The problem

IN May 2011 the Congress party won a landslide victory in the elections to the Assam assembly and Tarun Gogoi was re-elected to a third consecutive term as chief minister. This was the first time in the state’s political history that a chief minister was elected to a third term in office since B.P. Chaliha in 1967. The voter turnout was an impressive 76.03 per cent. That the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) did not call for a poll boycott helped. By then almost the entire top leadership of the ULFA was ready to negotiate with the central government – a development few could have predicted a few years ago. Voters gave some credit to Gogoi for pushing the process forward.

It was tempting to infer that the elections could mark the end of Assam’s troubled years, and that the state could be on the road to recovery. Indeed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, with more than the usual hyperbole of a political speech, has since spoken of a ‘new wave of development in Assam… made possible by a period of social peace and political stability.’ Assam, he said, could ‘emerge as a new engine of growth for the Northeast and the country as a whole.’¹ 

All such optimistic talk came to a screeching halt in the summer of 2012 when violence broke out between Bodos and Muslims of East Bengali descent in the Bodoland Territorial Autonomous Districts of western Assam. As many as 109 civilians were killed, and around 5000 houses were burnt in 244 villages, and nearly 400,000 people were displaced. As of mid-September, 187,052 people were still living in camps.² The issue of immigration from Bangladesh that had rocked Assam for six long years from 1979 to 1985 in the form of the Assam Movement – and which began the long period of political turmoil in the state – appears to have returned to centre-stage with a vengeance.

Immediately after the successful 2011 elections, this writer had warned against reading too much into them. To read them as signs of the beginning of the politics of good governance and development, I said, ‘would be a triumph of hope over reality.’ I reminded readers that the problems behind Assam’s political troubles were quite serious: that they ‘raise fundamental questions about the Partition’s vision of two, and subsequently three, bounded nation-states, and whether it matches the subcontinent’s subsequent ground realities.’³ 

All talk of Northeast India’s ‘post-conflict’ future has one thing in common: there is very little attention given to matters of reconciliation. Reconciliation is not just about finding common ground between rival positions on political and economic arrangements. It is about coming to terms with past wrongs. And to achieve that, apologies, truth commissions, and even reparations may be necessary. The important role of reconciliation in building a common future of conflict-torn societies is now widely recognized. But in India we seem to have a national aversion to the idea.

Nandini Sundar tells us of the response of a senior Indian minister to her suggestion that an apology could help move the Naga peace process forward. ‘Apology for what’? he replied.⁴ Yet, senior figures associated with the administration have acknowledged that efforts to militarily suppress the Naga rebellion had led to a ‘ghastly tragedy’. And one reason it could happen with ‘civilized and intelligent human beings at the helm of the administration’, wrote Nari Rustomji of the Indian Civil Service, whose responsibilities as Adviser to the Governor of Assam on Tribal Affairs included the Naga areas, was because of ‘the tradition of decision-making by precedent inherent in the administrative processes’ – part of the postcolonial Indian state’s institutional inheritance from its colonial forebearer.⁵ Why should it be so hard to say sorry when it is so clearly understood that bad decisions had led the ‘ghastly tragedy’?

The resentments that fuel Northeast India’s conflicts, however, are not only towards New Delhi or vis-à-vis India’s national narratives. It is often said that questions of identity are at the centre of the region’s conflicts. But identity, as Charles Taylor reminds us, is always defined ‘in dialogue with’ and ‘sometimes in struggle against’ what ‘our significant others want to see in us.’⁶ Whether it is the identities of an individual or of a group, memories play a key role in shaping them. ‘Acquiring a group’s memories and thereby identifying with its collective past is part of the process of acquiring any social identity.’⁷ 

From the perspective of many, Assam’s history – including its recent history – is as much of a repository of resentment as dominant narratives of India are to Assamese nationalists. Hegemonic narratives of Assam cannot easily accommodate stories of groups purported to be included in that history, but groups that were misrecognized, disrespected, abused or violated. It is even more difficult for contemporary generations to apologize for the unjust acts of their predecessors.

But there is a remarkable wave of new historical scholarship on Assam, which can provide inspiration for a politics of reconciliation. Historian Yasmin Saikia tells us, in this issue of Seminar, that Assam of the Ahom-era chronicles, the buranjis, was a ‘region of an extensive community that is cleverly designated as "Ami" or "Us" …an inclusive and evolving society that incorporated multiple people producing a flexible identity.’

We learn from Bodhisattva Kar’s work that ‘the differences between the "Ahoms" and the "tribals" were neither coded as "an irreducible cultural essence", nor as a "fundamental economic hiatus". Ritual practices and modes of subsistence overlapped, and political relationships were expressed in the "protean language of kinship" – that of a bhai-raja or a brother-king. Sovereignties "were neither necessarily focused on one centre, nor unavoidably reliant on demarcated borders".’⁸ In pre-colonial Goalpara, as Sanghamitra Misra tells the story, there were ‘realms of overlapping sovereignties of local chieftains, zamindars, mercenaries, the Bhutan monarch and the Dalai Lama.’⁹ 

Perhaps ‘the story of a glorious and continuous past of modern Assam’ could not be written without appropriating and repressing competing narratives.¹⁰ But what happened with that narrative is much worse. Jayeeta Sharma documents the pernicious influence of 19th century European theories of race and evolution on Assamese elites. ‘Morbidly conscious of their inclusion among the "barbarous hordes" who inhabited British India’s frontiers,’ the philologists’ categorization of the Assamese language within the Indo-European ‘family of languages’ had a remarkable hold on their imagination. They made claims of linguistic and racial ties with high status groups in the Indian heartland and to ‘civilization’, thus ‘pushing the burden of primitiveness onto "non Aryan" neighbours.’ This began to change only in the 20th century as the result of progressive political ideas gaining ground, and subaltern groups becoming ‘active participants in public discussions about history, progress, language and community’ challenging ‘dominant articulations of region and nation that excluded them from full belonging.’¹¹ 

To a significant extent the identity politics of our times is a reaction to histories that construct the past by projecting backwards in time from contemporary political-administrative borders and colonial ethnographic constructions of peoplehood. Activists often allude to memories of ancient kingdoms to support contemporary claims of territoriality, paying insufficient attention to the profound break in spatial dynamics under colonial rule. Colonial occupation subverted local political and resource use regimes and created new boundaries and enclaves. But the colonial era ethno-territorial frame continues to inform politics in Assam and Northeast India, restricting political imagination and reinforcing the fences and walls erected under colonial occupation.

Serious conversations about the conflicting narratives of the past are a necessary condition for sustainable peace. Reconciliation – whether within Assam or with New Delhi – cannot be achieved with a ceasefire agreement, an arms surrender ceremony or a peace accord. It must include changes in the way we understand our own nation or nationality. And that is more than just a matter of ‘inserting a paragraph in a history book; to accept the ignored history of abuse means that one’s national pride must be nuanced, with its points of pride balanced with shame.’¹²

SANJIB BARUAH

 

Footnotes:

1. ‘Assam has Lead Role in Look East Effort: PM’, The Hindu, 20 April 2012.

2. Giriraj Bhattacharjee, ‘Assam: Witches Brew in BTAD’, South Asia Intelligence Review, South Asia Terrorism Portal, Weekly Assessments and Briefings, volume 11, no. 13, 1 October 2012.

3. Sanjib Baruah, ‘Assam: Don’t Hold Your Breath’, Forbes India, 2 May 2011. http://forbesindia.com/article/special/assam-dont-hold-your-breath/24462/1

4. Nandini Sundar, ‘Interning Insurgent Populations: the Buried Histories of Indian Democracy.’ Paper presented at the Agrarian Studies Colloquium, Yale University, 3 April 2009.

5. Nari Rustomji, Imperilled Frontiers: India’s North-Eastern Borderlands. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1983, pp. 31-32.

6. Charles Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’ in Amy Gutman (ed.), Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1994, p. 33.

7. Eviatar Zerubavel cited in Jeff Spinner-Halev, ‘From Historical to Enduring Injustice’, Political Theory 35(5), October 2007, p. 580.

8. Bodhisattva Kar, ‘Welsh’s Fallacy: A Note on the Problematic of Sovereignty in Northeastern India,’ Unpublished paper.

9. Sanghamitra Misra, Becoming a Borderland: The Politics of Space and Identity in Colonial Northeastern India. Routledge, New Delhi, 2011, p. 197.

10. Ibid., p. 166.

11. Jayeeta Sharma, Empire’s Garden: Assam and the Making of India. Duke University Press, Durham, 2011, pp. 9-11, 196.

12. Spinner-Halev op cit., ‘From Historical to Enduring Injustice’, p. 584.