On Tuesday, the Assam government closed down a museum inaugurated two days earlier to showcase “Miya” culture. On Wednesday, three leaders of the All Assam Miya Parishad, including Parishad president Mohar Ali, were arrested and booked under the UAPA. Police have said that they will also be probed for alleged links with the Bangladesh-based terrorist outfit Ansarullah Bangla Team and al-Qaeda. The case must follow the due process of law, of course. But the fact also is that a cultural conflict has been brewing in Assam over “Miya” identity for some time now. The museum had reportedly been set up in the private residence of Ali, a school teacher, in Goalpara. Justifying the police action against it, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma claimed that its exhibits, barring the lungi, were a part of “Assamese culture”. Bodo leader and state minister Urkhao Gwra Brahma claimed that the museum was established with “the motive of creating a cultural conflict”.
Leaders like Sarma and Brahma have contributed towards the making of this polarising issue. To start with, “Miya” is now a derogatory term used to identify Bengali-speaking Muslims, most of them peasants living in the riverine islands of the Brahmaputra. They have been a target of the nativist politics that roils Assam and bore the brunt of the polarising NRC exercise. In recent times, however, the “Miya” community has successfully upended the discourse by embracing the pejorative to claim a distinctive identity within the rubric of broader Assamese and Indian identities. A 2016 poem, “I am a Miya”, spawned a genre of poetry that highlights the plight of a community targeted by the political establishment and elites as outsiders. While the “Miya” community describes these activities as cultural articulations, the BJP frames it as an act of divisive assertion.
In recent years, the BJP in Assam has given a communal twist to the state’s long-running nativist politics which has its roots in colonial era settlement policies and the post Partition social churn. The attempt to link Miya cultural politics with Islamist terrorism and illegal immigration threatens to further vitiate an already polarised environment. The action against the “Miya” museum comes in the backdrop of a demolition drive that targeted some madrasas for allegedly receiving dubious funding. It is unfortunate that CM Sarma has colluded in the attempt to redefine Assamese identity in narrow exclusivist terms, while downplaying the fact that the region is an ethnic, religious and linguistic melting pot. The state’s political leadership needs to respect, and in fact celebrate, the multiple cultural yarns that constitute the weave of Assamese identity and citizenship.
