>suffer harassment, humiliation and torture in various forms at the
>hands of the security forces>
You said it all. Happening ALL the last 60 years!
mm
From: "ualles" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: [asom] Assamese Fears and Saviours
Date: Sun, 29 Oct 2006 04:58:05 -0000
>Sentinel, 29th Oct'06
>
>God Save Asom and the Asomiyas!
>JP Rajkhowa(Retd Chief secy)
>
>The question as to who the Asomiyas are or were, was never raised
>during the British Raj or swaadhin Bharat, even when the Assam Accord
>on the foreigners issue was signed in 1985 in the presence of the then
>Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Every one, including the signatories to
>the Accord representing the All Assam Gana Sangram Parishad (AAGSP) -
>since disbanded - was apparently aware of the meaning or definition of
>"Asomiya". Even if some signatories representing the government had
>some doubts on the issue, no one considered it appropriate to raise
>it, as a matter of prudence, since the uppermost concern of the
>sangrami leaders as well as the government representatives seemed to
>be to resolve the vexed foreigners issue which eluded a solution for
>long six years. The issue remained dormant during the first spell of
>the AGP regime which had constituted a Cabinet committee headed by the
>then Law Minister Surendra Nath Medhi to go into the matter of
>drafting a detailed proposal to submit it to the Central Government
>for administrative, legislative and constitutional safeguards for the
>Asomiya people in pursuance of the Accord. The Committee's
>recommendations were then considered, discussed and debated in the
>State Cabinet, after which a consolidated proposal was sent to the
>Centre. If I remember correctly, the then Advocate General of Assam
>Pachu Gopal Barua and AGP MP Dinesh Goswami made valuable
>contributions in drafting the proposal.
>
>Clause 6 of the Assam Accord states: "Constitutional, legislative and
>administrative safeguards, as may be appropriate, shall be provided to
>protect, preserve and promote the cultural, social, linguistic
>identity and heritage of the Assamese people." After submission of the
>proposal as mentioned above, the AGP regime appeared to have totally
>forgotten about it, as no discussion whatsoever was held with any
>Central Ministry for implementation of Clause 6 of the Accord, not to
>speak of discussing the proposal. What had prompted the then Chief
>Minister Prafulla Mahanta not to follow up this extremely important
>clause with the Union Home Minister or the Prime Minister by insisting
>on a formal discussion on the State's proposal, only he will be able
>to explain. At the bureaucratic level, I remember, the matter was
>raised during discussions a number of times, but the mandarins at the
>North Block shrewdly avoided the issue, leaving it to the political
>masters to handle. But the political masters, both at the Centre and
>the State, scrupulously refused to find time for a discussion. After
>the AAGSP was disbanded, its constituents, Purbanchalia Loka Parisad
>(PLP), Asom Jatiatabadi Yuva Chatra Parisad (AJYCP) and Sadow Asom
>Karmachari Parisad (SAKP), also forgot the matter at their
>organization levels.
>
>Though the only sangrami signatory, the All Assam Students' Union
>(AASU), remained in the focus - which continues till date - its
>approach also appears to be a bit lackadaisical one. Thus years passed
>by, and during the previous term of the Tarun Gogoi Ministry as AASU
>started pursuing the matter with the Centre, the latter desired that
>the State Government should intimate the students' body on a
>universally accepted definition of "Asomiya" so as to enable the
>Centre to process the issues related to the implementation of Clause 6
>of the Assam Accord. Nearly four years have since elapsed, but the
>Asomiyas and their government (is it of Bangladeshis?) are still
>unable to define or elaborate or elucidate as to who is an Asomiya.
>
>For the survival of the Asomiya people by which I mean all the
>indigenous people of Asom belonging to different ethnic, religious and
>linguistic groups who have been living in the State since time
>immemorial and some for centuries, and who speak one or more of the
>languages of the ethnic communities, including Asomiya, and follow
>region-specific manners, customers, dress code, folk dances and music
>etc, Clause 6 of the Assam Accord is most important. It is more
>important than even Clause 5, which deals with detection, deletion,
>regularization and deportation(?) of illegal migrants from
>Bangladesh. Under Clause 5, only the post-March 24, 1971 Bangladeshi
>migrants are to be detected, deleted and deported, thereby allowing
>lakhs of pre-March 24, 1971 Bangladeshis to be regularized as Indian
>citizens, allowing them to enjoy all their rights in Asom. Obviously,
>the intention of the sangrami leaders had never been to include these
>millions of regularized Bangladeshis in the description "Asomiya" so
>as to provide them "constitutional, legislative and administrative
>safeguards" in order to "protect, preserve and promote the social,
>cultural and linguistic identity and heritage". Now after long 21
>years of the Accord, one who calls himself or thinks of himself as an
>Asomiya would like to know as to what safeguards have been provided to
>protect, preserve and promote the social, cultural and linguistic
>identity and heritage of the Asomiyas.
>
>While the politicians have been blissfully dithering away from the
>issue for their own vote-bank interests, what has the only living
>sangrami signatory to the Accord - the AASU - been doing to secure the
>existence of the Asomiyas? Latest media reports state that the AASU
>has demanded the update of the National Register of Citizens (NRC),
>1951 so that illegal Bangladeshis could be detected, their names
>deleted from the voters lists, and finally deported out of the
>country. Is that the reason of putting the revived Foreigners Act in
>Asom safely in the cold storage? We fail to understand why both the
>processes cannot go together, simultaneously. Why have the Foreigners
>Tribunals numbering 23 or so been set up, if they have no tasks to
>perform? Are not these Tribunals legally authorized to take up nearly
>four lakh complaints pending for disposal by the Tribunals set up
>under the IMDT Act and those illegally rejected by the screening
>committees or competent referral authorities?
>
>As per the latest Action Taken Report (ATR) prepared by the Centre on
>implementation of the Assam Accord, though there is hardly any
>encouraging development on the foreigners issue under Clause 5 of the
>Accord, certain actions under Clause 6 are mentioned. The Centre takes
>credit for setting up the Srimanta Sankardeva Kalakshetra and
>modernization of Jyoti Chiraban studio - both over a period of two
>decades, with four different ministries in the State! What a way to
>befool the Asomiyas and the AASU as well, as if our cultural,
>linguistic identity and heritage are already protected just by
>establishment of one cultural centre and renovating an existing
>studio! Any person with average intelligence knows it pretty well that
>setting up of even a thousand cultural centres and studios is not
>going to safeguard the vital interests of any threatened multicultural
>society or community. When the very existence of the Asomiya culture,
>language and heritage is facing the imminent danger of extinction by
>the joint pressure of Bangladeshis and their supporters, including
>fundamentalist and terrorist groups and their cohorts in Asom, what
>purpose the cultural centres and studios would serve is anybody's
>guess. So if Asom is to be saved, the Asomiyas are to survive with
>dignity, self-respect and some strength. Organizations like the AASU,
>Asom Sena, various other students' organizations of the ethnic groups,
>the Asom Unnati Sabha and certainly the political parties have to
>decide and declare their strategies to save Asom and the Asomiyas.
>
>While the ULFA has been fighting their 'liberation war' for the past
>27 years, apparently against Indian 'colonialism', to form a part of
>the Mogalistan confederation with the Asomiyas as minority (and
>thereby serve their motherland!), thousands of Asomiyas continue to
>suffer harassment, humiliation and torture in various forms at the
>hands of the security forces. The top ULFA leadership, having secured
>their present and the future on foreign lands, more particularly in an
>unfriendly Bangladesh whose citizens have deprived the Asomiyas of
>their ancestral land and properties, have continued their 'struggle'
>with renewed vigour. It does not matter if their Bangladesh-based
>'liberation war' leads to the killing of young students and other
>youths. The two top ULFA leaders, Arabinda Rajkhowa and Paresh Baruah,
>must understand that Asom has thousands of years of strong historical,
>religious, spiritual and cultural links with India since the days of
>the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and the tradition was carried
>forward by Sankaradeva and other Vaisnavite saints and scholars of
>Asom. Even if Asom has been neglected and deprived of her rightful
>share in Indian developmental agendas, or if her natural resources are
>unduly exploited by the Government of India, or if the Asomiyas are
>exploited in different ways, the remedy does not lie in a so-called
>sovereign Asom, which, even if achieved by any stretch of imagination,
>would certainly be either a protectorate of Bangladesh or ultimately a
>part and parcel of China just like Tibet, or a protectorate of a
>western power broker.
>
>The Asomiyas, in that remote eventuality, could become rich or
>important for sometime, but then they would no longer remain or be
>known as Asomiyas - they would lose their religion, culture, language,
>heritage and whatever. No Asomiya worth the name would accept such a
>'sovereign' fate if one has a normal mental make-up. This must be
>clearly understood by the ULFA leadership. The Asomiyas would prefer
>to resign themselves to their fate in a democratic, secular, free
>country like India which is governed under a Constitution of which the
>judiciary is the guardian, rather than thinking of aligning themselves
>to a theocratic Bangladesh or an authoritarian China where human
>values and basic freedom are simply nonexistent. The ULFA should
>honour the wishes of the people they are supposed to have been
>fighting for, and join the streams of the Brahmaputra and its numerous
>tributaries, not continue with the streams of the Meghna and Padma, or
>the Huangho and Yangtsikiang. This needs demonstrative courage on the
>part of the ULFA top brass, which we are sure it has enough to
>exhibit, in the interest of safeguarding the security of a
>disappearing identity - the Asomiyas.
>
>(The writer is a former Asom Chief Secretary)
>
>
>
>
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