[India Today]

Published date: 31st Mar 1983

Hiteswar Saikia was last Fortnight trying to settle into the hottest seat in India-the chief ministers hip of Assam. The diminutive, balding ‘politician had been selected to lead a ministry that had obtained one of india’s largest-ever majorities-91 seats out of 109. But the mandate had come drenched in blood, and ridden on an abysmally low voter turn-out, and the newly-installed Congress(I) ministers were clearly uneasy about the task confronting them.
Saikia was clearly being singled out by the Congress(I) Government in Delhi for his proven administrative ability-he had been an efficient home minister of the state between 1970 and 1977. But he was being asked to deliver a host of impossibilities-to repair the torn social fabric in Assam, to manoeuvre the leaders of the anti-foreigners agitation back to the negotiating table, to control the anarchic law and order situation prevailing throughout the Brahmaputra Valley, to contain the growing communal and ethnic violence that continued to explode sporadically, and to deliver relief and rehabilitation to at least 4 lakh people displaced by the insensate carnage.

Careful Moves: During the first ten days of his ministry, Saikia moved cautiously, maintaining a studiedly low profile and yet conveying an impression of determination. More than two weeks after the Assembly elections had climaxed with the blood-letting at Nellie, crippled communications and simmering ethnic disaffection ensured that the state provided happy hunting grounds for an array of agents provocateur.

While Saikia tried to defuse sentiment against the state police and the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) by asking for an estimated 15,000 soldiers from four army di­ visions to be deployed in seven trouble-torn districts, he also moved to tone up the administration by transferring the district commissioners of Darrang, Nowgong. and Lakhimpur, and the superintendents of police of Nowgong and Darrang. “Good sense will finally prevail,” said Saikia, “and I am immediately tightening border vigilance to prevent infiltration by transferring the office of the IGP (Border) from Gauhati to Dhubri in Goalpara district, and by setting up a new DIG (Border) at Karimganj in Cachar district.” Although Saikia said he would not increase security protection for ministers and party MLA’s, who may be prone to attack by anti-government mobs, he nevertheless carried out substantial reshuffles in the state police administration.

But the chief minister, who suffers from poor health, faces the immediate problem of recognition by the Assamese. When ministers travelled to relief camps to oversee rehabilitation, entire areas they were scheduled to pass through were clamped under ‘janata’ bandhs and black-outs by the hostile population. On March 8, the agitation leaders announced that they would not participate in any talks in Delhi in which the Saikia Ministry was represented-a condition placed by Union Home Minister P.C. Sethi.
Refugee Problem: The biggest headache confronting the ministry was the rehabilitation of the refugees uprooted by the violence. Sethi himself estimated that 2.3 lakh people had been forced to flee their homes throughout the Valley because of arson or terrorisation. Although Saikia asked the Centre to grant Rs 25 crore for relief measures, he got only Rs 5 crore. “Out of that,” he said, “we will have to spend over Rs I crore just to restore communications.”

More than 250 makeshift relief camps were set up to house the growing tide of refugees as the Government belatedly began to put its plans into operation. Inevitably, the relief operations were accompanied by allegations from both the Assamese and the Bengalis that they were being discriminated against by the administration. In many areas, supplies of rice could not reach quickly enough because of disrupted road links.

Another thorn in the ministry’s flesh was the continuing hostility of the state bureaucracy, much of which had sided openly with the anti-election agitators. Although the agitationists’ 18-day non-co­ operation movement ended on February 22, government employees returned to work only in trickles; many had been dismissed or arrested for refusing to participate in election duties.

Rival Claims: Within the Congress(I) Legislature Party, Saikia faced trouble from Harendra Nath Talukdar, president of the state party unit. Talukdar had reportedly obtained the support of a majority of the MLA ‘s, but the party high command in Delhi made its preference for Saikia clear.

Saikia denies that such differences exist.”There was some interest in leadership,” he admits, “but everybody is cooperating now. There are two ex-chief ministers, Anwara Taimur and Keshab Gogoi, in my Cabinet, and both are working very hard. My attempt now will be to ensure assimilation of all Assamese sections. The agitators are talking about ‘indigenous’ people. Who is indigenous? Even the indigenous people. the tribals, feel insecure today. I have repeatedly stressed that the doors are open to the agitators and I am willing to talk to them.”

Meanwhile, intriguing trends were emerging in the All Assam Students Union (AASU) and All Assam Gana Sangram Parishad (AAGSP) post-election stand. Although agitation leaders said that their volunteers were concentrating on relief work until March 19, a series of belligerent statements streamed from their propaganda machinery, foremost among which was the demand that the state Government should not allow “foreigners” who had fled to refugee camps in West Bengal to return, and the repeated accusation that “indigenous” Assamese were being ignored by relief teams.

AASU President Prafulla Mahanta and AAGSP Convenor Atul Bora, who had been released along with AASU General Secretary Bhrigu Phukan and other ranking agitation leaders on February 22 by the Gauhati High Court from National Security Act (NSA) detention, were busy touring the worst-affected Assamese areas in Nowgong district incognito, since there were fresh arrest war­ rants out for them.

Phukan emerged from concealment on March 6 to talk about strategy for the future. On March 3, AASU had confounded observers when it supported a bandh called by the Plains Tribals Council of Assam (PTCA) in Kokrajhar in Goalpara district. The PTCA had contested the elections despite AASU’s efforts to dissuade it. but party leader Samar Brahma Choudhury had suffered a humiliating defeat in his stronghold at Kokrajhar (East). Moreover.. the PTCA is dominated by the Boros. who had clashed bloodily with anti-poll Assamese villagers in the Gohpur area in Darrang district.

Enlisting Support: Yet, the agitation leaders were plainly anxious to enlist the support of the tribals after the elections. Joy Nath Sarma of the Sweccha Sevak Bahini (SSB), AAsu’s “volunteer force”, said that AASU did not agree with the PTCA’s demand for a tribal Union territory called ‘Udayachal’. “But we welcome support from any­body who shares our feelings against the foreigners,” he said.The Boro Students Union and the Mishing Students Union support our anti-foreigners movement,” said Phukan. “We have formed peace committees in the Gohpur area.” Phukan was less forthcoming about AASU’s plans, saying the executive committee would meet after March 15 to chalk out a strategy. “I feel our strategy should be changed,” he said. “to fight a long­term battle. The atmosphere is altogether changed now.”

AASU spokesmen, however, were anxious to point out that they represented all ‘indigenous’ Assamese-including the tribals and the tea-garden labourers who come mostly from Bihar and Orissa. By fortnight’s end, a strange new alignment was visible when both the Boro Students Union and the Lalung Darbar issued strong statements demanding expulsion of all foreigners from tribal lands. Although the Lalungs were directly involved in the Nellie massacre. they blamed a secondary tribe, the Saraniyas, for the carnage-and the PTCA said all violence against immigrants had been perpetrated by agitationists.

Propaganda Blitz: As the fortnight ended with a reduction in the daily deathcount, AASU launched a new propaganda blitz. Six members of the union, led by Dr D.P. Barooah, quietly entered Delhi on March 5. Their mission: to tie up with the Delhi University Students Union (DUSU), which is dominated by the pro-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) youth wing, the Janata Vidyarthi Morcha, and to organise a demonstration to coincide with the inauguration of the seventh Non-aligned conference.
Barooah, who heads the Department of Political Science and Journalism in Gauhati University, has emerged as AASU’s leading ideologue. The AASU delegation carried copies of a neatly-printed “open letter” to the heads of the non-aligned countries meeting in Delhi, and the students’ first illustrated pamphlet in more than two years, titled ‘To­ day’s Assam: A Graveyard of Democracy’

The open letter was signed by Mahanta and Phukan, and marshalled a clever argument asking basically that the non-aligned countries raise the Assam issue in the conference “on humanitarian grounds”. Citing the “grim tragedy inflicted on our people in the name of an exercise in democracy with indiscriminate use of bullets and bayonets”, the letter said the Assam carnage was worse than the Sharpeville killings in South Africa decades ago that had “roused the democratic conscience of the international community”. AASU also claimed that its stand on the aliens issue was “far more democratic than the post-war Potsdam Agreement of August 2, out that the immigrants had, after Daya’s ammunition ran out, cast a fishing net over him and hacked him to death with daos (machetes).
The Chawlkhowa operation was expertly executed. All access to the immigrant settlements had been cut off earlier by anti-election agitators. For more than two weeks no news of the massacre reached the outside world. Only on March 2 when two injured victims staggered into Mangaldoi, only 25 km away, did a police patrol set out for the massacre area.

Rising Toll: By March 5 the shocked district administration had discovered 194 badly decomposed bodies and skeletons, and officials estimated at least 300 more had been buried hastily by surviving villagers because of decomposition. Significantly, Chawlkhowa is only 15 km from Nellie in Nowgong district across the Brahmaputra, and it had preceded the larger Nellie outrage by three days.
Stunned intelligence men in Gauhati are only now talking of the SSB’s organisational skills. The Bahini’s role in much of the frenzied ethnic violence that tore Assam apart last month had been con­ jectured. But sources now say that the Bahini has plans to keep up pressure through organised violence in the foreseeable future, too.

The SSB was quietly created iii May 1980 by AASU to ”identify foreigners”. It took root initially in the Mangaldoi area, but spread rapidly to the entire Brahmaputra Valley. It was put in charge of drawing up plans to issue identity cards to ‘bona fide citizens”. AASU announced on May 27, 1980, however, that the agitation would take “action in self-defence” against “minority attacks”. This followed Assamese-immigrant clashes in Nowgong, Darrang, Kamrup and Goalpara districts the previous day when the All Assam Minorities Students Union (AAMSU) and the Citizens’ Rights Preservation Committee (CRPC) organised a Demands Day and took out processions. At least 35 people were killed in group clashes and police firing, and the SSB began in earnest to prepare for a protracted armed struggle.

Throughout last month’s violence. Sarma was being held in Silchar Jail under the National Security Act (NSA). But his cadres had been sufficiently prepared for action. His release under parole for a week .was a pre-condition imposed by AASU for participation in the last round of talks with the Government in early January.
A militant member of the AASU executive committee, Sarma is a recognised a militant member of the Rashtriya Swyamsevak Sangh (RSS). After he obtained bis law degree, he was appointed a lower-division assistant in the Assam State ElectriciLy Board (ASEB) by his mentor Umanath Sarma. the then chairman or the board. who became president of the state Bharatiya Janata Party unit after he retired in 1981. The same year Joy Nath Sarma was dismissed from service for his overt involvement in the agitation.
Shadowy Connections: Sources say that SSB volunteers have built links with another shadowy underground organisation. the Jatiya Rakkhi Bahini (JRB). which is affiliated to the Jatiyatabadi Yuba Chhatta Parishad (JYCP), the youth wing of the right-wing Assam Jatiyatabadi Dal (Am). SSB volunteers have received weapons training from JRB men who have visited northern urma for help from the rebels there.

SSB men are trained, say sources, to organise a sustained underground movement, to operate firearms, to plan and conduct raids on immigrant areas. to cut off communications to vital spots by° burning bridges, snapping telephone lines and setting up road blocks, and to man an efficient communications system that relies on squads of “bicycle telegraph” men who carry SSB and AASU diktats to the remotest villages.

Sarma was released from NSA detention by the Gauhati High Court on March 2; the same day, however, he was rearrested under Case 28/83 registered under the Jalukbari Police Station. The Jalukbari case followed a police raid on the AASU office in the Gauhati University campus on January 25, which broke up a meeting being held by fugitive AASU leaders with representatives of the Khasi Students Union from Meghalaya. At the meeting plans to cripple communications between Gauhati and Shillong during the elections were discussed.

On March 5, however, Sarma was released by the chief judicial magistrate (CJM) in Gauhati. “The Government does not know how to keep us in jail,” laughs Sarma in his hideout near Rail Gate. “The Jalukbari case was registered on January 25, but my re-arrest on March 2 was confirmed by an executive magistrate under the Assam Executive Magistrates (Temporary Powers) Act, 1983, which was promulgated only on January 28. When I pointed this out the CJM had no option but to nullify my arrest orders.”

Formidable Organisation: ‘Every SSB volunteer is a soldier of peace. a symbol of non-violence,” says Sarma. ‘but we are also active guards of our motherland. Each district has two or more sub-divisional units. and between five and 11 regional units. Today we have totally more than 30 regional units in the valley and at least 15,000 volunteers.”

Sarma accuses Indira Gandhi of fomenting differences between communities in Assam. ”l immigrants have been settled in char areas under Indian Army auspices: alleges Sarma, “and in the early ’70s the Government gave shelter to pro-Mujibur Rahman guerrillas of the Mukti Bahini to train in Assam. Today those men know our geography well, and have formed a secret Razakar Bahini that has infiltrated certain areas to raid and kill Assamese vinagers. The Indian Government is giving Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) uniforms to these infiltrators and the Government is releasing fake CRPF men caught by villagers.”
But the SSB knows its geography very well, too, and Sarma offers a hand-drawn map as evidence. Map-maker Deepak Das of the volunteer force has auto­ graphed his creation. and the map shows large areas around Barpeta, in Kamrup district, that are shaded to show “heavily populated foreigner villages” that Sanna claims surround “threatened” Assamese pockets.

Last fortnight Sarma and his lieutenants were busy mapping out strategy from his “tactical headquarters”. “It is a natural truth that all of us will die,” he says. “but what Mrs Gandhi has unleashed will result in untold bloodshed. We will gladly die for a great cause.”
1945″, and ended by beseeching the heads of government assembled in Delhi to “consider how far the expression of grief by the inter­ national community over the Assam carnage should extend to the point of possible friendly succour on human rights considerations”.
Efforts: In the event the AASU delegation got nowhere near any non-aligned leader, but its plans showed how far it was willing to go in order to embarrass the Government. The accompanying pamphlet, too, concentrated on Assamese victims of the violence that had ripped Assam apart last month, and ended with the current AASU slogan: “Save Assam today to save India tomorrow”.

Barooah symbolises the confu­sing welter of political camps that infest the top ranks of the AASU leadership. Until the agitation began in 1979 he was an acknowledged member of the Communist Party of India-Marxist. but has now switched to a rigid stand against the Communists. Mahanta and Phukan head the moderate section, which is not averse to an eventual adjustment with the Central Government, and which carefully insists that all illegal immigrants after 1971, whether Muslim or Hindu, should be deported to Bangladesh.

But the moderates are facing in­ creasing hostility from a strong lobby within AASU, led by Joy Nath Sarma, that supposedly has links with the Rashtriya Swyamsevak Sangh (Rss). This group has gained tremendous leverage during the elections, and makes a fine distinction between “refugees”, meaning Hindus who ought by rights to be allowed to stay on in “Hindustan”, and “infiltrators”, who are by implication Muslims.

A third lobby is backed by the Communist Party of India Marxist-Leninist (CPI-ML)-in particular by the Vinod Mishra group of ‘Bhojpur Naxalites’ who are currently engaged in an active policy of “annihilation of class enemies” in the Patna-Gaya areas in Bihar. On March 4, two AASU representatives, Jayanta Das and Gulam Murtaza Ahmed, travelled to Calcutta to address a public meeting organised by the Indian People’s Front, a countrywide organisation that is building up support among agricultural labourers and the unorganised industrial sector-and is affiliated to the Mishra faction of Naxalites. Nagen Sarma, an AASU adviser, says that there is no­ thing wrong in accepting support from the CPI(ML). “AASU is willing to take help from anybody who supports this national cause,” he says, “but we are non-political and are not prepared to be exploited.”

The BJP and the RSS have gained substantial support among the Assamese upper caste Hindus who constitute the bulk of the agitators. In 1982 alone the state BJP unit, says Bansilal Sonee. party observer for the North-eastern region, gained 40,000 members. BJP President Atal Behari Vajpayee, along with Rajya Sabha MP Jaswant Singh, visited Assam for the sixth time last fortnight to visit refugee camps, and the state unit’s vice-president Dr Jogeshwar Mahanta, raised the curtain on the visit by claiming that ”indigenous” Assamese in Nowgong district were in grave danger of being liquidated by “foreigners”.
Off the busy Paltan Bazar area in Gauhati, in the local RSS headquarters at Keshav Dham, was the organisation’s Akhil Bharatiya Bouddhik Pramukh (all India intellectual coordinator). Kupphalli Seetharamiah Sudarshan is a suave man with considerable knowledge of the situation in Assam. On March 8, Sudarshan chaired a meeting of local shakha heads and was given reports on the requirements in the relief camps. The RSS’s Akhil Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha is meeting in Nagpur from March 18 to 20 to discuss how to “ameliorate Assam’s agony”. On March 5, the RSS headquarters in Delhi announced the formation of a ‘Sangharsh Peedit Sahayata Samiti’ to render aid in the strife-torn state.

Emerging Strategy: It was clear that the RSS is beginning to shape a strategy for Assam that is finding favour with a major section of the agitation leadership. “I have been insisting that AASU should rethink its strategy,” says Sudarshan. “I feel the agitators should concentrate upon foreign infiltrators. Refugees can be allowed to stay on humanitarian considerations. The Assam movement has to be made an all-India movement.”
The RSS now has 200 shakhas in the North-east, says Sudarshan, with more than 130 in Assam alone. Sudarshan has been accompanied on his tours of disturbed areas by Dr Sujit Dhar of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP). The VHP has been concentrating on Karbi Anglong district, trying to wean the tribals away from missionary influence. Last year it revived a tribal ritual called bafangrangkher that had been forgotten for 50 years and organised a big festival at Phoolani in Karbi Anglong.

The RSS is helping sharpen the ethnic divisions that have now permanently damaged the Assamese social structure. But there are other centri­fugal forces at work, apart from the Assamese, the tribals and the Bengalis, in a process that might eventually result in a dismemberment of the state.
New Movements: Last fortnight reports indicated that the Ahoms are now girding up for a struggle to claim their own state in Upper Assam in the districts of Lakhimpur, Sibsagar and Dibrugarh. The Ujani Ahom Rajya Parishad argues that this state should take in the outlines of the ancient Tai Ahom kingdom. The Ahoms ruled Assam for 600 years, and trace their descent to Buddhist Thais. Over the years they have been assimilated into Assamese society, but many Ahom leaders now privately argue that the Hindu Assamese in Assam were either imported from places like Kanauj in Uttar Pradesh or converted from within.
Simultaneously, there has been a move to revive the Phralung Buddhist cult among the Ahoms, who are otherwise part of Assam’s Brahminical stream. The Ahoms have already demanded recognition as a Scheduled Tribe and reservation of Parliamentary seats under the tribal quota. When the Tai Historical and Cultural Society celebrated its silver jubilee in 1980, it invited the ambassadors to India from Thailand, Laos and Burma.

In Dibrugarh a Tai language research institute is busy trying to revive the Ahom language, which has almost become extinct. Sources in Gauhati say that if the Ahoms become very militant about their demands it might create tremendous problems for the Government, particularly because many Ahoms man key posts in the state administration. Chief Minister Saikia himself is an Ahom-Saikia is a military title bestowed by the Ahom kings on the commander of a hundred men.
As Union Home Minister P.C. Sethi paid a desultory two-day visit to Assam on March 11 and 12 to inspect relief measures, the Centre was clearly trying to cover up its mistakes in Assam with a series of transparent moves. While attempting to minimise the impact of the Assam holocaust on the rest of the country and abroad, the Government has tried to apportion blame. Conveniently, the three advisers to Governor Prakash Mehrotra are being blamed in calculated news “leaks” for not having handled the violence efficiently. The district administrations and the state bureaucracy too were singled out for censure. An over­hauling of the intelligence set-up in the state was hinted at.

Soon after the elections ended, Sethi announced that future talks with the agitation leaders would include representatives from the minorities, the tribals, and the new Congress(I) ministry. Between the Government and the agitation leaders stood the Saikia Ministry-and the agitationists were adamant about not recognising the legitimacy of the new government. The stand­ off was hostile and intractable, and the Government, sources said, would not give ground on the modalities of future talks unless the agitation leaders first held out an olive branch by making some token concessions.
As the fortnight progressed, it was clear that the agitation leaders were seeking to keep up pressure on the Government by maintaining an atmosphere of rumour and panic, and by ensuring that violence continued to crackle in staccato bursts. But Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s inclination has
always been to not to succumb to such pressure, and she was taking a hard line on the continuing violence.
What is obviously required is quick, corrective and conciliatory action from both sides. Within the ravaged state itself, the Saikia Ministry finds itself caught in a vice, between a stubborn Centre and an intransigent movement. The experience of the last three years shows that ‘popular’ Congress(I) ministries in the state have utterly failed to touch even the fringe of the problem. With the Non-aligned summit out of the way, therefore, it was clear that the ball was firmly in Mrs Gandhi’s court, and she would have to make the first move in this perilous minuet.

Pulling Away

CACHAR district has always suffered from an agonising schizophrenia in regard to Assam. Over whelmingly Bengali in both population and character, it has been totally alienated from the Assamese ‘mainland’ over the last three years-only Cachar voters exercised their franchise in the 1980 Lok Sabha elections and there is no sign of the anti-foreigners agitation. “Cachar is just like Bengal,” says Monoranjan Dey, who owns a photographic studio in the Premtala area. “There is no trouble here, only peace.”

Last month, the savage ethnic violence that tore the Brahmaputra Valley apart revived talk in Cachar of the Government’s plans to partition Assam into Assamese, tribal and Bengali segments-the most obvious Bengali territory being Cachar (area: 6,962 sq km. estimated population in 1983: 2.5 million). When the Congress(l)­ affiliated National Students’ Union of India leader Partha Ranjan Chakraborty met Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on her electoral trip to Silchar on February 10, he asked her for a separate university for Cachar. Her response was to ask whether he wanted a Cachar university or a Cachar state.
Contrary Pulls: Ironically, the populous districts of Sylhet (now in Bangladesh) and Cachar were part of the Bengal province until 1874, when the British merged them with the newly-annexed Assam in order to make that territory viable, economically and demographically. The Bengalis in the two districts however insisted that they would retain their affiliation with Calcutta university and high court-a factor that helped maintain a higher rate of literacy among the Assamese Bengalis. This dichotomy continued until 1947 and the Sylhet and Cachar district Congress committees owed allegiance to the Bengal Provincial Congress Committee.
A referendum in June 1947 in Sylhet resulted in that district’s merger with East Pakistan. Sylhet had been Assam’s most populous district, comprising almost one­third of the state’s total population. Only three and a half police thanas from Sylhet were merged with the contiguous Cachar because they held a dominant Hindu population. But the Assamese were uneasy about Cachar’s continuing presence in their midst; Ambicagiri Rai Chaudhuri, the founder of the Assam Sahitya Sabha, suggested that Cachar too should go to East Pakistan.

These contrary pulls surfaced at other times. When the States Reorganisation Committee under Fazal Ali, Hridaynath Kunzru and K.M. Panicker was at work in 1955-56, the Cachar Congress leadership demanded the district’s separation from Assam. Eight years earlier. soon after Partition, there had been a demand that a composite ‘Congress’ state, ‘Purbanchal’ be formed from the Cachar. Manipur Tripura and the Lushai Hills district of Assam.
Sylhet was thrown out of Assam because it was dominating the Assamese.” says Dr Lutfur Rahman, a former minister and an active member of the Congress(S). “Now they would like to throw Cachar out for similar reasons.” A former principal of the Cachar College, Deba Brata Datta feels that the trouble lies elsewhere. “The seeds of this alienation were sown when the British merged Sylhet and Cachar with Assam in 1874,” he says. “They did not think of the linguistic and cultural factors.”

Legitimate Fears: Although many leaders of opinion in Silchar, Cachar’s headquarters. feel privately that separation of the district from Assam is inevitable. there is also a strong section that opposes the move. A body called the Union Territory Demand Committee, led by Paritosh Pal Choudhury, has failed to gain many supporters. ..People will accept separation with resignation.” says Dr Binay Krishna Bhattacharya. principal of Cachar College. ••we must learn to live together, or perish.” Mahitosh Purkayastha. who has on earlier occasions campaigned for Cachar’s separation. now says: –what will we gain if we separate? There will be unemployment and pressure on land. Bengalis get the majority of jobs in the Brahmaputra Valley, in the railways, posts and telegraphs, coalfields. Oilfields, banks and so on. Such opportunities will dry up.”

Economically, Cachar is one of Assam’s more backward districts. It contains 114 of Assam’s 769 tea plantations, but its mainstay is rice cultivation. The anti-foreigners agitation has led to skyrocketing prices of all essential commodities in the district because of impeded movement through the Valley. And as far as employmem goes. Bengalis from Cachar are already finding it difficult to get jobs in the Brahmaputra Valley. Coven discrimination in favour of “sons of the soil” has kept many public sector and governmental posts vacant, and in Gauhati University many department have deliberately not been expanded so as to prevent Bengali candidates from getting jobs.

Where Cachar has most starkly differed from the Valley is in reation to language. The Assam Official Language Act. 1960. which made Assamese the lingua franca through out the state, was greeted by language nots in Cachar and in Bengali areas in the Valley. A formula evolved by Lal Bahadur Shastri. the then Union home minister. led to the insertion of an amendment that kept Bengali as Cachar’s official language. In 1972. when Gauhati University decided to make Assamese the medium of instruction throughout the state, another strong movement in Cachar succeeded in retaining Bengali as the medium in that district.
On December 30 last year, however, only a week before the elections were announced. the Assam Secondary Education Board (ASEB) issued a circular saying that Assamese would henceforth be a compulsory third language in all Cachar schools from class eight onwards. In contrast, schools in the Brahmaputra Valley continue to have Hindi as the third language. The Cachar Shiksha Sanrakshan Samit, sent a strongly worded protest on January 30. calling the move “academically unsound. Discriminatory, undemocratic, politically motivated, impractical and unsuited to the needs of modern life”; and the directive has been kept in temporary abeyance.

Communal Clearnge: Sources in Silchar say that even if the Government does not bestow Union territory status on Cachar. it might still decide to merge the district with neighbouring Tripura. where the Bengali population constitutes 70 per cent of the total. Either move will almost certainly draw a strong protest from Cachar’s Muslim Bengali population. The Muslims currently constitute around 35 per cent of Cachar’s population, dominating the rural sector. Although Muslims occupy the top posts in the three Mahakuma Parishads (zonal bodies) that administer the district. they form a minority in the district administration. Both a separate Union territory status or merger with Tripura will result in a drastic reduction in Muslim influence.

The Muslim leadership in the district, therefore, favours continuation of Cachar in Assam-because. together with the immigrant Muslim population in the Valley, they can better safeguard their interests. Such fears have led to a firming of Muslim sentiment; in the recent elections, voters in Alkapur, Hailakandi and Silchar tended to favour Muslim candidates-preferably from the Congress(I)-in a clearly religious delineation. Even in Karimganj town, traditionally an opposition stronghold, a total newcomer to politics from the Congress(I) was voted in because he happened to harp on Muslim minority fears. As a result of such minority swings, eight of the 15 Cachar MLA’s in the new Assembly are Muslims.

Losses: Educationally, however, Cachar has suffered the most because of the anti-foreigners movement in the Valley. Although educational institutions worked normally even at the height of the trouble in the Valley, Cachar’s students lost the 1979-80 academic year because of examination cancellations and will now most probably suffer a loss of the academic year 1982-83 too; examinations for both schools and colleges, scheduled for later this month. have not been announced so far.
Discrimination against Cachar students in admissions to Gauhati University (a number of meritorious candidates for the physics post-graduate course had to be admitted last year only after Vice-Chan­ cellor Jamini Choudhury intervened) has deepened Cachar’s siege mentality. To add to their woes. Cachar’s graduates have now been informed that West Bengal’s universities will no longer grant admissions in post-graduate courses because Assam follows a two-year degree course system. Attacks on Bengali students in Gauhati University hostels have held back many parents from sending their-children to the state capital.
“Basically, the Assam agitation has ended up in demanding the extirpation of all Bengali refugees because they are rivals in trade and employment,” says Bijit Choudhury, head of the history department in the Guru Charan College. ;”The Assamese feel that if Assam’s Bengalis are united it will be very difficult for them to get a unilingual state.”

Ethnic Rivalry: The growing Assamese Bengali rift is summed up by a senior academician in Gauhati. “Suddenly.” he says. “the Assamese have discovered that the ­Bengalis constitute the third largest linguistic community in Asia, alter the Chinese and the Hindi speakers. In addition, looking at the political development in West Bengal. Tripura and Bangladesh, the Assamese feel that the Bengalis subscribe to two undesirable political schools-Marxist or authoritarian. So, fears about engulfment by the Bengalis have been cleverly played upon by the agitators.”

Whether or not Cachar is ultimately separated from Assam, it will not solve the essentially heterogenic problems afflicting the state. Nor are the ethnic, cultural and linguistic divisions tearing Assam apart a new feature. As long ago as in 1792. when Ahom king Gouri Nath Singh begged the then Governor-General Lord Cornwallis to send his troops into the Valley to stave off external aggression, the British contingent that marched into Gauhati issued to proclamation saying it had come to protect and not to conquer the Valley, in both Assamese and Bengali.

In March 1901. when Lord Curzon visited Gauhati and was asked to grant Assam a permanent seat in the Imperial Legislative Council, he told the petitioners that “there was not found to be within this province that substantial community of interests which would render any one delegate truly representative of the whole …. The constituency is, in fact, too composite to admit of a permanent single mouthpiece” Cachar’s Bengali population is to­ day in a state of suffocating siege. But the miniscule Assamese population feels just as encircled as the Bengalis do in the state as a whole.

The simmering Assamese­Bengali incompatibility was symbolised once again last fortnight when the Purbanchal Bank, one of the state’s largest, opened a new branch in Silchar. The agent of the new branch got hardly any accounts at all-because he is Assamese, and does not speak Bengali.

Winning On Points
The Figures, for once, did not lie. When Chief Electoral Officer S.L. Khosla released detailed results of the Assam elections last fortnight, it was clear that the Congress(I) had swept one of history’s most transparently illegitimate elections.
In the end the party secured 87 seats out of 105 for which polling could be conducted. It had earlier won four seats uncontested when no opposition candidate came up to file his nomination against the ruling party’s men in the Patacharkuchi, Boko, Palasbari constituencies in Kamrup district, and the Mangaldoi constituency in Darrang district. The Left and Democratic Alliance (LDA) which had staked its political survival in Assam on the elections, won only five seats in a defeat characterised by the humiliating rout of the communist parties.

Diminished Electorate: State-wide polling averaged a miserable 32.76 per cent, versus 66.85 per cent in the 1978 Assembly elections. Both elections were conducted on the basis of the same electoral rolls—the basis for the agitation that has rocked Assam since 1979. Only in Cachar (62.31 per cent). North Cachar Hills (56.12 per cent) and Goalpara (58.47 per cent) was polling normal. In Kamrup and Nowgong districts, where the Congress(I) had hoped to draw out substantial pockets of Bengali voters polling nevertheless averaged only 25.61 per cent. The turnout was laughable in Sibsagar district (5.47 per cent), Lakhimpur district (3.49 per cent) and Dibrugarh district (17.31 per cent)—areas where the anti-election Assamese population dominated.
In 28 constituencies in the districts of Kamrup, Nowgong, Sibsagar and Dibrugarh, the Congress(I) won 26 seats, the other two going to independent candidates, on an average voter turnout of 3.8 per cent. Dharmapur constituency in Kamrup, where the party’s Dr Bhumi dhar Barman won all 266 valid votes cast, was added to in notoriety by a string of other improbabilities. In the Bokakhat constituency in Sibsagar, Dharmeswar Hazarika won 1,418 of the 1,51:7 votes cast (total voter turnout: 2.56 per cent).

At Khumtai, Jiba Kanta Gogoi won 934 votes out of 987 cast in a total voter turnout of 1.53 per cent. At Titabor, also in Sibsagar, Joy Chandra Bora won 1,540 out of 1,691 votes cast in a total voter turnout of 2.48 per cent. At Bihapuria, Borgoram Deori won 425 of the 437 votes cast in a turnout averaging 0.69 per cent. The pattern was repeated at Dhakuakhan in Lakhimpur, where Ragunath Patne gam won 587 out of the 640 votes cast in a voter turnout averaging 0.85 per cent, and at Dhemaji where Durgeswar Patir won 327 of the 358 votes cast in a turnout averaging a pathetic 0.40 per cent.
Adverse Conditions: In the end, polling in 16 constituencies had to be post poned indefinitely because of impossible conditions. Khosla said that: repolling would be held before June this yearly Polling in the Biswanath constituency in Darrang district had to be counterman ded when Congress(I) candidate Satya Narayan Ram was killed by anti-poll agitators on February 15.

The postponed polling led to the continuing vacancy of seven Lok Sabha seats out of the 12 for which by-elections had been held. All five parliamentary: seats that could be filled were won by the Congress(I), three of them giving the candidates an average of 9.78 per cent of the total possible votes. At the bottom end, Tarun Gogoi won the Jorhat seat with 36,836 votes oat of 6,76,595 registered voters in the constituency.
There were other milestones in this exercise of a “constituetional imperative”. Polling averaged below 10 per cent in 30 per cent of the total constituencies, and below 20 per cent in 44 per cent of the total constituencies. The Patacharkuchi seat was won uncontested by tobacco seller Rabiram Das in a constituency that has given Assam some of its best academic luminaries. Moreover, Pata charkuchi is dominated by upper-caste Assamese Hindus who are stoutly op posed to the elections, and Das happens to be totally dark horse.

Chief Minister Hiteswar Saikia won the Nazira seat in Sibsagar district with 9,005 votes out of a total of 13,065 polled; polling averaged only 22.56 per cent in his constituency. At Dibrugarh, former: chief minister Keshab Chandra Gogoi won with 4,905 votes out of a total of 5,334 cast in a total voter turnout of 8.71 per cent. Only Anwara Taimur, another ex-chief minister, retained her Dalgaon seat in a predominantly immigrant area with 15,605 votes out of 33,099 cast. Even there she faced a reduced voter enthusiasm-in the 1978 elections she had won 23,028 votes out of 44,913 polled.