The
Assam question and the left
Arup
Baisya
Migration and colonial rule
The current dominant political discourse
in Assam is revolving around the citizenship question. The citizenship problem
in Assam has a convoluted history and is related to demographic changes due to
migration. The citizenship question in Assam is intertwined with linguistic
identity. The question of language plays a pivotal role in the dynamics of
power politics. In the spatio-temporal dimension of Assam politics, the
intermingling of the characteristics of migration and language prepares the
ground for citizenship conundrum.
The linguistic assimilation in Assam
through social interaction was hamstrung by the perverted path of capitalist
development under the colonial and post-colonial rule. There is historical
evidence of the presence of Muslim inhabitants in the present day lower-Assam
before the advent of Ahoms into Assam in 1228. This was the time of
‘Charyapada’ and the people of that period cannot be identified with any modern
linguistic identity. So the concept of aboriginal or Khilonjiya in local
Axomiya parlance is the modern political vocabulary that has emerged to create
‘other’ in this geopolitical space of Assam. Being a contiguous geographical
landscape of today’s lower Assam and Bangladesh, the settlement of people from
densely populated agricultural present-day Bangladesh into land-abundant
low-lying submerged plains of lower-Assam was a natural phenomenon. The poor
peasant and fishermen who roamed over the whole landscape could find it
beneficial to settle in the upland of submerged plains of lower Assam. After
colonial Annexation of Assam in 1826, the British allured the Bengali Muslim
poor peasants of present-day Bangladesh to migrate and settle in land-abundant
plains of Assam to earn revenue from agricultural production. These
Bengali-Muslim peasants were hard-working and had the skill in agricultural
production in low-lying submerged land; the local tribals lacked both the
characteristics. The peasants were flocking to the Brahmaputra valley in large
numbers, in order to settle down on its beckoning wasteland for livelihood and
to free themselves from Zamindari oppression in Bengal.
The British later introduced Line System
in Lower Assam and inner-line permit system in upper Assam to ensure their
administrative control for super-exploitation and drainage of natural
resources, agricultural economy and tea production. The Chinese and local
tribal workers who were initially engaged in tea-production were extricated
because of their rebellious attitude against the almost slave-like exploitation
in tea-enclaves. The native language which was suitable for the British
administration at that time was Bengali. The English educated Bengali middle
class especially from erstwhile Sylhet district occupied the clerical jobs of
various departments when the departmental head-quarters were established in
Sylhet which was part of Assam. So the colonial British ruler imposed Bengali
as the official language in 1836 and treated Assamese as the dialect of
Bengali. This measure caused immense disruption in the process of linguistic
assimilation through social interaction and hindered the capitalist development
from below through surplus-accumulation and drainage. At the hindsight, we can
safely conclude that in the absence of British subjugation, Assam could have
witnessed the desired linguistic assimilation in an independent market economy
that could have emerged in a landscape which was resourceful both in terms of
labour and nature.
The birth of nationalism
The line system which was responsible
for the spatial division of the landscape on the basis of linguistic community and
for colonization of the Bengali-settlers in low-lying flood-prone areas was
suitable for the domination of the colonial rulers at the time when the Quit
India movement was at its peak and the militant peasant struggle on the basis
of Hindu-Muslim unity was resurgent. The colonial rulers then sided with the
Assamese ruling class to defend the continuation of the line system which the
hard-working Bengali peasantry was opposing. The position on the question of
line system took a class-community dimension. The Assamese ruling class and the
colonial rulers found them in the same camp as strange bed-fellows. The
apotheosis of this new alignment of forces was the introduction of Assamese as
the official language and the official declaration in favour of forced
assimilation into Assamese nationality by accepting common language and culture
in 1936. The birth of a new nationalism was thus marked by the backing of the
imperialist and was pitted against the toiling masses that were linguistically
and culturally considered as alien. The reactionary class dimension of Assamese
nationalism was thus fixed in the garb of history at its birth. The progressive
voices of English educated Assamese intellectuals were thus subdued in the
social dynamics of Assam’s migration politics. This reactionary trend of
Assamese nationalist politics was accentuated, mutatis mutandis, during the
historical events and social churning of independence and post-independence
period.
Assimilation and chauvinism
The next massive disruption in the
process of linguistic assimilation occurred due to partition and the
industrialization policy of independent India to drain out surpluses from
Assam’s natural resources. The large scale anti-Muslim riot that broke out in
lower Assam during partition forced the Bengali Muslim peasant to cross the
border and take refuge in the newly constituted Pakistan state. A large number of
Bengali Hindu refugees came to India as partition-victims, but a small
percentage of them settled in Brahmaputra valley. The lakhs of people who left
Assam during the trouble-torn period of partition returned to their abode on
the basis of Nehru-Liyakat Pact. But their return was not welcomed by the
Assamese landed gentry and the dependent Bourgeois class and their political
leadership who generated anti-Muslim passion within the Assamese peasantry who
had the petty-bourgeois desire of getting the ownership of land which was
developed into fertile productive land by the Bengali Muslims peasants through
their skilled and intense challenging labour. These immigrants faced a lot of
hindrances and harassment from the independent Assam administration and were
treated as aliens in the Assamese society. The massive riots in the fifties and
riots before and after every census were spearheaded for coercive inclusion of
them as marginalized and submissive people into the fold of Assamese hegemony.
All the Bengali schools in lower Assam were demolished. The Muslim peasantry
who are called Na-Axomiya identified themselves in the Census of 1950 as
Axomiya. They changed their identity without much resistance because the
livelihood issue was more important for the poor peasants who were left
leaderless by the migration of influential Muslim families to East Pakistan,
than their identity question.
This was the turning point when the
anti-immigrant and anti-Bengali Assamese psyche in the form of inchoate social
discourse had transformed into a chauvinist political force who took charge in
the independent Assam as regional satraps. The ruling class of Delhi found it
convenient to pander this chauvinist regional force to ensure their writ over
this land and economic exploitation.
After the submission of the Bengali
Muslims, the next target was the Bengali Hindus who were in a dominant position
in Government jobs due to the policy followed by the British for a long time.
These Bengali Hindus were forcefully displaced from the public space of
job-market in the massive language riots in the 1960s. Post-language riot, many
Bengali middle-class families migrated to West Bengal in search of a safe
social life. The Assamese regional ruling class treaded this bloody path of
coercive assimilation and domination because of their weakness as inchoate
Bourgeois class who were not in a position to establish their hegemony over the
larger indigenous Assamese society and their dependence on the Indian ruling
class who was in control of the regional market which was developed through
colonial and post-colonial perverted path of capitalism. The Indian ruling
class always pandered this Assamese psyche to keep the regional forces in good
humour and this political arrangement is continuing till today, albeit in
changed socio-economic circumstances.
Peasant struggle and chauvinist movement
The Bangladesh liberation war which
caused lakhs of Bengali Hindu refugee to take shelter in India had once again
made the Assamese ruling class apprehensive of losing their majority position.
But at that time, the migrants were sheltered in refugee camps and the majority
of them were returned to Bangladesh on the basis of Indira-Mujib pact. A small
section of the Bengali Hindu migrants came to Assam and those who had not returned
were rehabilitated in many parts of the country.
The Assam movement in the 1980s was the
zenith of the political turmoil that was initiated in the garb of
post-partition politics. The forced assimilation of the minorities is always an
Achilles heel for the Assamese domination in the state’s helm of affairs,
because the Assamese leadership is always apprehensive that the minorities may
claim the share of political power at a time when the social balance of forces
is favourable to them, and to achieve that goal, they may even go out of the
fold of Assamese nationality. The UMF and AIDUF phenomena are examples of such
minority assertion. This politics of numerical majoritarianism is anathema to
democratic dialogue and social interaction. Bereft of that, the only option
left for the Assamese ruling class to ensure their regional political hegemony
is to establish their numerical strength by deporting the Bengalis. Initially,
the student movement in Assam was started on the demand for regional development
and regional power. But soon it transformed into anti-Bengali movement under
the patronage of Assamese ruling class in tow with the Indian ruling class. The
RSS was active within the movement surreptitiously and could successfully fan
communal passion from within. The majoritarian politics of Assamese domination
simultaneously translates the anti-Bengali and anti-Muslim sentiment into an
intertwined political agenda. In 1983 when the Assam movement was at its peak,
Assam witnessed the anti-Muslim genocide in Nellie and anti-Namasudra riot in
Shilapathar. The imagined enemy was meticulously built in Assamese psyche
through statistical jugglery to propagate the story of continuous migration as
a part of the conspiracy of Bengali expansionism. The Assamese peasantry and
tribals were mobilized behind the ruling class by appealing to their
petty-bourgeois desire of grabbing the land of the minorities and for a “Sonar
Assam” which would be the land only for Assamese to live in prosperity and
happiness, and they were pitted against the minorities as frenzied mob to torch
minority villages with clandestine support from police administration. This
tormentous phase of Assam’s history ended with the Assam Accord in 1985.
The left’s role and its weakness
The Assam movement was launched in the
backdrop of a growing peasant struggle under the leadership of various left
organizations. The Naxalbari peasant uprising was also a source of inspiration
behind the rising peasant struggle in Assam in the 1970s. The chauvinist Assam
movement disrupted this peasant struggle to stall the process of the democratization of Assamese society. When the left nationalist argues that the
left leadership in the peasant struggle in the 1970s failed to address the
nationalist aspirations of Assamese linguistic identity and that is why the
peasant masses could be successfully pursued to bring them to the chauvinist
fold, they actually miss the class dynamics of Assamese nationality question.
Why the Assamese bourgeois class and the political leadership did not consider
the peasant movement as an opportunity to flex the Assamese nationalist muscle
for devolution of more power to the state to serve the regional interest and
hegemonic control? The answer to this question lies in the nature of the Assamese
ruling class who epitomizes the nationality politics which took shape in the
garb of colonial power in the 1920s & 1930s and later under the patronage
of Indian ruling class.
The left forces from RCPI in the
pre-independence period to CPIM in the 1970-80s never identified the chauvinist
character of Assamese nationalist politics and did not theoretically formulate
any programme against chauvinism to ensure the assertion of toiling masses and
their victory. During Assam movement too, CPIM and other parliamentary left
considered it as a reactionary aberration of people’s movement, though they
stood firm against the minority bashing. But later they internalized the
left-nationalist argument. Some Naxalite groups even considered post-Assam
Accord ULFA experiment as the militant assertion of a marginalized nationality
and underestimated the chauvinist character of their agenda to annihilate the
diversity in Assam to create a monolithic Assamese identity through coercive
means. The inchoate Assamese Bourgeois class which failed to establish their
hegemony over the Assamese society and to promote assimilation through social
interaction and market forces always tread the path of coercion and violence
against the other linguistic groups. The PCC CPI(ML) attempted to combine the
democratic content of the AASU movement in its formative stage with peasant
question to formulate a democratic revolutionary agenda. But in the eighties,
the peasants had already started losing their class power for agrarian
revolution due to the changing dynamics of the social relation of production
that had taken roots in the agricultural economy, and the strength of
democratic Assamese intellectual class was too weak to give the society a
democratic mooring. As the parliamentary and practicing left never had a
theoretical position and agenda against the Assamese chauvinism and never built
a sustained dispassionate critique against the chauvinist politics, the
intellectual section of the left and the Assamese left leadership shifted their
allegiance according to the vicissitude of political discourse and the dominant
trend.
The class question and the Sangh Parivar
After a long phase of dirigiste
development model, the 1980s was the beginning of a new phase of global
capitalism under which India also started following the structural adjustment
programme which was officially accepted in 1991 as reform process. In this
scheme of neo-liberal reform, the class power of the old Assamese
proto-bourgeoisie further eroded. The new classes started emerging in the
social spectrum. At the one end of the social spectrum, there are class of
people who benefited from privatization and disinvestment, commissions from
opening up of economy to national and global private players, sub-contracting of
construction work in infrastructure investment, the commission from land
acquisition and plundering of natural resources and this class as new regional
ruling class is firmly embedded in the global chain of financial capital and
the Indian compradors. On the other end, there is a meteoric rise of wage
labourers who are uprooted from the agricultural economy due to agricultural
distress, eviction for accumulation through dispossession and capitalist
penetration. In the initial phase of the neo-liberal economic drive, there was
a rise of the middle-income group and intellectual working class whose
deteriorating status and their agony now becomes evident due to the deep-rooted
systemic crisis of capitalism. All these classes intermingle in the market
place cutting across community affiliations and that influences their worldview
to be modern from the primordial chauvinist outlook. They find no solution to
their angst and agony in the chauvinist project. The change of social relation
of production in the rural landscape has also changed the peasant masses that
were amenable to be a frenzied mass in the chauvinist call for deportation of
so-called illegal migrants. The Assamese Nationality is also gripped with the
symptom of fatigue due to long drawn out failed experiments of the chauvinist
project of deportation of migrants from Assam. In this backdrop, the politics
behind NRC, citizenship Bill, etc needs to be looked into.
The Assamese chauvinist as the social
force has lost their vital energy and mass mobilizing ability due to the change
in social relation of production as well as the fatigue that sets in by the
repetition of same anti-migrant anti-minority political vocabulary for a long
period. At the national level, the absolute control of central power is established
by a politically homogenous entity which advocates the most reactionary
reconstruction of national pride and that force is in a position to shape the
ruling political discourse in Assam both from below and above. In the eighties,
RSS was acting clandestinely to influence the Assam chauvinist movement in the
anti-Muslim communal line. But this time, the RSS and Sangh Parivar set the
agenda of chauvinists and establish the ideological control through their
meticulously planned organizational and propaganda machinery. They have the
entire wherewithal and the state backing to lead their plan of action to
fruition, as the state has completely arrogated the communal-chauvinist
politics. Much before the beginning of NRC process in Assam, the Hindutwa forces
launched a massive campaign on the exaggerated version of Bengali Hindu
atrocities in Bangladesh and their declining population in Bangladesh through
their concocted stories and statistical jugglery. This propaganda blitzkrieg
gave its intended result in favour of Sangh Parivar to occupy the driving seat
of both communal and chauvinist politics in Assam simultaneously. It pandered
the communal instinct and partition-memory in the Bengali Hindu psyche and
instigated the Assamese chauvinist apprehension of becoming minority due to
alleged continuous influx of Bangladeshis. The two instruments of NRC and
Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) were projected in such a way in the political
discourse that these added ammunitions to the arsenal of chauvinist and communal
forces. NRC is for the exclusion of Bengali Muslim infiltrators and the CAB is
for the inclusion of Bengali Hindu migrants. This is the trajectory designed
and propelled by the Sangh Parivar to bring the section of Assamese left, left
nationalist and the chauvinist in the same camp.
The citizenship question and the left bankruptcy
The CAB is opposed by the all
progressive forces on the ground that this is communal and anti-constitutional.
But the Assamese intellectual stalwart and left nationalist Dr. Hiren Gohain
guiding the anti-CAB movement argued that CAB should be opposed as its
implementation would facilitate the migration of all the Bangladeshi Hindu to
settle in Assam. The idea he adumbrated and his vociferous claim to exclude
lakhs of people from NRC justified the RSS propaganda of rising Islamic
fundamentalism in this sub-continent, especially in Bangladesh. The
parliamentary left and the Assamese leaders with left leanings preferred to
join the anti-CAB movement of the nationalist and chauvinist force with a
misconstrued notion of combating the BJP with Assamese nationalism. The left
became befuddled because of their credulity to believe that the Assamese
nationality has the class power to challenge the Delhi’s writ. The polemic on
chauvinism within the parliamentary left circle in the eighties when they stood
firm against the Assam movement was never more than hieroglyphics in nature.
The left never conceded the fact that Assamese nationalism is inherently
chauvinist right from its birth because of its tendency to suppress the
cultural diversities within the national identity and to surrender to Indian
ruling class to buy the status of regional satraps. This time when the regional
political forces were heading towards complete decimation through the merger
with most reactionary ultra-nationalist Sangh Parivar and when the AGP was
sharing power with BJP at the state-Assembly, the state CPIM leader was
pleading the AGP to take leadership of the anti-CAB movement for Assamese
nationalism. Many other left forces in Assam had an almost similar position on
Assamese nationalist movement. The befuddled left completed its full circle of
bankruptcy from theoretical obscurity to the falling in the trap of
communal-chauvinist stratagem. The inevitable had happened in pre-poll
political realignment when both the pro and anti-CAB forces in the apparently
separated camps of communalism and chauvinism joined BJP bandwagon.
The lost opportunity to be regained
Before the full-blown imbroglio of
Assam’s turmoil centering around NRC and CAB issues, Assam witnessed the
vibrant and sporadic movement of a diverse section of the organized,
unorganized and intellectual working class. Had the united left launched a
movement against the undemocratic division of original (Khilonjiya) and
non-original citizens in NRC process, the uncivilized imposition of onus of
proof of citizenship on citizens themselves, the immense harassment of citizens
especially the religious and linguistic minorities in the name of D-voters and
detention camp, and stood firm against the centralization of power and
curtailment of working-class rights, the communal-chauvinist politics in Assam
would have faced formidable challenge of people’s movement this time. But
instead of visualizing the nationality question from a working-class
perspective and challenging the reactionary middle-class perspective, the left
and democratic forces missed the opportunity and succumbed to the machination
of the Sangh Parivar and allowed the snowballing of the citizenship question in
Assam into a dire humanitarian crisis. But everything is still not lost, the
rapid disenchantment in Hindutwa politics will once again transform the
objective reality for regaining the opportunity lost. The left and democratic
forces should rapidly reconstruct their political discourse from a
working-class perspective and build the mass organizational foundation that can
be used by the toiling masses as their instrument to combat the onslaught of
the state and to empower themselves.
