The Assam Conundrum | Books

On August 31, 2019, the final National Register of Citizens (NRC) was published. News coverage in India estimated that around 1.9 million citizens were made ‘stateless’. The NRC is a culmination of decades of questi­ons over citizenship around the Assam Movement. Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty’s book, Assam: The Accord, The Discord, traces the emergence of the movement and the debates that began in 1979 spearheaded by the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU). Following electoral boycott, protest and violence on the streets, the Rajiv Gandhi-led Congress government and leaders of the Assam movement signed the Assam Accord on August 15, 1985. Central to the Assam movement was the issue of how to deal with ‘foreigners’, primarily from East Pakistan/ Bangladesh who entered illegally or came after a cer­tain date (1.1. 1966 as the base year for inclusion and those who came after and up to March 24, 1971, were to be detected and removed from the electoral rolls). Although some objected, this accord brought the Assam movement to a close. But that was just the beginning of the complicated ethnic and religious algorithm of Assam. Pisharoty details how the Assam movement developed, with the rise of the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) fighting for an independent Assam. She draws from material filled with personal anecdotes, interviews, archival research and first-hand experience of reporting for the online newspaper, The Wire.

Pisharoty’s work encourages us to think about three interesting points. First, what do these contentious exclusi­ons tell us about identity politics in Assam? The answer takes us to the very idea of India itself and the formation of Assam in the colonial and post-colonial period. The messiness of the Assam movement and the way it highlighted issues of identity, arising from the post-1947 partition of India and the Bangladesh War of Independence of 1971, is fascinating and, in this aspect, Pisharoty’s documentation and analysis of Assam are unparalleled. However, the Northeast of India has multiple ethnic, religious, linguistic and nationalist all­egiances that have troubled the Indian state. The Assam accord certainly does not lay to rest the complex territorial refashioning of belonging in a tenuous borderland between Bangladesh, Northeast India and Burma. Partition and the formation of Bangladesh also affected Meghalaya and Tripura. While most partition histories focus on the Bengali and Hindu-Muslim divide, in Meghalaya, for instance, it was separating Christians from Christians (and therefore the separation was between tribes) while in Tripura it was between Christians/ Buddhists/ indigenous religions. Inc­luding context to these larger developments would have brought greater depth to the idea of citizenship, especially when analysed alongside Tripura, where the indigenous peoples are numerically marginalised by the incoming Bengali Hindus from Bangladesh. Increasingly, it appears as though the Hindutva narrative (in Assam and Tripura) is becoming more normative in the way religious identity is instrumentalised as a basis for inclusion and exclusion.

Second, the story of the Assam mov­ement is also a history of migration, the shaping of different Northeastern histories and questions of sovereignty that still dominate the region. Examining other independence movements such as the Naga National Council and the Mizo National Front in the 1940s and ’60s would provide interesting insi­ghts on how their histories were sha­ped by similar questions of identity that depart from the larger Assam narrative.

The third question concerns the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) suppor­ted by the current BJP government. The NRC 2019 works with dates and not religion, which has excluded large numbers of Hindus. The CAB, with its promise to include Hindus and other ‘minorities’ (but notably excluding Muslims), undermines this intent and perhaps demonstrates the Hindu right’s larger territorial vision of Akhand Bharat (undivided India) that stretches all the way to Bangladesh, Burma and Southeast Asia. Pisharoty’s work is strong when focused on Assam, but shifting the gaze towards a broader Northeast narrative would have made this into an even better book.

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