[Assam] a balanced view?

Thu Aug 16 21:11:47 PDT 2007

http://www.sentinelassam.com/

Asom at 60, in Reality — IITHE REALITY MIRRORBikash Sarmah IN CONTINUATION WITH WHAT I dealt with last week, it is now in the fitness of things here to talk of Asom’s exclusivity as imposed on its people by mainland India and how the State is still assumed to be fitting well into the Indian federal paradigm. In fact, in a functioning democracy that we claim ours to be, and quite confidently at that after 60 years of Independence, ‘‘mainland India’’ must be a misnomer because there can be no mainland and hinterland in such a democracy — with federal features — except for a definition strictly territorial. In the case of Northeast India, the definition is not just territorial; it extends to include the people of the region, their cultures and traditions seen as alien to those of the mainlanders, and their hopes and aspirations as forming a mismatch with things ‘nationalistic’. Asom’s case is extraordinary, then. Home to both Aryan and Mongoloid races, the State has to its credit an inbuilt and sustainable space that is no different from what mainland India would obsessively refer to as nationalized space. The presence of a militant outfit as the ULFA that obdurately clings on to the demand for a sovereign Asom, does not — and cannot — make the whole of the State as being given to fissiparous tendencies. Or, for instance, as I write this and begin to stress the fact of Asom’s exclusivity as imposed by mainland India, it does not, I hope so, make me a secessionist. This is so because secession and dissent or dissidence are two different things: the former decries the country and whatever principles and values the country is symbolic of, both in theory and practice; while the latter works on a critique of the aberrations in those very principles and values, again both in theory and practice, just in order that the country could chart out its course as a more cohesive unit. However, Asom, a State long neglected just because it forms a part of the hinterland and a State whose problems are thought of as being too unique to be accommodated in what may be called a nation-state that is more a Union of territories than a Union of States in the real sense of the term, is often described as a region where fissiparous tendencies take birth because the people of the State fail to identify themselves with the mainland discourse. What are these fissiparous tendencies? And what is the mainland discourse? The fissiparous tendencies do not just pertain to the ULFA’s call for a sovereign Asom. These are tendencies, as the centrist mainlanders would argue, that aim at creating a weak national fabric; that run counter to the ‘federal’ concept of India as being a Union of a strong Centre and weak States; that would rather undo the very ‘spirit’ of the Indian Constitution. Given this, it is natural on the part of the strong-Centre votaries to support the Centre’s attempt to ‘nationalize’ Asom — which is in fact to let the State remain a weak component of the Indian Union, ever dependent on the Centre. But it is also natural on the part of the Asomiyas to decry the Centre’s attempt to nationalize an already nationalized territory. The mainland discourse, which overlooks local and localized factors, and which tries to effect a forced alteration in these factors, cannot be said to constitute the process of nation-making. Mainland India, then, gets jittery when Asom’s so-called exclusivity boomerangs. Take the ULFA’s genocide this January. When over 70 Hindi-speaking people were killed by the rebel outfit, the Centre was unnerved. Union ministers and a whole lot of mainland politicians rushed to the State in a show of solidarity with the Hindi-speaking people, who have lived in this State for generations. Why was such Central or mainland panic manifest? The reason is that it was people, whose origin is in mainland India, who were being targeted by the ULFA — an outfit that calls such people ‘‘foreigners’’. However, the Central leaders or mainland politicians forgot the fact that those Hindi-speakers, who were being targeted by the ULFA in its terrorist avatar, comprised quite a few who had no practical connection with mainland India except for the fact of their origin. There are many Hindi-speakers in Asom whose identity is as much Asomiya as anyone else with Asomiya as mother tongue. They have lived here for generations — many are third- or fourth-generation Hindi-speakers whose mother tongue may be Hindi but whose commitment to the cause of the State, mainly the economic cause, is no less than that of the Asomiyas who are defined so in terms of their mother tongue. So these Hindi-speakers are as much Asomiya as anyone else whose mother tongue is Asomiya. However, since the Centre and mainland India have imposed a bizarre exclusivity on Asom and the Asomiyas, an Asomiya Hindi-speaker, if he or she can be called so, remains a mainlander who operates in Asom due to business concerns but whose commitment is concentrated in mainland India — in the eyes of the Central leaders and mainland politicians. The same was true of the killing of Hindi-speakers in Karbi Anglong by the Karbi Longri National Liberation Front (KLNLF) allegedly in tandem with the ULFA last weekend. The Central team that was here, including Union Minister of State for Home Affairs Sriprakash Jaiswal, gave the impression of theirs having to make out a meaning of their routine knee-jerk reaction to such genocide without bothering to delve into the reality of the day: that the perpetrators of such heinous crime are no longer insurgents but sheer terrorists acting under the diktats of hostile foreign powers; more specifically, the Bangladeshi fundamentalist and terrorist organizations and, of course, Pakistan’s ISI. The Centre does not have the guts to ask Bangladesh to ensure that its territory is not used for anti-India activities, failing which that country will face the music. No, such hard talk cannot be India’s, for it has to promote a regime of courtesy diplomacy even at the cost of national security, and it has to also take care of ‘secular’ ethos. The Centre also does not have the guts to ask Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf to rein in his ISI — his ISI, because the ISI is the quintessential component of the Pakistani military establishment and General Musharraf continues to be the chief of that establishment. T he fact of the matter is that in Asom, the volatility of the situation brought about by the existence and operational expertise of militant groups — the leader being the ULFA — provokes the debate as to the need for nationalizing Asom more ruthlessly. This task would be backed by Article 3 of the Constitution — in terms of its connotation — which otherwise empowers Parliament to meddle with the States’ affairs by way of diminishing their areas or altering their boundaries or changing their names, and which, as noted constitutional expert Fali S Nariman argues (India Today, August 20, 2007), runs counter to Article 1 that ‘‘did proclaim the federal character of India’’ by categorically stating that ‘‘India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States’’. Nariman says that India is rather a ‘‘Union of territories’’. This is best reflected in Asom’s case as also in the rest of the ‘tribal’ — hence not ‘mainland’ — Northeast. That a State like Asom, otherwise projected as the leader in the Centre’s much-vaunted Look East Policy and considered as the gateway to South East Asia, should continue as a typical peripheral territory at the mercy of militant groups thriving as part of the ‘insurgency’ industry framework and by virtue of their association with the Bangladesh-sponsored jehadis, indeed forms a narrative on the flawed federalist paradigm that the Centre would showcase after 60 years of Independence. Asom at 60, in reality, then, continues to bleed as an Indian territory — not as any State in a truly federal scheme of things. But the million-dollar question is: even if Asom begins to be a truly federal State at one point of time when all other States of the Indian Union will be so, will the State’s politicians, used to corruption and all sorts of share in the ‘insurgency’ industry, choose to rescue the beleaguered Asomiya society from the imminent doom — the takeover of the State by Islamic forces backed by an Islamic Bangladesh? Perhaps it sounds un-‘secular’, but that is the reality in a country and a State where the practitioners of ‘secularism’ are united by the greed for political power at the cost of national security.(The writer is the Consulting Editor of The Sentinel

“In order to make spiritual progress you must be patient like a tree and humble like a blade of grass”
- Lakshmana

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