Envisioning tomorrow’s Assam

With Eyes Wide Open: D. N. Bezboruah

Apart from about 17 years spent outside, most of my four score years and five have been spent in Assam—the State where I was born and one I am proud to belong to. But if anyone imagines that just because I am an Assamese born in Assam, I am quite happy about how the State is now and what our leaders have turned it into, this is far from the truth. What saddens me no end is that the Assam of my dreams is very different from what it is today and what it is likely to become if we are not thinking of drastic changes that our leaders may be quite incapable of bringing about. And that is why it imperative to know what the Assam of today is like and what needs to be done to make it a better place to live in. Where we may have seriously gone wrong is to imagine that even if we do nothing at all about bringing in some of the vital changes that are the crying needs of the State, it will still somehow magically become the land of our dreams. Nothing of the sort is likely to happen, because a State or a country is not just the land mass it occupies, but the people who inhabit it. It is the nature, preoccupations, attitudes and lifestyles of the people whose land it is that determines what the land itself will be like.

My homeland Assam needs a whole gamut of changes to become what it is capable of becoming and not just changes that will make things easier for New Delhi or improve its capability to interact with countries of the Far East. Some of the changes that are vital for Assam’s future may, in fact, not be to New Delhi’s liking at all, but we must still make sure that those changes are affected. But in order to be aware even of the directions of change, we must be aware of what the Assam of today is like and how to activate the necessary remedial measures to bring the State at least to the level of the front-ranking States of India. In undertaking this Herculean task, it is imperative for us to know how some of the diktats of Delhi over the decades have seriously undermined our ability to make our own choices and to chart our own course. The senseless urge to emulate the doings of what mainland India does (in the belief that it is fashionable to do everything that the rest of India does) has driven us along questionable paths hitherto uncharted. These changes are the ones that threaten to make Assam lose its unique identity and to make the people ape what Delhi would like us to be: a totally compliant and conformist State.

One of the things that is seriously wrong about Assam is that the younger generation has taken a very lenient view of crime and criminal behaviour. The kind of crimes committed in Assam over the last five or six years, were once deemed impossible for the people of Assam. This was a State where even in the major towns, one could leave a car in a busy area with the ignition key in the slot and the doors of the car unlocked. This was a State where documents and receipts were redundant because the spoken word was enough and people kept their promises. In the same State, now crimes like murder, rape (including gang rape), abduction and cheating on a large scale have become daily happenings. As far as murder is concerned, even the killing of parents, children, spouses, brothers and other close relatives has become all too common. And no one seems to be losing any sleep over what is happening to our State as long as one’s own family is safe and sound. The number of murders committed over money and material assets is also alarming. As for cheating, the very value system of people in Assam seems to have changed in favour of regarding someone who can make a good living out of cheating as someone who is smart. They seem to have ceased to look upon him as a criminal. The trouble with such attitudes is that they are infectious. If a hundred people have begun to see a crime as normal behaviour, the attitude of people to such crimes seems to change overnight. They see such petty crimes as normal behaviour. When this happens, something is seriously wrong with our society. The ability to distinguish wrong from right is a sign of good health for any society. The tendency to compromise in such matters is a clear sign of a collective malaise, and should be seen as an unmistakeable warning sign. The difficulty about sound moral education is that it is impossible to impart it if our own deeds contradict what we tell our children about what they should not do.

Apart from a casual attitude to crime, much of our collective failing can be traced to our total disinclination for any kind of work. Of late, there have been concerted attempts to cover this aversion for physical work with a great deal of verbiage. I am unaware of any country or State in the world that conducts quite as many seminars and colloquiums as Assam does. Here is a typical example of a society that is afraid physical work camouflaging this very significant failing with a great deal of words and talk. People who thrive on purposeful work have no time for the kind of meaningless verbiage at seminars that get people nowhere at all. Today, the very fact of having attended a few seminars is deemed to be the equivalent of work. Until such fraud is eliminated from our lives, there is really no hope for a society that is gradually getting to hate all forms of physical work.

It will simply not do to pretend that our apathy for all forms of physical work is just a passing phase and not typical of our society. No society ever got anywhere by deluding itself that a collective malaise is no more than an undeserved myth. We only have to look around ourselves to realize that all human societies that have got anywhere at all have done so with a great deal of work. By contrast, we have a society that has no communities that can be identified in terms of work. Other societies in India have their masons, carpenters, blacksmiths, barbers, cobblers, confectioners and so on. We in Assam have none of these callings that we can call our own. If there is a genuine and positive change in our work culture, in course of time we would also possibly have communities based on the kind of work that they do. That is the day worth waiting for. That is the kind of Assam of tomorrow worth looking forward to. Mere words and verbiage are unlikely to get us anywhere at all. Tomorrow’s Assam has to be Assam that cherishes and respects work. It has to be a State that takes pride in the kind of economy that is sustained by its own work rather than the work of those who have migrated to a State that is known for its desperate need of migrant workers from elsewhere because it has none of its own.