I love THAT!
MM
From: "Rajen Barua" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
CC: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Assam] [asom] Assamese Fears and Saviours
Date: Sun, 29 Oct 2006 19:42:47 -0600
And put a stop to writing Asom and Asomiya please and move on...
Rajen Barua
From: "mc mahant" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
CC: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Assam] [asom] Assamese Fears and Saviours
Date: Mon, 30 Oct 2006 06:58:09 +0530
<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> --"ARE ASSAMESE"--- we should put a stop to the definition cacophony-and move on.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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