[Assam] FW: A sermonic deliverance from the pulpit with a myopic knowledge on Assam and the Assa

Mon Aug 20 09:23:15 PDT 2007

Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2007 16:15:51 +0000From: patricia17 at rediffmail.comTo: mikemahant at hotmail.comSubject: Re: RE: [Assam] A sermonic deliverance from the pulpit with a myopic knowledge on Assam and the Assa
Only articles touching a raw nerve can get such vehement reaction. i guess the truth always hurtspatriciaOn Mon, 20 Aug 2007 mc mahant wrote :>>This lady fills up pages of garbage in 2nd rate tabloids.>No idea of ethnicity in Assam .>Certainly nothing about what Ulfa is fighting for.>And who kills in KARBI.>Khasis will need to rejoin Assam again if they want to come out of medieaval obscurity.>>mm>>>>Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2007 12:39:34 +0100From: barttabistar at googlemail.comTo: assam at assamnet.orgSubject: [Assam] A sermonic deliverance from the pulpit with a myopic knowledge on Assam and the Assamese? People from ‘The Scotland of the East’ should know that Scotland in on course to have an Independent Sovereign identity splitting from Great Britain’. O’ Luce!>Northeast Echoes>PATRICIA MUKHIM>http://www.telegraphindia.com/1070820/asp/northeast/story_8208508.asp>>>>>>>>>Assam's 'other' victims>In the build-up to India's 60th year of Independence, Ulfa massacred not less than 29 innocent non-Assamese victims. Knowing the lay of the land better than anyone else, Ulfa chose distant Karbi Anglong for its senseless killings.>It is no news that Karbi Anglong is one of the most neglected parts of Assam. One reason could be the profile of its ethnic community. The Karbi people do not fall into the unembellished and classic definition of "Assamese", as understood by those who claim to be direct descendants of the Ahom rulers or of the Brahmin class who came over from Kanauj to settle in the Brahmaputra valley.>Rarely has an event taking place in this remote frontier captured the minds and hearts of parliamentarians as the recent massacre has. Admitting the motion, Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee termed it a "very serious matter".>Not a single parliamentarian from the Northeast spoke up on behalf of those killed. But this is hardly surprising. Those who understand the Northeast also know that even killings have an ethnic face.>Protests are loudest when killings affect the majority community. When it happens to minorities, it usually does not evoke any compassion.>Combat zone>To an impartial observer, Assam in the last few weeks seemed like a combat zone where the shots were called by Ulfa. They could throw bombs wherever they chose, kill any target they chose and got away with all of these damages. The state was virtually an apologetic onlooker.>Tarun Gogoi appears confused and ill at ease and does not seem able to get his act together, his standard argument being that there are not enough forces to contain Ulfa's butchering spree.>Of course, his reactions would have been different if the killings had taken place in one of the Upper Assam districts. Those murdered in Karbi Anglong have no political constituency. Their lives are expendable and like Gogoi himself admits, they are soft targets. But when have militants ever done target practice on hard targets? Most of these hard targets are politicians and Ulfa sympathisers, anyway.>It took the visit of no less a dignitary than the Union minister of state for home, Sri Prakash Jaiswal, for new strategies to be developed and for the killings to temporarily subside. But many wonder now whether it is the right thing for the chief minister to head the Unified Command. Is he equipped to provide the leadership in a counter-insurgency operation of the scale that is called for in Assam? Is the killing of 29 people in a span of a few days not a human rights violation?>Tough measures>Politicians never make good leaders because they cannot take hard decisions. Yet at this juncture, some really tough measures are called for. The compulsion to please all people all the time has taken our country to its nadir. Political equivocation has created ample space for agent provocateurs and anti-national forces to operate in an unrestrained manner. The war against terror must be fought like one. There can be no compromise when it comes to providing security to the common man. Assam is undeniably a large state with some far-flung areas that have been left to languish in the political and economic wilderness. Karbi Anglong is not the only district, which experiences an apology of governance. Let us have the grace to admit that the bulk of resources are cornered by the traditional "Assamese" strongholds, namely, Guwahati, Sivasagar, Jorhat, Dibrugarh and Tezpur.>Even the commercial town of Tinsukia and its periphery are in a kind of economic limbo. Jhalukbari, which is Himanta Biswa Sarma's constituency and which includes the silk hub of Assam, Sualkuchi, seems to have just emerged from the backwoods.>People speak with some amount of respect for what their representative has done in terms of activating the community health centres and hospitals and making them perform. But Sualkuchi is still too sleepy to meet the huge demand for Assam silk with its ethnic designs. If the constituency of a powerful cabinet minister has a profile like Jalukbari beyond the Brahmaputra, and if the minister is happily unaware of the tribulations of his most critical constituents — the weavers — then there is something seriously problematic with his role as a public representative and policy maker.>This brings me to the point of my contention. Karbi Anglong has only four MLAs in a House of 126 elected representatives. Of the four, only one is a minister and the other a parliamentary secretary. Important portfolios in the cabinet, irrespective of the pecking order are firmly entrenched among the "Assamese" gentry. Assam has never had a tribal chief minister and perhaps never will. This time the Congress allied with the former Bodoland Liberation Tigers (BLT) chief Hagrama Mohilary under the banner of Bodo Peoples' Progressive Front (BPPF), which has a dominant sway in Lower Assam. But because numbers matter, a tribal even from Bodoland will find it hard to get a toehold in the government hierarchy. Where do the Karbis stand in this pecking order?>Like it or not, the Assamese will continue to patronise their tribal colleagues, giving them the crumbs of office. Otherwise, it would have been fit and proper to give the second most important portfolio to an alliance partner. Would the Karbi Anglong massacres have been allowed to happen if a tribal from that district or from Bodoland held the home portfolio? If truth be told, it took the state more time than necessary to respond to the killings. Why?>Biased attitudes>Few will raise this pertinent question in the Assam Assembly because as stated earlier, those killed have no political clout, unlike the Bangladeshis who form a formidable votebank. Assamese hegemony and patronising attitude towards those who do not speak their language is alive and kicking. A true blue Assamese cannot think beyond what he conceives is the nucleus of his origin, which is also Ulfa's hub.>Why would an Assamese bother about what happens in Karbi Anglong unless he/she is a newsperson and what happen is of news value?>Sadly, after all the horrendous killings, Gogoi is back to offering the olive branch to Ulfa. How do you explain this blow-hot, blow-cold attitude of the chief minister?>In fact his indecisive stance has created a jarring cacophony, particularly among security forces. Ulfa's rejoinder to chief minister Tarun Gogoi's peace missive is predictable.>They have turned it down on the hackneyed argument that Gogoi made no mention of sovereignty as a talking point with the Centre. Ulfa should read Edward Luce's article where he cogently argues that the "traditional legalistic definition of sovereignty should give way to a more sophisticated understanding of power in a frighteningly interdependent world". Those who want peace cannot split hairs. But who says Ulfa wants peace?>(The writer can be contacted at patricia17 at rediffmail.com)>>>_________________________________________________________________>Search from any Web page with powerful protection. Get the FREE Windows Live Toolbar Today!>http://toolbar.live.com/?mkt=en-in

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