Kabir Ahmed Saikia
(kabirsaikia040@gmail.com)
The provenience of the cacophony which is hovering around the present eviction of Assam is entrenched somewhere deep in the past history of Indian politics and often seen as a ramification of the obduracy of the then leaders who occupied the top echelons of the government and their propensity to deal with the problems of Assam according to their own comfort level.
Since British colonial times, Assam has been intransigently defiant in accepting the gospel of being considered a “land without people” by its rulers. Efforts to recuperate the land and to assert the historical presence of collectiveness against the discourse of power have been a theme in the politics of Assam for nearly a century. Well before the partition, local resistance had forced changes in the colonial-era settlement policy and even defined the battle lines, confirming the presence of a regional patriotic frame in Assam. In fact, it was the political mobilization based on this regional patriotic frame that formed the part of the anti-colonial confederacy, which was built by the Indian National Congress in Assam.
But over the years the tension between the regional patriotic frame which formed the politics of the provincial Congress and the pan-India frame of the Indian National Congress proliferated and came to the fore during Jawaharlal Nehru’s visit in 1937 as president of Congress amid a raging controversy over immigration from Eastern Bengal, where Nehru’s appeal to the people of Assam to prioritize India’s major “national problems” over “provincial problems” in his public speeches faced stern animadversion from the intellectuals for failing to appreciate the local understanding of the issues of Assam.
At the time of Partition, no other issues caused estrangement between the leaders of Assam and the all-India Congress more than the issue of the settlement of refugees, for, by that time, Assam had already been sheltering three lakh refugees, and our perspicacious local leaders, foreseeing its cataclysmic effect on the future economy, tried to truncate their number to be settled in Assam. To address the issue, the Government of Assam issued a state circular in May 1948 stating, “In view of the influx created by the refugees into the province from the East Pakistan territories and in order to preserve peace, tranquillity and social equilibrium in towns and villages, the government reiterates its policy that settlement of land should in no circumstances be made with persons who are not indigenous to the province.” And Nehru retorted to this in his letter to Assam’s Chief Minister on May 18, 1949, that “the state is getting a bad name for its narrow-minded policy,” further stating in the same letter that “it is patently true that if land is not available in Assam, it is still less available in the rest of India.”
The intrepid leaders of Assam relentlessly contended for the state government’s prerogatives on the matters of citizenship and immigration. But to this Jawaharlal Nehru sarcastically retorted that “I suppose one of these days we might be asked for the independence of Assam.” Adding more to the repertoire, when the controversy over how many refugees were to be settled in Assam continued, the then Deputy Prime Minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel called Bordoloi’s successor, Bisnuram Medhi, a narrow-minded parochial person. But the idea of freedom did not remain in custody for long, nor could the label of parochialism whittle down the hankering for independence among a younger generation of Assam three decades later, finally leading them to declare the Assam Movement in 1979 to vent their spleen.
Though the Assam movement ended in 1985 with the signing of the “Assam Accord”, somewhere the leaders of the movement failed to recognize that their effort to implement the clauses of the Accord would become nugatory due to the former existence of the IMDT law passed in the Indian parliament in 1983 – when most of Assam had no representative because of the Assam Movement’s boycott of the parliamentary election in 1979 – which severely limits the ability of any government agency to act against those who are legally foreigners. And in 2005, when the Supreme Court declared the IMDT law unconstitutional, the Congress government still bought the provisions of the law through the back door by issuing two notifications since the law had become a liability for the party at that time due to the upcoming Assembly election of Assam to be held early in 2006.
However, by the end of the year, the Supreme Court nullified those notifications, but that time was enough for Congress to squeak by and win the election.
Such history, which holds a plethora of evidence that substantiates how the interest of Assam and its people was exploited in the name of democracy either by issuing frivolous replies officially or by passing incogent laws like IMDT, obfuscates Assam’s strategic position in the nation-building process, whether it is to be considered a treasure trove to fill the government coffers with earnings from its natural resources or to be taken as a land where parties in the past had been accused of getting mandates in elections through voters with challenged identity.
Today though the high constitunal bodies like Supreme Court, Election Commission and Gauhati High Court had spoken much in favour of a tougher illegality regime, drawing a fine line between citizens and non -citizens, putting a stop to the practice of voting by citizens whose identity is apocryphal, but the huge numbers of lives lost in the strive for an intruder-free Assam due to the recalcitrant attitude of the mainland leaders of the past towards the predicament of Assam and their proclivity to not break their psychological stalemate with the local leaders to frame laws for protecting Assamese interest cannot be brushed off, which today has metamorphosed the Assam’s immigration problem into an anathema.