[Assam] Briefing by Assam Watch (UK) at United Nations, Geneva

[AssamWatch at aol.com]

Briefing on South Asia and South Asia Confederation of Nations?
Delivered by Dr. M. Hazarika of  Assam Watch (UK) on 29th September 2006 at 
the briefing session on  South Asia and South Asia Confederation of Nations 
during the Second Session of  the Human Rights Council (18 September to 6 October 
2006) Geneva, United  Nations, Sponsored by Interfaith International. 
Mr. Chairperson, representatives of respective Nations  and International 
Organisations and learned participants, my sincere  appreciation for being here 
to listen to us today.   
I am very grateful to the  Interfaith International for giving me the 
opportunity to appraise you regarding  the nation of Assam situated in East South 
Asia, whose rights to remain a  Sovereign State have been denied since 24 
February 1826.  
A low intensity war has been  going on continuously for the past fifteen 
years over the issue of restoring the  Sovereignty of Assam. The parties involved 
are the Government of India and the  United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA). 
The ULFA had to take up arms as the last  resort to restore the sovereignty of 
Assam from the colonial  occupation of India. In her own  statistics India 
reveals that more  than ten thousand Assamese lives have been lost so far as a 
result of this  conflict. But, it is firmly believed by other parties that this 
is only a very  conservative estimate and the actual figure is much higher.  
As things stand today, many  more deaths are inevitable now that India has 
decided upon a  military solution. I would like to draw your concerned attention 
to the fact  that nine Civil Society representatives, called the People’s 
Consultative Group  (more generally known by its acronym – PCG) under the 
stewardship of Prof.  Indira Goswami of Delhi University and Mr. Rebati  Phukon, has 
been interacting with the Indian Government for the past twelve  months. By 
gleaning through media reports, there have been clear indications  that the 
Indian Prime Minister felt that there were political issues and he  needs to 
resolve those fulfilling his role as, in his words, ‘the servant of the  Indian 
Constitution’. He agreed to discuss with the ULFA any issue in order to  arrive 
at a solution. In the hope of resolving the conflict politically and  swiftly, 
the ULFA dropped two of the organisation’s long held conditions, that  is, 1. 
To hold talks only in a third country; 2. Talks to take place under  United 
Nations presence.  
Now as the peace process has  come to a dead end, it appears very clearly 
that India had no inclination to  discuss the restoration of the Sovereignty of 
Assam but was aiming for a  repetition of ‘Assam Accord, 1985’ - an agreement 
which was not worth the paper  it was written on. As soon as it became 
blatantly obvious that the ULFA is not  prepared to accept anything short of the 
restoration of Assam’s sovereignty,  Indian authorities have taken steps to 
scuttle the discussion process with the  PCG.  
The pertinent question that  needs to be discussed here is - does Assam have 
the legitimate  right to Sovereignty?  
Please allow me to indulge you  with two quotes here. Dr. John Peter Wade 
wrote on 20 March  1800, “That the Kingdom of Assam was at an earlier  period 
flourishing and powerful and capable of sending forth an army of four  hundred 
thousand men. That the Kingdom of Bootan and Nepal were subdued by the  Monarch 
of Assam who extended their conquest into the banks of the Ganges by the 
capture of  Gaur and that Tipera, Coosbeyhar and the countries to the east of 
Corotia river  formed a part of their dominion.” Also, Dr. Audrey Cantley in 1984 
wrote,  “Anthropologically speaking, almost nothing is known of Assam. For many 
centuries  it occupied a peripheral position both geographically and 
politically in  relation to India. The term Assam, Asam, or Ahom was  originally 
applied to the country ruled by the Ahoms.” 
Permit me to pose a question.  If the Ahom Royal household made Tai the 
official language of Assam and revived  Buddhism (known to be widely practiced in 
Assam till the  7th century) and made it the State religion, could the 
departing  British merge Assam with India? In this case they  would have had no option 
except to leave Assam a Sovereign State like Burma  (Myanmar) and Ceylon  
(Sri  Lanka), despite the Assam Congress’s  decision to join hands with the 
Indian Congress party to get freedom from  British colonial rule. In the Cabinet 
Mission Plan of 1946, the ‘Grouping Plan’  offered by the British to the 
leaders in India prior to the Partition in 1947,  placed the non-Muslim majority 
Chief Commissionership of Assam inside Group C,  suggesting that the British 
authorities realised very well that the Assamese had  a separate identity from 
India.  
Mindful of these facts, please  consider that leaving aside the pre-1228 
period, for 600 years Assam had a  Sovereign identity as an ethnic composite 
society bound by a common lingua  franca, ideological affinity, well defined bord
ers, her own currency, a standing  army and a highly developed civil 
administration which even the British East  India company found satisfactory to continue 
unchanged for many years after  taking control of Assam.  
During the de-colonisation of India, it is known, that  the then district of 
Sylhet within Assam, could have made  the choice to go with India. It did not. 
This  suffrage to Sylhet was given on the basis of religion. That the rest of 
the  people of the Chief Commissionership of Assam were not given that 
suffrage was a  gross injustice. Due to the decision of a few leaders within the 
Assam Congress  to merge Assam with India, it became  internationally believed 
that this was the opinion of the Assamese people as a  whole. However simmering 
discontent of being under Indian rule since 1950s and  mass eruption in 1968, 
1971 and 1979 supporting an Independent Assam paints a  different picture. The 
world hardly knows about these struggles as India managed to  violently 
suppress each one of them with an iron hand. 
The region to which Assam belongs has a long  international border with 
China, Burma and Bangladesh and is connected  with India by a thin stretch  of 
merely 20 kilometres known as the Siliguri corridor. All the international  
neighbours of Assam have disputes with India resulting in India having fought war  
with two of them – China in 1962 and Bangladesh (formerly East  Pakistan) in 
1971. India has made our  territory its battlefield in its quest for regional 
hegemony. To secure her  deployment of forces against China, India has carried 
out  extensive political engineering in which significant international borders 
of Assam have  disappeared. 
India has managed to  isolate Assam totally -  physically as well as from the 
world media. Assam and the region want  to be free of Indian rule, which has 
been using unprecedented brutality in  suppressing legitimate aspirations of 
the peoples of the region. Since the mid  1990s it has unleashed a reign of 
terror under a security blanket, and the ratio  of Indian troops to the 
indigenous Assamese population is known to be amongst  the highest in the world. 
Currently there are Two Hundred Thousand security  personnel are deployed in Assam 
by the Indian  authorities.  
India says that she  cannot concede the right of self-determination to 
peoples of Assam and elsewhere in India because of the  specific limitation of ‘
territorial integrity’ being sacrosanct and the  International community appears 
to support this stance. But India did not feel any  such constraint when it 
invaded East  Pakistan in 1971. India’s direct  involvement created Bangladesh 
and the  International community gave recognition to the independence of 
Bangladesh from Pakistan, of Singapore from Malaysia, of Belize from Guatemala. That 
shows that  the limitation has been ignored in practice by States. Keeping 
this in focus,  may I respectfully ask the International community how can India 
justify use of  draconian laws and brutal repressive measures trampling human 
rights amounting  to State terrorism in protecting her territorial integrity? 
With this briefest introduction  to political Assam and the rights to her 
sovereignty I would fervently appeal to  the world community at large from this 
floor of the United Nations to look into  the anguish of Assam and impress upon 
India to be reasonable and fair; and to  bring about the logical conclusion 
to establish Assam as one of the members of  the South Asian member nations 
which has been demanded by the majority of the  indigenous people of Assam.  
I thank you all for your kind  attention. 
Please check with  delvery. 
e-mail:  AssamWatch at aol.com 

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