Uneasy Homecomings: Political Entanglements in Contemporary Assam

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Uneasy Homecomings: Political Entanglements in Contemporary Assam a

Sanjay Barbora a

Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Guwahati, Assam, India Published online: 18 Jun 2015.

Click for updates To cite this article: Sanjay Barbora (2015) Uneasy Homecomings: Political Entanglements in Contemporary Assam, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 38:2, 290-303, DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2015.1032473 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2015.1032473

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South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2015 Vol. 38, No. 2, 290!303, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2015.1032473

Uneasy Homecomings: Political Entanglements in Contemporary Assam

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SANJAY BARBORA, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Guwahati, Assam, India

Tying together the different threads that explain the persistence of violent conflicts in defining the politics of Assam is a difficult proposition, more so because the analyses tend to concentrate on big episodes and rely on a causal explanation that leaves little room for understanding the layered realities that have emerged as a result of three decades of conflict. This article attempts to suture together the different levels at which expressions of violence have been manifested in contemporary political entanglements in Assam. It does so by reflecting on the repertoire of melancholic manifestations of these conflicts in everyday life. It argues that decades of engagement between rebels and the Indian state have led to emotional suffering and self-preservation, but have been sacrificed to a cynical political vocabulary that narrows the possibility of solidarity. Keywords: Assam; autonomy; counter-insurgency; melancholia; poet(s); trauma Protracted conflicts sometimes have confusing conclusions. In Assam, ever since 2009, counter-insurgency operations and political processes have remained in suspended animation. For those interested in trajectories and histories of armed rebellion and insurgencies, 2009 would count as an important milestone, for it saw the detention and arrest of a significant section of the leadership of the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB) and the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA). It was also the year when the Indian National Congress-led government in Assam entered the second quarter of its second consecutive term in the state assembly. The arrests of insurgent leaders and the subsequent initiation of talks might have contributed to the party’s third-term mandate to govern the state in 2011. In addition to these political developments, one also saw the consolidation of ethno-centrist parties such as the Bodo Peoples Front (BPF) and the All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF) as well as the simultaneous waning of sub-nationalist, regional political parties like the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP). The 2014 general election, which brought in as many as seven newly-elected members of a market-friendly, Right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), suggests that there is a distinct mood for development and change. After all, the BJP and its prime minister have kept reminding the electorate in Assam that theirs is a party that will bring in an era of development and peace for all. Barring a few disturbing disruptive notes— the existence of splinter groups and new factions in insurgent organisations, violent conflicts between different ethnic groups, and occasional clashes along Assam’s borders with neighbouring federal units—2009 might have qualified as a template for any community moving out of more than three decades of political violence. The disruptive notes, if anything, suggested the existence of ‘embers’ after the fiery decades of armed opposition to the Indian state and its institutions. Yet, these disruptive notes—particularly the violent conflicts involving discrete linguistic and religious communities—have gone on to overshadow the optimism generated by the

! 2015 South Asian Studies Association of Australia

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government following the arrests of insurgent leaders in 2009. Since then, several thousand people have been displaced and hundreds killed in riots in western Assam’s Bodo Territorial Area Districts (BTAD) and Karbi Anglong. Moreover, clashes between various communities living along Assam’s borders with all the neighbouring states, especially Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland, have created a volatile situation that requires constant centralised monitoring (and occasional hectoring). In addition to this, the occasional bombing and ambush by yet-to-be demobilised insurgents add to the rather confusing scenario in contemporary Assam. While it is true that many conflicts do have neat resolutions, the kind of environment that they leave in their wake requires serious analysis by social scientists. The landscape that conflict leaves behind is often marked by the arbitrariness of violence. Recent scholarship on Assam has emphasised the metamorphosis of insurgency—particularly in the case of the ULFA—as one that moved from liberation to warlordism.1 Such positions cohabit with more prosaic explanations, which see insurgencies (and insurgent groups) in the region as part and parcel of the workings of civilian authority in militarised areas.2 Taken together, these two positions could constitute two ends of a continuum, along which the everyday implementation of power and resistance, coercion and co-option, and life and death continue to operate in contemporary Assam. This article is an attempt to move away from a purely cerebral and disembodied account of what has transpired in the course of the last decade in Assam, which—though important, especially in the ability to compare and contrast the political impact of violence upon both personal and impersonal collectives—is unable to grasp the nuances of disruptive notes to the conflict narrative and their implications. Hidden within the layers of these nuances are larger questions that confront India’s current obsession with economic development and growth. Using episodes from fieldwork in Assam over the last decade and a range of accompanying material drawn from poetry, fiction and the statements of politicians and insurgent leaders, I argue that as the meta-narrative of insurgency in Assam articulates a movement from violence to peace, from fragmentation to order, from poverty to development, it is the disruptive notes that reveal a much more poignant counter-narrative of everyday life in the state, an everyday life characterised by melancholy, murder and migration. This will be explored through four sections. The first section draws parallels between the militarisation of Assam and the melancholia that descended on those targeted, explored through the writings of those caught up in state brutality. This also points to the shifting political landscape in Assam, punctuated as it is by promises of development through large-scale power projects, and the growing frequency of border disputes with surrounding states, which have, in turn, galvanised a state-constructed sense of a prosperous future and a shared identity. Those continuing to challenge the power of the state were cast as outside— and antithetical to—this future. The second section explores the collapse of the binary between victims and perpetrators in violence between communities in Karbi and Bodo territories and the ways in which this has further strengthened the hand of the state—the disruptive notes taking centre stage. The third section focuses on the emergence of immigration politics, extending debates that have characterised Assamese politics throughout the twentieth century. However, the most recent manifestation of these homeland politics

1

Nani Gopal Mahanta, Confronting the State: ULFA’s Quest for Sovereignty (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2013). 2 Bethany Lacina, ‘Rethinking Delhi’s Northeast India Policy: Why Neither Counter-Insurgency nor Winning Hearts and Minds is the Way Forward’, in Sanjib Baruah (ed.), Beyond Counter-Insurgency: Breaking the Impasse in Northeast India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 329!42.

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adopts a more severe form of exclusion, which paints the movements advocating them as evermore extremist, while everyday livelihoods transform in ways that exemplify land alienation for all rural communities in the state. Finally, the concluding section draws these notes together with reference to the fictional work of Arupa Patangia Kalita, providing a final reflection on melancholia, murder and migration.

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Militarisation and Melancholia The counter-insurgency apparatus in Assam was particularly repressive in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It was responsible for creating a milieu of impunity that resulted in public silence and denial of political dissent.3 Rights groups within the state and outside regularly reported on the numerous extra-judicial executions and disappearances that were carried out by the armed forces, the police, and some insurgents who had surrendered who were deployed to coerce their colleagues into crossing over to the government’s side.4 This period also saw the emergence of a body of critical literary work that exemplified the social tensions and the impact of militarisation in Assam. Some of the authors of this literary form were members of armed opposition groups. Swadhinata Phukan was a well-known presence in the firmament of Assam’s media circles in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He was the ULFA’s assistant publicity secretary until 26 May 2000, when he was killed in a village in upper Assam. His communiqu!es on political issues, as well as statements on the ULFA’s position on key matters, were keenly read and analysed by those who picked up the Asomiya Pratidin—a widely circulated Assamese daily—or other newspapers that reflected the concerns of the time. It was through his press communiqu!es that people got a peep into the secretive organisation that the ULFA had transformed into. Like most people in Assam, I read his views about the world, India, colonialism, Assam, the ULFA and much else in papers and journals with which he corresponded on a regular basis. Among a closed, often paranoid community of radical students, journalists, lawyers and human rights activists, there would be heated arguments about the rights and wrongs of the ULFA based on what Swadhinata Phukan had written that day. However, it is not the life of the rebel that is of concern here, but that of the person who left behind a family—ageing parents and a young sister—steeped in sadness that I would like to turn to. Swadhinata Phukan was the nom de guerre of a young man named Kabiranjan Saikia who was born in Nagaon, a bustling small town in central Assam. His sister worked as a research assistant for one of the projects that I was involved in many years ago and I visited his home several times to discuss work with her. The house had one concrete room and two other rooms made of mud, bamboo and wood, all welded into a modest home that one sensed had been painstakingly built and with pride. It stood apart from the rest of the colony that had similarly modest homes. Perhaps, it just seemed so because neighbours were afraid to visit the house for fear of reprisals by the police and army. Kabiranjan’s father, by then a broken man who had cremated his only son and lived with a razor-sharp sadness that permeated everything

3

Patrick Hoenig and Navsharan Singh, ‘Introduction’, in Patrick Hoenig and Navsharan Singh (eds), Landscapes of Fear: Understanding Impunity in India (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2014), pp. 1!48. 4 MASS (Manab Adhikar Sangram Samiti), Voice of MASS: Quarterly Newsletter (Guwahati: Lachit Bordoloi, 2000); and NCCAMRAFSPA (National Campaign Committee Against Militarisation and Repeal of Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1997), ‘Where “Peacekeepers” Have Declared War: Report on the Violations of Democratic Rights by Security Forces and the Impact of Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act on Civilian Life in the Seven States of the Northeast’ (New Delhi: NCCAMRAFSPA, 1997).

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he did, invited me to stay for lunch. We ate modest food that was cooked by Kabiranjan’s strong-willed mother and talked about children, life and the future. The old man worried about what would become of his daughter since she was not likely to get a job in a hurry. I asked him not to worry, but he sensed that this was yet another platitude from someone who did not know how difficult life could be. His young son had been only 26 or 27 when he was killed and though we never got around to talking about it, his son’s death had consumed the old man. He would live for a few more years before retiring from the sadness that surrounded the world that he knew. His mother had a few dry and yellowing papers inside a flimsy plastic bag, the poems that he had written, some when he was still a young schoolboy. Like any prodigious talent, he wrote on whatever paper he could lay hands on. His poem, ‘Your Lush Green Fields’, reads: . . . I don’t know how my lover, who has been raped, is. I can say just one thing When I meet you again That will be the last day of my fight against every king, I will hug you endlessly, We shall write with gunpowder on the walls of the courtroom The song of freedom.5 Saikia’s poems and the expressly melancholic milieu within which I received them and within which they continue to be circulated need further elaboration. In his seminal note on mourning and melancholia, Freud likens the latter to a condition where the ego—rather than the world that one inhabits—has become poor; where the element of self-torment is fed by insult, slights, humiliation; through which existing relationships of love and hate can be intensified and defy closure.6 It is this defiance of closure that makes melancholia a particularly useful idea to think through the tactile ideas that emerged in print and in political discourse in Assam. For some, like Saikia’s friends and family, it was a huge weight, a heavy ball of guilt and sorrow that sat on their consciences every time the issue of dead rebels was raised. Perhaps, it had to do with the fact that people were almost coerced into contemplating an inward-looking world in which poets had been marshalled into writing pamphlets and sloganeers had become poets. In this world of inversions and paradoxes, melancholia was an experiential reality for many, even as they went about burying or cremating the dead and creating a contradictory world of analytical consistent politics. The constant and recurring acts of burial or cremation of the dead were in large part sanctioned by the counter-insurgency regime in Assam. The first few years of the twenty-first century were also the years of untold brutality in Assam. The government, under the aegis of the Unified Command Structure (UCS) that was set up in 1997 and meant to combat the various insurgent groups that were active in Assam, sanctioned much of it. Commenting on the legality of the actions of the surrendered militants and their links with the UCS, the now-deceased human rights activist, Ram Narayan Kumar— quoting from the K.N. Saikia Commission—said that their role in counter-insurgency was outside the reach of the law. Unlike special police officers (SPOs) who may be inducted to

5 Kabiranjan Saikia, ‘Bhora Pothar Xeuj Tomar’ (‘Your Lush Green Fields’), in Xoumitra Jogi (ed.), Moi Kabiranjan Uttapta Hobo Khuja Eta Kobita-r Naam (I am Kabiranjan, a Poem about to Erupt—A Compilation of Kabiranjan Saikia’s Poems (Guwahati: Aak Baak, 2011), p. 116. 6 Sigmund Freud, On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia (London: Penguin Adult, 2005).

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augment the law enforcement agencies of the state, under Sections 17 and 18 of the Police Act (of 1861), the actions of the surrendered militants were not compatible with existing law. Instead, Kumar notes that they were ‘an illegal squad of executioners, created by various official agencies, integrated with the Unified Command Structure, established by the State government’s notification—No. PLA 271/95/223 dated 24 January 1997—to synergize the operations against militant groups’.7 He further notes that the UCS included the chief secretary of the state, the general officer commanding (GOC) of the Army Staff’s 4 Corps, the state police, the inspectors-general of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), the Border Security Force (BSF) and representatives of the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW). Most victims of state terror do not visualise their perpetrators as abstract representatives of institutions meant to protect law and order. Instead, those who have survived the exercise of arbitrary power over them remember the faces and personas of the people who were responsible for it. Familiarity—between victim and perpetrator, between powerless and powerful, between friend and foe—is something that appears fleetingly in detailed discussions on the crucial few years between 1996 and 2002!03. Where litigation is involved, familiarity is either highlighted or underplayed by the parties involved in the case. In any event, the outcomes of such cases are almost always predetermined by legal jurisprudence. However, when there is no possibility of institutional redress, or when familiarity is used as an instrument to further state policy, the outcomes are both tragic and uncanny. When governments decide on a particular course of action, especially on matters related to combatting insurgency, their considerations are always in favour of using local knowledge to re-shape political conditions. Hence, there is always an accelerated output of knowledge—in the form of books, articles and broadcast debates—about a particular place that has been corralled by the government. In Assam, too, there was an effort to incorporate local research and insights into policymaking. In the years corresponding to the secret killings, several workshops and conferences were held that focused on the themes of development, peace and progress. During the course of the Assamese agitation against foreigners being included on the electoral role (1979!84), universities and newspapers remained the dominant public faces of the movement. The research community and media were seen as the bulwark of the civil disobedience movement. By the time the secret killings started, there had already been a considerable distancing from everyday politics by the research community and the English-language media. Instead, both researchers and the English-language media were actively involved in promoting the discourse of development and peace, an effort that dovetailed with government policy for the region. This created a climate in which academic discussions about conflict overlapped with the promotion of development as an antidote. In most cases, the hypothesis for the causes of violence moved seamlessly into a recitation of unsubstantiated facts about economic deprivation being the motor for insurgency. Not surprisingly, Assam’s economy was also undergoing visible changes during this time. The government was outsourcing its tax collection, especially in the spheres of road and transportation taxes on forest products, coal and other minerals. It was also disbursing loans through state-funded banks to encourage social entrepreneurship amongst younger people. In most cases, access to new wealth-creation and profit-accumulation possibilities depended on a person’s ownership of land. It was land, then, that served as the actual arena for unbridled

7

Sanjay Barbora, ‘Road to Resentment: Impunity and its Impact on Notions of Community in Assam’, in Patrick Hoenig and Navsharan Singh (eds), Landscapes of Fear: Understanding Impunity in India (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2014), p. 116.

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conflict that had little chance of resolution (or reconciliation). This also required an extensive army of informers, hangers-on, spies and others who were recruited from amongst the local community and whose presence within the social fabric of society was the reason they were able to perform tasks meant to enhance surveillance and policing. As a result, everyday relations and the outcomes of local disputes were fraught with a tension that arose from people feeling powerless. On several occasions, ordinary citizens were driven to undertake policing and investigations themselves because the local administration was perceived to be incapable of doing so.8 In his nuanced analysis of ULFA activist Raktim Sarma’s novel, Borangar Ngang, literary theorist Amit Baishya evoked a milieu where the life-worlds of revolutionary possibility are beset by the death-worlds created by the realities of guerrilla warfare.9 Sarma’s novel spoke of a world where tight-knit guerrilla groups came apart for a variety of reasons, ranging from internal dissent to acts of betrayal, where individuals clung to ambivalence as a sign of hope. In essence, this was precisely the kind of convoluted world where one was forced to ‘do’ politics. Despite such a bleak predicament, the existence of counter-intuitive narratives like the one described above alludes to the possibility of seeing violence, loss (of physical lives) and absence (of people and dialogue) as a creative force.10 However, these narratives and affective dispositions also underlined the layering of social change in the environment that was set in motion by the state. The traditional ideological grounds for radical politics in Assam—like the one espoused by Swadhinata Phukan—have shifted since the 1990s. While insurgent groups like the ULFA talked about economic exploitation in the state, they were not prepared for the nature of the transformation of the economy. In 2000 and the decade that followed, Assam’s economy and its middle classes underwent insidious, albeit radical, changes. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, politics in Assam had included participants from different classes, most notably students, and skilled and semi-skilled professionals. As explained earlier, the human rights movement that emerged in opposition to military excess was to an extent dependent on middle-class participation and support. Over the years, a combination of coercion and cooption resulted in this class disengaging from overtly oppositional politics. In part, this attests to the government’s successful strategy of acceding to demands for ethnic autonomy and engaging in power-sharing arrangements with leaders of armed opposition groups. It was also the result of the systematic isolation and criminalisation of dissent in the state. The ease with which the government was able to create associative connections between what the security regime calls Left-wing extremism and protests against the Assam government’s acquiescence to large-scale power projects testifies to two disturbing changes. First, it is the landscape of political radicalism that has been transformed in Assam. Unlike earlier, inwardlooking attempts at political mobilisation, there is now a renewed and explicit strategy to organise peasants and workers. Organisations like the Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti (KMSS) were at the forefront of this mobilisation, but it was by no means the only one. Smaller, more tightly-knit associations of students and youth have begun to marshal support from areas where more conventional organisations such as the All Assam Students Union (AASU) and Asom Jatiyatabadi Yuba Chattra Parishad (AJYCP) had enjoyed unwavering support for over three decades. These newer organisations and political formations have so far eschewed 8

Barbora, ‘Road to Resentment’, p. 117. Amit Baishya, ‘FRONTISPIECE—Zombies in No-Man’s Land’, Seven Sisters Post (2011) [http://nelitreview. blogspot.in/2011/12/zombies-in-no-mans-land.html, accessed 6 Mar. 2015]. 10 David Eng and David Kazanjian, ‘Introduction: Mourning Remains’, in David Eng and David Kazanjian, Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 1!25. 9

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mobilisation along ethnic/identity lines and, instead, chosen to rally people around issues pertaining to failing agricultural policies, river erosion and development-induced displacement. Predictably, these groups have been labelled as Maoist, or as having Maoist sympathies, by the security establishment, though there is little substance to these accusations. They were at best allusions and insinuations that were not backed by any concrete investigative work either by the police or sections of the media that treat police press releases as though they were manifest truth. Secondly, there has been a contradictory crisis arising between the government of Assam and its neighbours, even though middle-class opinion on developmental issues has begun to converge across the region. Over the past decade, there has been an increase in border clashes between Assam and its neighbouring hill states, mainly Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland. These disputes are rooted in different land ownership patterns in the hill states and the expansion of plantation crops like tea and rubber into areas that had been traditionally under subsistence or shifting agriculture. The media in Assam has been uncritical in its reporting of these conflicts, tending, instead, to abide by the police version of events. For perhaps the first time in its modern history, the Assamese middle classes, including erstwhile separatist rebels, had begun to accept and defend the territorial boundaries of the state. The government of India remained an interested, but diffident, actor in these developments. This was most evident in its recurring calls to its state counterparts in Assam and Arunachal Pradesh to sort out their border disputes. The central government’s concerns had been heightened by protests against the big dams that are being commissioned for construction in Arunachal Pradesh. Organisations like KMSS had successfully prevented the transport of critical machinery to the dam sites and continue to defy the administration’s calls to allow construction to continue. The protestors were concerned about the downstream impact of the dams and argued that tens of thousands of livelihoods would be lost if the government of India went ahead with its plans to build dams along the tributaries of the Brahmaputra River. This placed the protestors in opposition to public-sector giants like the National Hydro Power Corporation (NHPC), the prime agency in charge of building the dams in Arunachal Pradesh. A combination of factors, including a weak opposition in Assam’s legislative assembly, resulted in the state government’s willingness to use force against the protestors. Things have changed slightly since the 2014 parliamentary elections, when local functionaries of the Right-wing BJP made electoral promises to stop the spate of dam-building that the Congress had allegedly supported. This change in political regimes in New Delhi did not result in automatic changes in the government’s counter-insurgency strategies. If anything, following attacks on Adivasi and Bodo villagers in Sonitpur, Udalguri, Baksa and Kokrajhar in December 2014, army operations were stepped up, supposedly against a particular faction of a predominantly-Bodo armed opposition group. In the disturbing tradition of mythological warfare—which entails layer upon layer of deception, disinformation and distrust—law and politics have become compliant with the government’s need to police dissent. Security concerns had already converted Assam into a film-studio-like village stage set, where ghosts of earlier counterinsurgency campaigns were regularly invoked to justify militarisation. The security drama had destabilised the boundaries between might and right, mystified reason in the pursuance of violence, and abrogated the need for political debate and discussion on the three decades of conflict. These processes may be part of what Sanjib Baruah referred to as shortcuts that insurgents and governments resort to when negotiating relationships of power.11 The

11

Sanjib Baruah, ‘Routine Emergencies: India’s Armed Forces Special Powers Act’, unpublished essay, 2012.

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processes had an eerie effect on an embattled community, already fragmented by counterinsurgency strategies. It was the trauma of having to reflect resentment and resignation in a single thought process. Such possibilities were difficult enough in times of peace; in times of conflict, they were refracted through the lenses of violence and political closures. The easy manner in which political dissent and differences resulted in the loss of lives was most keenly felt around the vitiated circumstances surrounding conflict in the autonomous councils and districts of Assam.

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Murder, Betrayal and the Paucity of Political Possibilities The Roman senator and antiquity’s best-known historian, Gaius Cornelius Tacitus, said of the Roman Empire: ‘To plunder, butcher, steal, these things they misname empire: they make a desolation and they call it peace’.12 Tacitus was speaking about the character of the Roman state and the people who were empowered to man the various military and political arms of the early democratic state. Centuries later, the Irish poet laureate, William Butler Yeats, was to pensively ask if it was possible ‘to hold in a single thought reality and justice’ during times of conflict and not allow dreams of justice to be subsumed by the crassness of reality.13 Yeats, forever a melancholic poet who wished to see an end to the colonial exploitation of his country by its more powerful neighbour, was always wistful in his reflections on politics. A century after Yeats’ musing, one struggles to find a vocabulary of peace in our contemporary times, even though there is a greater acknowledgement of the need for the cessation of armed conflict across the globe. One of the most indelible effects of the legal and political environment on societies is the manner in which victims of power are themselves drawn into repeating acts of violence upon others. One incident in the not-so-distant past bears recollection, as it epitomises the process like no other. On 17 October 2005, a passenger bus carrying the usual cargo of people was winding its way to Diphu, the district headquarter of Karbi Anglong district in Assam. It was stopped near Charchim—a village dominated by the ethnic Karbi—by a group of armed men. They asked all the Karbis to get off and many did so, since they had no way of avoiding their ethnic markers. One Karbi woman, who was the mother of two young children, quickly took off her pekok, a garment worn on the upper part of the body by women and associated with the Karbi community, lied and claimed that she was Garo, as were her little children.14 That probably saved her life, as 22 Karbi women and men were attacked with machetes and left to die. The magazine report cited above went on to provide a tragic but curious series of allegations and denials by those who claimed to speak for the victims and the supposed perpetrators. Tung-E Nonglda, the publicity secretary of the predominantly-Karbi armed opposition group, the United Peoples Democratic Solidarity (UPDS), said that the killings were carried out by a faction of the predominantly-Dimasa armed opposition group, the Dima Halam Daoga (DHD). In response, Dilip Nunisa, the chairman of the DHD, said that his group, engaged in a ceasefire with the government of India, was in no way responsible for the killings and that they were probably the handiwork of a breakaway faction called the Black Widows. The magazine report also mentioned that Nonglda and Nunisa were roommates in college. It is ironic that it is only when our college roommates choose to engage with the long 12

Cornelius Tacitus (trans. William Peterson), Dialogue, Agricola, Germania (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1914), p. 221. 13 William Butler Yeats, A Vision (London: Macmillan, 1962). 14 Wasbir Hussain, ‘Say Karbi & You’re Dead’, in Outlook (7 Nov. 2005) [http://www.outlookindia.com/article. aspx?229133, accessed 29 Jan. 2015].

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arm of the law and India’s famed Constitution that they find themselves flailing at each other with machetes. This predicament is similar to the one that Michael Ignatieff describes in his narration of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. There is a chilling section where the author interviewed an inebriated Serbian militiaman and the conversation veered to the differences between Serbs and Croats. For a while, it seemed as though the drunken militiamen were amiable friends who were merely locked in a minor dispute. Their firing zones separated by no more than a few hundred yards, Serb and Croat volunteers exchanged abuse and pleasantries over a radio. However, the Serb was not willing to give in. As he pulled a cigarette out of his pocket, he said: ‘These are Serbian cigarettes and those are Croatian cigarettes’ (pointing in the direction where the Croatian militias were sheltered). He immediately went on: ‘Look here is how it is. Those Croats, they think they are better than us. They want to be gentlemen. They think they are fancy Europeans, but Serbs and Croats are just Balkan shit’.15 This, even as a few years prior to the actual violence, they had been Yugoslavs: there was no marked difference in their language, they intermarried and even their food was the same. Yet, when it came down to it, the extremist fringe on each side was able to create conditions in which similarities in experience were splintered by real or invented differences. These differences, in turn, were capable of fuelling greater tragedies in the larger Balkan region that would simmer for a long time to come. This Balkan parallel is a little disorienting, yet, at the same time, uncannily like an epiphany for someone grappling with the conflict in Assam, especially in its designated autonomous districts. Karbi Anglong, where the incident cited at the beginning of this section took place, has been the crucible of great hope for democratic change—with the unique Autonomous State Demand Committee (ASDC) movement—as well as the reason for despair due to the tragic violence that has engulfed the area since the turn of the century. Radical Marxist parties and other independent Left-leaning individuals and collectives had supported the demand for autonomy for districts where indigenous tribal communities formed the majority of the population.16 On the ground, several schoolteachers, college and university students and working professionals from the districts of Karbi Anglong and North Cachar Hills (now renamed Dima Hasao) took to the streets in the 1980s to demand guarantees of autonomy from the central government. However, less than a decade after they had been able to secure relatively far-reaching concessions on a transfer of power of several departments to the autonomous councils, both districts were to witness far more radical demands for change. By the mid 1990s, the government of India had begun to see autonomy in its instrumentalist form and encouraged the growth of homeland politics among the radicallydisposed youth. It is not as if the radical formations were opposed to autonomy. They were simply asserting that the autonomous councils were replicating an unviable and centrist state model. However, this assertion was also susceptible to political machinations, whereby fringe elements of the radical youth were capable of thinking along ethnic homeland lines. It is not as if they had to invent their differences from other groups; they merely had to follow through the logic of colonial census categories that were then refracted through the language of the Indian Constitution.17

15 Michael Ignatieff, The Warrior’s Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company, 1997), p. 36. 16 P.S. Dutta, Autonomy Movements in Assam (Documents) (New Delhi: Omsons, 1993), pp. 1!22. 17 Sanjay Barbora, ‘Autonomous Councils and/or Ethnic Homelands: An Ethnographic Account of the Genesis of Political Violence in Assam (Northeast India) Against the Normative Frame of the Indian Constitution’, in International Journal on Minority and Group Rights, Vol. 15, nos. 2!3 (2008), pp. 313!34.

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The effects of this predicament have continued to play out in the Bodo Territorial Area Districts (BTAD) in western Assam. The demand for Udayachal—an area that covers parts of present-day BTAD and then some—began just after Indian Independence. Born from a genuine need for autonomy from a caste-Hindu Assamese-dominated administration, the Udayachal movement, as with the ASDC-led movement in central Assam’s Karbi Anglong and Dima Hasao districts, was a genuine attempt to bring together a plural political constituency. However, it was during and after their negotiations with the Indian state that these pluralistic coalitions turned inwards and have begun to echo a majoritarian rhetoric. For the government of India, it was as though the granting of autonomous councils was a way out of the contentious civic politics that prevail in Assam. BTAD is an example of how principles of autonomy for indigenous communities could go wrong when the political guarantees of security—both political and fiscal—were missing from the political vocabulary of those who sought, as well as those who granted, autonomy. On the face of it, autonomous districts like BTAD survive because they are useful tools for diffusing dissent against the state and are policed by sections of the dominant elite of indigenous communities, who in turn owe their wealth and power to developmental packages that trickle down from Dispur and New Delhi. This untenable situation is similar to the kind of conundrum described by Mahmood Mamdani in the east African context, especially in countries that suffer from the twin problems of (a) the burden of colonial history and (b) the need for internal renegotiation of power. In such instances, the colonial roots of how some communities (and tribes) were apportioned homelands, while others were not, would remain a contentious issue in the evolution of a political vocabulary for the future.18 In Assam, conservative opinion swung the other way to denigrate any effort at political mobilisation for autonomy by pointing to the increase in violence within these movements.19 However, such opinions make for lazy, sociologically-reckless attempts at political analysis. It is not as if autonomous councils, including BTAD, were built up to be ethnic pressure chambers. The realities of mixed villages in the area remain a poignant testimony to how the tragedy was political in origin. Nor was it true that different communities were unable to live alongside one another. Since the tragic events in BTAD in 2012, 2013 and 2014, the local media and bloggers have brought to light several stories that allude to the co-operation between different communities in the area.20 In reinforcing public debate along polarised lines between advocates for autonomy versus agents of a centralising state that can provide security, one risked abolishing the possibility of a neutral and non-violent position that could be capable of brokering a settlement between these communities. The autonomous councils in Assam remain a tragic example of failed interventions. Such interventions are shown to be more dangerous than neglected conflicts since their momentary media-induced stage was also capable of amplifying grievances that could well have been settled amicably. In the rush to provide sound bites for the cameras, political parties and commentators only served to enhance the lack of a coherent dialogue on resource- and power-sharing between different communities in the autonomous councils. This silence was not simply the mark left by the trauma of inter-ethnic conflicts in Assam, it was also the persistence of doubts about and loyalties of those representatives of the state, 18

Mahmood Mamdani, Saviours and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2009). 19 Namrata Goswami, ‘Violence in Bodo Areas: The Risks of Conceding “Exclusive” Ethnic Homelands’, Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (12 Sept. 2012) [http://www.idsa.in/idsacomments/ViolenceinBo doAreas_ngoswami_120912.html, accessed 11 Feb. 2015]. 20 Saba Sharma, ‘The Carnage in Kokrajhar’, Kafila (4 May 2014) [http://kafila.org/2014/0504/the-carnage-inkokrajhar-saba-sharma, accessed 11 Feb. 2015].

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including politicians, bureaucrats and even commissions of enquiry, who heard grievances and the mistrust that divided collectives of speakers and listeners. Under such circumstances, one need only reflect on the early days of the Udayachal and ASDC movements, when their intellectuals and activists were capable of drawing other communities into a non-violent, progressive struggle for the devolution of power over resources to indigenous groups in the Brahmaputra Valley. They were aware that even though the colonial authorities had not invented ethnic categories, it was in the course of interacting with these authorities that identities became ossified. Hence, the elders of the Udayachal movement and also the later Boro movement raised universal issues of justice for all the marginalised people of the Valley. Such a voice would act as a salve on new and old wounds today. For, if the political community in Assam (and in India, by extension) was unable to nurture such debates on ‘otherness’, it would have to live with the fact that it had condoned the normalisation of internal displacement and violence against indigenous communities and minorities alike. Maybe Tacitus was right: we might just be riding into a dead-end peace. Those who practise and theorise about political futures would be well advised to bear Yeats’ caution in mind: they have to be able to hold both reality and justice in one single thought. In the context of living with alterity, Paul Gilroy stated that ‘it is important to ask what critical perspectives might nurture the ability and desire to live with difference on an increasingly divided but also convergent planet’.21 Would it be possible for one to insist on a humanist dialogue against a backdrop of identity-based political articulation? If Gilroy was to be taken up on his thesis of cosmopolitan solidarity, would one be able to find an axis, or programme, for operationalising it in contemporary Assam? One feels that it would be a difficult task because everyday realities are marked by compromise borne from engaging with a political vocabulary that could not bear to let college roommates be. From this unenviable position, they had to create a language of peace that differed from the ones used so far. The need to create this language could begin with the long, contentious discourse on immigration in Assam because immigration was the contentious issue that determined the contours of political discourse in modern Assam.22

Immigrant Song Following the unprecedented eruption of violence in BTAD in August 2012, several civic groups in Assam came out in a united call for peace. However, as the violence continued, two seemingly-disparate, but ultimately-related occurrences took place. The first was the exodus of several thousand people from towns spread all over southern and western India back to Assam and other parts of the Northeast. Students and skilled and unskilled workers from the Northeast region had been targeted—some claim in retaliation for the violence against Muslims in BTAD—in cities such as Pune and Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore), and in an eerie rapid mobilisation of fear, they soon boarded trains headed towards Guwahati in Assam. The people from the Northeast aboard these trains were symbols of a new India in which their services and skills had found a ready market in malls and spas. However, the exodus served to show how vulnerable they were in their assigned roles and places of work and re-emphasised the lack of a coherent dialogue between ‘mainland’ India and its Northeast.23

21

Paul Gilroy, Post Colonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 3. Arupjyoti Saikia, A Century of Protests: Peasant Politics in Assam since 1900 (Delhi: Routledge, 2013). 23 Dolly Kikon, ‘Home is Hardly the Best’, The Hindu (20 Aug. 2012), online edition [http://www.thehindu.com/ opinion/op-ed/home-is-hardly-the-best/article3796017.ece, accessed 9 Feb. 2015]. 22

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The second occurrence was the coalescing of political opinion in Assam on what constituted the crux of the problem. Most civic and political formations in the state, including political parties that participated in elections, opined that ‘illegal immigrants from Bangladesh’ were at the root of the problem.24 These responses from ethnic organisations, including student groups, were expected and, to an extent, predictable. Intellectual and academic concerns over migration to Assam have had a long tradition that goes back to the early twentieth century and has yielded a solid body of work.25 Much of it dealt with the ubiquitous stranglehold of the census official in defining the political discourse around migration, but it also underlined the need for a rational dialogue on the major contours of the debate: clashes over resources; ownership of land; weakening of common property regimes; and, most importantly, relations between different communities in a multi-ethnic area. Hence, political parties—including influential student unions—had reiterated their commitment to the nationalist project of an earlier era in which notions of community and territory were intrinsically bound together. However, when organisations committed to a non-ethnic political discourse entered the debate, the issue of migration took a different turn. On 7 and 8 November 2012, the KMSS held a rally and public debate in Guwahati. In its call for peace in BTAD, the peasant organisation also wanted to highlight the issue of control over resources and the plight of the indigenous communities in the area. Its insistence on a dialogue about resources in BTAD offered another view of the immigration/migration debate in Assam. The demand for Bodoland, they acceded, was actually the culmination of almost sixty years of political mobilisation among the various indigenous tribes in the plains of Assam. These demands had their roots in the colonial moment of contact between a predominantly European administration and the local communities. It was through this encounter that the political, social and economic structures of the region, especially the landand forest-based rural economy, were transformed radically. Extrapolating from historical and political scholarship on the region, Nel Vandekerckhove and Bert Suykens term this process ‘tribal entrapment’, whereby nineteenth-century colonial policies were responsible for sequestering forests from indigenous tribal groups in the Brahmaputra Valley. Between the expanding tea plantations and the tightly-secured forests, land-use rules in the Brahmaputra Valley became unfavourable for the indigenous communities. This added rancour to political debates and claims for ethnic homelands.26 These demands were also an extension of the acrimonious debates of the early twentieth century, when Assamese nationalists raised the issue of immigration from Bengal and the Gangetic plains, much to the dismay of their Indian nationalist counterparts in the mainland. In the 1950s and 1960s, tribal leaders had to remind caste-Hindu Assamese politicians of the need to redistribute power and administrative control to ensure the development of their communities. The idea of losing control over land and markets—both of which evoked radical nationalist sentiments among the Assamese-speaking political class—had echoes among educated tribal leaders who then looked upon Dispur—the seat of power in Assam—as the source of their problems. The idea, therefore, of setting up a mirror image state, each with its own secretariat, legislative assembly and university, was a very strong impulse and became a 24

H.S. Brahma, ‘How to Share Assam’, The Indian Express (18 July 2012) [http://archive.indianexpress.com/col umnist/hsbrahma/, accessed 10 Feb. 2015]. 25 Sanjib Baruah, India Against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999); Amalendu Guha, Planter Raj to Swaraj: Freedom Struggle and Electoral Politics in Assam 1826!1947 (New Delhi: Peoples Publishing House, 1977); and Myron Weiner, Sons of the Soil: Migration and Ethnic Conflict in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978). 26 Nel Vandekerckhove and Bert Suykens, ‘“The Liberation of Bodoland”: Tea, Forestry and Tribal Entrapment in Western Assam’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 31, no. 3 (2008), pp. 450!71.

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rite of passage for leaders in Haflong, Kokrajhar and Diphu that could not be wished away. However, it is the insistence on closed, ethnically-homogenous units that is a greater cause for concern; moreover, these homeland demands seem to play right into a script that insists on extreme forms of exclusion. The reality of migration obfuscates the fact that most homeland demands have actually grown out of coalitions and alliances of disparate groups who felt short-changed by the status quo. Perhaps, it is within this problematic paradigm that new questions that have more creative answers for co-existence in contemporary Assam will be found. This is especially true when the issue of autonomy is raised as a possible tool for conflict resolution. While every community in Assam could aspire to the demand for its own council, perhaps even an autonomous state if its numbers are big enough, the two largest groups in the state—Bengali-speaking Muslims and Adivasis—would forever remain outside these ethnic homeland arrangements because their arrival can be clearly dated to the colonial period. Hence, the insider versus outsider tensions assume serious consequences for all. Every time there was talk of extending the powers of an autonomous council, other communities, especially those who could never claim a council of their own, were quick to protest. They feared that their lands and livelihoods would be lost, that they would be left without a political voice, and that they would forever live under the shadow of fear and violence. Paradoxically, this suited political entrepreneurs from every community since it reflected the empirical realities of forced displacement from villages and farms that had taken place in almost every district over the last decade. Land, whether as an asset to be acquired, or one to be lost, remained the most frequently-cited cause for concern for all communities in the state. Therefore, it was hardly surprising that one of the most contentious matters for nonBodo communities in BTAD was the transfer of the Department of Land and Revenue from Dispur to Kokrajhar, the headquarters of BTAD. It would be premature to guess if this means an end to land alienation for indigenous communities and their equally beleaguered neighbours. By 2014, agriculture had become just another means of livelihood for many people in rural Assam, especially in the autonomous areas such as BTAD. For six days a week, rows of bicycles would be parked outside the enormous gates of Samdrup Jongkhar town, which borders Bhutan and Baksa district in western Assam. They belonged to daily wage earners from the Assam side of the border who poured out of the gates at 5 pm every evening to return home to villages in which dreams of political justice had been subsumed under the crassness of new economic realities.

Conclusion My personal approach to analysing the changes in Assam relies on a deeper, nuanced engagement with the everyday forms of power and contestation, nuances evident in the notes that disrupt the grand narrative of the move towards peace and prosperity. It is through such engagement that I have been able to make sense of the changes that have taken place since the surrenders/arrests of rebel leaders of the many insurgent groups in the state. Unwittingly, it is the three issues that begin with ‘M’—melancholia, murder and migration—that need further debate, not just in Assam, but in the larger South Asian and Southeast Asian regions that surround the state. As mentioned earlier, these issues appeared with remarkable clarity in literary works in Assam. In her fictional novel, Arunimar Swades, Arupa Patangia Kalita outlines the story of a young woman whose world is torn asunder when she marries into a household that has connections with rebels.27 Having navigated this world of intrigue, fear and violence, the

27

Arupa Patangia Kalita, Arunimar Swades (Arunima’s Homeland) (Guwahati: Ananta Hazarika, 2001).

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protagonist, Arunima, leaves her marital home for the security of her maternal one, where she gives birth to a child. When Arunima returns to her marital home with her son, she is confronted by the smell and sight of the dead bodies of her family. Kalita’s genre of pathos and loss has continued in a second novel, Felanee. In it, she dwells on the life of another woman of indeterminate ethnicity, who is cast from one tragedy to another.28 Felanee’s life is a particularly dire one, full of unenviable choices and ringed in by men who lay claim to her ethnic identity. Taken together, both novels reflect the tumultuous changes that continue to impact upon political life in Assam. They invoke a world of violence where peaceful solutions are impossible—even in conversations among erstwhile friends—and where the ‘courtesy, sympathy, peaceableness and trust’ that is expected in relationships between private persons are held in abeyance.29 Unfortunately, the paucity of dialogue on these issues is far too large to warrant reckless attempts at solutions. One could, however, wish for some tentative steps towards understanding the political entanglements in contemporary Assam. To do so, one would need to absorb the weight of all three—migration, murder and melancholia—in order to be able to unearth other possibilities of doing politics. Migration, into and out of Assam, needs a much broader debate than the present political climate will allow. Murder, in its political and personal senses, needs a more reflective engagement that does not end with a call for revenge. Whether it is the various cases of the internally displaced or of those who have emerged scarred from ethnic conflict, the need to exact revenge in the pursuit of justice will be challenging. This is not to argue that the pursuit of justice should be abandoned altogether—far from it. One needs to reiterate that it would be a noble project to reconcile the difficult histories of those who have been on the receiving end of relentless operations of power. Perhaps, this project would be an apt homecoming for those seeking an end to a debilitating, melancholic journey.

28

Arupa Patangia Kalita (trans. Deepika Phukan), Felanee (Cast Away) (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2011). Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, in Walter Benjamin (edited and with an introduction by Peter Demetz), Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), pp. 277!300. 29

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