PEOPLE TOGETHER, KOLKATA)
Neo-liberal Economy and Assam’s imbroglio
Freedom
and Social Justice
Linguistic States and Federalism
The contraction
of state border is usually driven by the aim of creating a more nationally
homogeneous and legitimate small state to bring the proto-bourgeois section of
the particular nationality into governance. The working class consciousness
always remains contingent to the identity assertion in the underdeveloped
country like India. The aspiration of various linguistic groups that were on
the rise within the ambit of growing anti-British freedom struggle was
ventilated through the formation of linguistic states in independent India. But
considering the great cultural and linguistic diversity in India especially in the
state like Assam, this linguistic state formation could not resolve the issue
of identity empowerment. With a view to establish unhindered hegemonic rule
through linguistic homogeneity, the ruling Assamese upper castes resorted to
unbridled chauvinist policies and let loose brutal state repression on the Bengali
speaking Muslims in Lower Assam in fifties and on the language movement of Bodos
in Lower Assam, Bengalis in Barak Valley and on other tribal groups in the
sixties and this culminated into re-division of Assam. The Assamese ruling class
was satisfied with the new truncated Assam with the voices of the Bengalis
especially the Bengali Muslims of Lower Assam and the Bodos muted for the time
being. There were regular hiccups with occasional screams from those suppressed
voices since then up to particularly early eighties, but the situation has
changed thereafter. When the so called Assam movement designed to permanently
suppress those recalcitrant voices to tilt the balance of power absolutely
towards the Assamese Hindu upper castes hegemony has reached its zenith, its vested
class-interest has disillusioned the Assamese masses and thereby blunting their
chauvinistic appeal. This has also been the time when the Indian state has
ventured into the realm of neo-liberal policy drive and has started losing its
efficacy to achieve consent for a social balance in favour of upper caste
hegemony. In this backdrop, the distinct political formation of Bengali Muslim
community of Lower Assam and politico-social show of strength of Jharkhandi Tea
community of upper Assam have upped the ante of identity rights and social
justice. These two communities together constitute almost half of Assam
population and also major chunk of manual industrial workers and
poor-peasantry. New state formation in piecemeal manner cannot entail all the
complex mix of overlapping identities of Assam on linguistic as well as on cultural
parameters, and this is not unique for Assam, rather it is true to a large extent in the case of other
states of India as well and this fact calls for re-constitution of state reorganization
commission to be mandated with the task of formulating the criteria for formation
of new states with greater autonomy and the greater autonomy for all
communities within the states and this task can be summed up as the federal re-organisation
of India vis-à-vis states through multi-layered autonomy. We must create a
space for the empowerment of all communities who are at their various stages of
development to defeat chauvinistic politics and ensure working class solidarity
by surpassing community consciousness. But this, I suppose, is a working class
perspective which is anathema to the present day neo-liberal capitalists. As
the neo-liberalism fetishised and camouflaged real inequality and oppression in
the name of formal legal equality between unequal actors, the ruling class has
seen a real challenge from the women and working class leadership of Telengana
state movement and so they have bitten the bullet to contain the working class
perspective to emerge. The situation is different in the case of Bodo statehood
movement which can best explain this proposition.
Chauvinistic movement and Bodo tangle
The waning efficacy and support-base of chauvinistic
appeal of Assamese ruling class have given rise to democratic space to manoeuvre.
But till now, the question arises, why the left and democratic movement is not
taking a strong root in Assam politics. The neo-liberal onslaught has set the
ground for revolts; but there is ample scope to twist these revolts into
sectarian outbursts. The tradition of democratic language movement of the Bodos
has been hijacked by the contractor class, the section of lumpen unemployed
youths and the middlemen who amassed large sum of money from IMF and ADB funded
schemes in connivance with corrupt officials to morph it into
chauvinistic-terrorist movement mercilessly killing and displacing thousands of
non-Bodos to establish minority rule. The neo-liberals both at centre and the
state have given them free hand to loot and plunder natural forest resources
and the Government coffers by forming BTC in an area where Bodo population is
about 20-25% only. The official left also toed the line of this tribal
chauvinism by supporting the so called Bodo autonomy and thus constricted the
democratic space further.
The recent spate of violence in the BTC area of the
state of Assam needs also to be seen from the perspective of the present phase
of neo-liberal globalisation. The immediate cause of the conflict brewed up in
the BTC area of the state of Assam has extensively been dwelt upon by many
experts in different fields and they have mooted that the extension of sixth
schedule to a geographical area of mixed population without paying any heed to
the democratic recommendations of Bhupinder Singh committee, and the drive of
the militant outfits of the undemocratically empowered minority Bodo community
to establish majority rule through the policy of ethnic cleansing are the root
causes of this conflict. Without going into the details of this aspect, the other
dimension of overarching influence of the neo-liberal globalisation of economy
and culture that erode democratic space to cause social/ethnic conflict have
been mentioned here.
Communities
and democratic space
In BTC and the rest of Assam, the community
collectivities are used against one another. A people’s centric discourse to
solve this vexed identity question is not gaining ground due to the neo-liberal
ideology of new private English-educated middle class who finds unbridled
market-economy as the panacea of all ills. This debate could not also happen
due to another major factor of anti-Muslim middle class mindset of both
Assamese and Bengali Hindu society. The Bengali speaking Muslims of lower Assam
being compelled to accept Assamese as the medium of instruction over a long
period of time has become “No-Ahomiya” meaning neo-Assamese. But their
integrity to the state of Assam is always questioned by the mainstream Assamese
society, and their due status is also not overwhelmingly accepted by the
Bengali Hindu middle class too and thus they are in a state of confusion and
disturbance with regard to their linguistic identity. This increasing
anti-Muslim stance has something to do with colonial culture that is spreading
its tentacles through the present phase of globalisation of
culture.
The historical causation of the emergence of reactionary identity based
politics in the peripheral states like Assam is reinforced by the economic
policy pursued. The problem of formal democracy is that mass
politics are too remote and too disaggregated to ensure that politicians are
under appropriate detailed constraint. The peasant movement of seventies was
defeated by the Chauvinist Assam Movement and the present democratic space is
being constricted by the sectarian movement of the oppressed tribal identities.
The communal and chauvinist politics in Assam has not faced the adequate
challenge from the grass-root people’s movements which still lack the vision to
incorporate the question of democracy, alternative economic model to the
neo-liberal growth model and alternative people’s culture to the neo-liberal
culture of globalization in their programme. The ruling political class
cutting across the party line is now realising that the Assam situation is sliding
down beyond manageable level leaving two extreme options of either barbarism under
the leadership of crass political class or new democracy under the leadership
of working class for foreseeable future, and so to avoid the snowballing of
these two extreme situations, some kind of consensus on multilayered autonomy
for Bodo people as recommended by Bhupinder Singh Committee, on the formation
of upper house to incorporate leaders of different communities into the power
structure and on extending economic-sops to the section of people losing out in
the spree of all out privatisation is rapidly emerging within the political
parties. But a new debate from working class perspective can only find the way
out to resolve the disarrayed premise of ‘unity in diversity’ in Assam.
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