army cannot defend every village and villagers must form protection
groups. Basu says when the Bengalis under the banner of the UBLF did that,
the army started massive repression on Bengali villages even as the NLFT
militants went scot–free.
The double standard of the Indian
State is obvious. When Hindi speaking settlers come under attack in Assam,
governor Sinha wants them to form resistance groups to crush the ULFA.
When Bengalis come under attack in Assam and Tripura, they are expected
to suffer silently. If they arm themselves, Delhi sees an ISI hand behind
it. Says UBLF chief Bijon Basu: “We have a strong support base amongst
the pro-liberation forces in Bangladesh. They sympathise with us because
they suffered as Bengalis at the hands of Pakistani forces in 1971 when
we sheltered them here. And the day is not far off when we will attack
the NLFT or the ATTF inside Bangladesh with the help of our supporters
there. Indian intelligence knows it is these tribal rebels who receive
help from ISI, not us.”
And he rounds up his perspective
in succinct terms: “We Bengalis don’t have to learn our patriotism from
Advanis and Bal Thackerays. Indian nationalism in its secular modernist
form originated in Bengal and thousands of our boys faced British bullets
and gallows. For that, we were rewarded with Partition that destroyed Bengal
as a province. Now if the Indian State refuses to defend us and sees us
as unwelcome settlers, we will have to defend ourselves. And look for future
political options in forging Bengali unity across the borders.” That’s
not going to be a happy scenario for Delhi. |