A thousand cuts, from the east and the west

He was not alone in downplaying the systematic “Indian-cleansing” in Assam. Where was the outrage of our NGOs and celebrity-activists, whose voice is heard all over the world whenever some wrong takes place in a BJP-ruled state? Most people in “mainland” India also tend to gloss over the killings in “distant” Assam. If we continue to so ignore the threat of Pak-supported separatism in Assam, a day will surely come, in the next 30-40 years, when another weak Indian Prime Minister will dream about having “breakfast in Kolkata, lunch in Dhaka and dinner in…” Fill the blank with the name of the capital of the new nation in the north-east, which will later become a part of the Islamic Republic of Greater Bangladesh.

Those who think this is scare-mongering should answer five questions:

• Why has ULFA killed nearly 1,000 “Indian” civilians in over 400 terrorist acts since 2002? Isn’t this a part of the ISI’s strategy to “bleed India with a thousand cuts”?

• ULFA, which aims to establish “Swadhin Assam” free of “India’s colonial rule”, is not only silent about Bangladeshi infiltrators but actually justifies their illegal influx. Why?

• Isn’t it true that various jihadi outfits in Bangladesh, who work closely with many pan-Islamist organisations around the world, and whose clout in that country’s politics has sharply risen in recent years, have spoken about slicing away Muslim-majority parts of West Bengal and Assam?

• Alarmed by the magnitude of infiltration, wasn’t even the Supreme Court, in its August 2005 verdict holding the IMDT Act “unconstitutional”, compelled to warn: “There can be no manner of doubt that the State of Assam is facing external aggression and internal disturbance on account of large-scale illegal migration of Bangladeshi nationals”?

• Isn’t it a fact that the Congress and some other political parties, guided solely by vote-bank considerations, have ferociously opposed repeal of the IMDT Act, and thus colluded with this “external aggression” in Assam?

Most people in “mainland” India are indifferent to the lessons of our country’s communally inspired vivisection in the east in 1947. That indifference has its roots in ignorance — both of geography and history. How many educated Indians know that our north-eastern region, which accounts for seven of our 28 states, is linked to the rest of India with a narrow strip, called the Chicken’s Neck, that is all of 21 kms in width? Contrast this with the fact that this region has a 1,829 km-long porous border with Bangladesh, a country where many people advocate the policy of lebensraum (claiming more ‘living space’ in the neighbourhood for its teeming millions).

This tenuous territorial linkage alone should have made every successive government in New Delhi extremely vigilant and caring towards India’s north-eastern region. But indifference to geography has been made worse by blindness to history. Not many even in the Congress party remember the enormous difficulties India faced in preventing Assam from becoming a part of Pakistan. In addition to the Muslim-majority parts of Bengal, the Muslim League had laid claim to the whole of Assam, taking advantage of a British stratagem called “grouping of provices”. League leaders were breathing fire. The British supported them. Nehru was vacillating.

The future of Assam (which in 1947 included Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Mizoram, and Meghalaya) was at stake. It was saved for India only because of the courageous, farsighted and uncompromising stand taken by two great personalities: Gopinath Bordoloi, the architect of modern Assam, and his mentor, Mahatma Gandhi.

In fact, every word that Gandhiji spoke and wrote about Assam in the critical years of 1945-47 is worth its weight in gold. In the end, only Sylhet district, where Muslim migrants from East Bengal had already formed a majority, was awarded to Pakistan on the basis of a referendum.

Assam’s “partial inclusion” in the newly carved out “Muslim nation” remained one of Pakistan’s enduring grouses. Therefore, balkanisation of India on the basis of religion — both in Jammu & Kashmir and in Assam — has been Islamabad’s strategic objective since 1947.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who later became Pakistan’s prime minister, articulated this in his book, Myth of Independence, in 1968: “It would be wrong to think that Kashmir is the only dispute that divides India and Pakistan. One, at least, is nearly as important as the Kashmir dispute, that of Assam and some districts of India adjacent to East Pakistan. To these Pakistan has very good claims.”

Since Pakistan’s own partition in 1971, its rulers are doubly determined to weaken and divide India by exporting terror both from the west and the east.

The moot question is: How did ULFA, a product of the anti-foreigner agitation in Assam in the late 1970s, become a tool in the hands of the very foreigners who are out to erase the socio-cultural identity of Assam? Next week’s column will deal with this and other questions in the painful and shocking story of betrayal of Assam.