Opinion Nellie massacre reports offer a cautionary tale about brutish identity politics, unchecked institutional failures

In February 1983, at the peak of the Assam Agitation and ahead of a contentious state election, entire villages of Bengali-speaking Muslims in central Assam became the sites of a massacre in the span of a single day. It remains one of the country’s worst episodes of communal violence. The silence that followed was deafening. Hundreds of FIRs notwithstanding, no one was ever convicted of the Nellie massacre. Forty-two years later, the tabling of the official inquiry report, led by IAS officer Tribhuvan Prasad Tewary, and the non-official judicial inquiry, helmed by the former Chief Justice of Himachal Pradesh, T U Mehta, come as a grim reminder of a brutish identity politics and congealed institutional inertia.

Despite the contradiction in their findings — the Tewary commission holds that the “decision to hold the elections cannot be blamed for the outbreak of the violence” while the Mehta commission report underlines it as the “main and immediate cause” — what emerges is the same cautionary tale. The Tewary Commission situates the violence not in religious conflict alone, but amid the churn of land pressures, demographic anxieties and festering fears about language and belonging. In the waves of migration following Partition and the formation of Bangladesh in 1971, Assam’s contentious border history has repeatedly been roiled by fears of demographic change, systemic neglect and vitriolic political mobilisations. The reports show how swiftly ordinary insecurities can be weaponised, how easily economic strain and identity politics can sharpen into virulent antagonisms, how institutions weakened by neglect or electoral expediency cannot be relied upon to arrest the slide.

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As Assam moves towards a pivotal election in 2026, the lessons of the Nellie massacre demand more than a ritual remembrance. From eviction drives to the revival of the Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act, 1950 without the safeguards of the Foreigners Tribunals, to the Chief Minister’s recurring invocations of spectres of “demographic invasion” and “land jihad”, the mobilisations against purported “foreigners” have often strained the democratic and constitutional guardrails. In highlighting what happens when institutional drift hollows out constitutional protections meant to shield every citizen from violence and injustice, the reports serve a warning that must be heeded.