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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.