📣 For more lifestyle news, click here to join our WhatsApp Channel and also follow us on Instagram
Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Today, the final version of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) is due for publication in Assam. The exercise has kept Assam in the national, even international, news for a year and more, as have ideas such as the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill and electoral politics — with the BJP putting up its best performance ever in Assam despite opposition to the Bill ahead of the Lok Sabha elections this year. But there is a lot more to the Assam story, with some of its complexities not yet brought to national attention as frequently as the NRC or the Citizenship Bill. The events of decades leading up to the NRC, the question of the fate of those excluded, and how the “immigration problem” can be solved, if ever, are so involved that they could fill a book. Which is what journalist Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty has done.
Assam: The Accord, The Discord builds its narrative around the Assam Accord of 1985, under which the All Assam Students Union (AASU), and the state and Rajiv Gandhi governments agreed on a cut-off date for Indian citizenship in Assam (which is more accommodating than elsewhere in the country). The NRC is being prepared on the basis of the cut-off agreed in the Accord — March 24, 1971. The book examines how the Accord came to be, and how it continues to cast its shadow on so much that has happened in Assam since. Pisharoty, who grew up in Assam during those days, reflects on her own memories of the 1979-85 Assam Movement and draws from interviews with Movement leaders-turned-politicians, journalists, scholars and members of various communities in multicultural Assam.
What defines this effort is the sweep of the information it covers and the insight it provides. There is the bargaining over the Accord until the movement leaders settled for 1971 — after having turned down an offer of 1967 from the Indira Gandhi government, it emerges. Of the various proposals made, some suggested that one group of migrants, based on an arrival date, could be resettled in other Indian states — an idea that could be of significance today, given the lack of clarity on what happens to those left out of the NRC.Then, there are the seemingly contradictory characters of the AASU, its movement and the Asom Gana Parishad party, which was born out of it. What began as a non-violent movement eventually took place in a violent atmosphere, which saw the massacre of thousands of Bengali Muslims in Nellie, as well as the killing of 855 youth participating in the Movement. The roots of the AASU had leftist connections, and the movement was non-communal. Yet it had the support of right-wing leaders like Atal Bihari Vajpayee, an RSS influence was imputed — denied by RSS leaders then and by movement leaders quoted in the book — and the AGP is, today, an ally of the BJP. The book dwells also on the puzzling question of identities and their relations: the difference between a miya (a Muslim of East Bengal origin) and a Bengali-speaking Muslim migrant who entered Assam illegally after 1971; the friction between Assamese and Bengali Hindus; and, how Assamese Muslims took part in the movement, got disillusioned when the AGP tied up with the BJP, but have now largely gone back to asserting their linguistic rather than religious identity. In this complex mix enters the Hindu right, represented by the BJP and a growing RSS, fed in part by the growth of the Muslim right represented by the AIUDF. “The way [various] conditions have meshed and conflicted, grows in nuance and bluntness, page after page, layer by layer, party by party, community by community,” Sanjoy Hazarika, journalist, author and international director, Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, writes in his foreword.
Where will all this lead to? Pisharoty acknowledges Bengali Muslims’ efforts at assimilation, and stresses the need for them to resist efforts by the Muslim right to infiltrate their community. She identifies the biggest challenge facing the indigenous communities — “whether to remain an Assamese, or a khilonjiya first, or bow to the rising wave prominently emanating since 2016 to be a Hindu first. The BJP’s push for the Citizenship Bill… led several among the Assamese Muslim community too to ponder where they would figure…” She ends with verses by Bhupen Hazarika: “And those who arrived from faraway lands/ To settle down by the Brahmaputra/ And called this land their mother/ Each of those is also a new kind of Assamese/ We just need to stay that way.”
