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Asom at 60, in Reality — IITHE REALITY MIRRORBikash Sarmah IN CONTINUATION WITH
WHAT I dealt with last week, it is now in the fitness of things here to talk of
Asom’s exclusivity as imposed on its people by mainland India and how the State
is still assumed to be fitting well into the Indian federal paradigm. In fact,
in a functioning democracy that we claim ours to be, and quite confidently at
that after 60 years of Independence, ‘‘mainland India’’ must be a misnomer
because there can be no mainland and hinterland in such a democracy — with
federal features — except for a definition strictly territorial. In the case of
Northeast India, the definition is not just territorial; it extends to include
the people of the region, their cultures and traditions seen as alien to those
of the mainlanders, and their hopes and aspirations as forming a mismatch with
things ‘nationalistic’. Asom’s case is extraordinary, then. Home to both Aryan
and Mongoloid races, the State has to its credit an inbuilt and sustainable
space that is no different from what mainland India would obsessively refer to
as nationalized space. The presence of a militant outfit as the ULFA that
obdurately clings on to the demand for a sovereign Asom, does not — and cannot
— make the whole of the State as being given to fissiparous tendencies. Or, for
instance, as I write this and begin to stress the fact of Asom’s exclusivity as
imposed by mainland India, it does not, I hope so, make me a secessionist. This
is so because secession and dissent or dissidence are two different things: the
former decries the country and whatever principles and values the country is
symbolic of, both in theory and practice; while the latter works on a critique
of the aberrations in those very principles and values, again both in theory
and practice, just in order that the country could chart out its course as a
more cohesive unit. However, Asom, a State long neglected just because it forms
a part of the hinterland and a State whose problems are thought of as being too
unique to be accommodated in what may be called a nation-state that is more a
Union of territories than a Union of States in the real sense of the term, is
often described as a region where fissiparous tendencies take birth because the
people of the State fail to identify themselves with the mainland discourse.
What are these fissiparous tendencies? And what is the mainland discourse? The
fissiparous tendencies do not just pertain to the ULFA’s call for a sovereign
Asom. These are tendencies, as the centrist mainlanders would argue, that aim
at creating a weak national fabric; that run counter to the ‘federal’ concept
of India as being a Union of a strong Centre and weak States; that would rather
undo the very ‘spirit’ of the Indian Constitution. Given this, it is natural on
the part of the strong-Centre votaries to support the Centre’s attempt to
‘nationalize’ Asom — which is in fact to let the State remain a weak component
of the Indian Union, ever dependent on the Centre. But it is also natural on
the part of the Asomiyas to decry the Centre’s attempt to nationalize an
already nationalized territory. The mainland discourse, which overlooks local
and localized factors, and which tries to effect a forced alteration in these
factors, cannot be said to constitute the process of nation-making. Mainland
India, then, gets jittery when Asom’s so-called exclusivity boomerangs. Take
the ULFA’s genocide this January. When over 70 Hindi-speaking people were
killed by the rebel outfit, the Centre was unnerved. Union ministers and a
whole lot of mainland politicians rushed to the State in a show of solidarity
with the Hindi-speaking people, who have lived in this State for generations.
Why was such Central or mainland panic manifest? The reason is that it was
people, whose origin is in mainland India, who were being targeted by the ULFA
— an outfit that calls such people ‘‘foreigners’’. However, the Central leaders
or mainland politicians forgot the fact that those Hindi-speakers, who were
being targeted by the ULFA in its terrorist avatar, comprised quite a few who
had no practical connection with mainland India except for the fact of their
origin. There are many Hindi-speakers in Asom whose identity is as much Asomiya
as anyone else with Asomiya as mother tongue. They have lived here for
generations — many are third- or fourth-generation Hindi-speakers whose mother
tongue may be Hindi but whose commitment to the cause of the State, mainly the
economic cause, is no less than that of the Asomiyas who are defined so in
terms of their mother tongue. So these Hindi-speakers are as much Asomiya as
anyone else whose mother tongue is Asomiya. However, since the Centre and
mainland India have imposed a bizarre exclusivity on Asom and the Asomiyas, an
Asomiya Hindi-speaker, if he or she can be called so, remains a mainlander who
operates in Asom due to business concerns but whose commitment is concentrated
in mainland India — in the eyes of the Central leaders and mainland
politicians. The same was true of the killing of Hindi-speakers in Karbi
Anglong by the Karbi Longri National Liberation Front (KLNLF) allegedly in
tandem with the ULFA last weekend. The Central team that was here, including
Union Minister of State for Home Affairs Sriprakash Jaiswal, gave the
impression of theirs having to make out a meaning of their routine knee-jerk
reaction to such genocide without bothering to delve into the reality of the
day: that the perpetrators of such heinous crime are no longer insurgents but
sheer terrorists acting under the diktats of hostile foreign powers; more
specifically, the Bangladeshi fundamentalist and terrorist organizations and,
of course, Pakistan’s ISI. The Centre does not have the guts to ask Bangladesh
to ensure that its territory is not used for anti-India activities, failing
which that country will face the music. No, such hard talk cannot be India’s,
for it has to promote a regime of courtesy diplomacy even at the cost of
national security, and it has to also take care of ‘secular’ ethos. The Centre
also does not have the guts to ask Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf
to rein in his ISI — his ISI, because the ISI is the quintessential component
of the Pakistani military establishment and General Musharraf continues to be
the chief of that establishment. T he fact of the matter is that in Asom, the
volatility of the situation brought about by the existence and operational
expertise of militant groups — the leader being the ULFA — provokes the debate
as to the need for nationalizing Asom more ruthlessly. This task would be
backed by Article 3 of the Constitution — in terms of its connotation — which
otherwise empowers Parliament to meddle with the States’ affairs by way of
diminishing their areas or altering their boundaries or changing their names,
and which, as noted constitutional expert Fali S Nariman argues (India Today,
August 20, 2007), runs counter to Article 1 that ‘‘did proclaim the federal
character of India’’ by categorically stating that ‘‘India, that is Bharat,
shall be a Union of States’’. Nariman says that India is rather a ‘‘Union of
territories’’. This is best reflected in Asom’s case as also in the rest of the
‘tribal’ — hence not ‘mainland’ — Northeast. That a State like Asom, otherwise
projected as the leader in the Centre’s much-vaunted Look East Policy and
considered as the gateway to South East Asia, should continue as a typical
peripheral territory at the mercy of militant groups thriving as part of the
‘insurgency’ industry framework and by virtue of their association with the
Bangladesh-sponsored jehadis, indeed forms a narrative on the flawed federalist
paradigm that the Centre would showcase after 60 years of Independence. Asom at
60, in reality, then, continues to bleed as an Indian territory — not as any
State in a truly federal scheme of things. But the million-dollar question is:
even if Asom begins to be a truly federal State at one point of time when all
other States of the Indian Union will be so, will the State’s politicians, used
to corruption and all sorts of share in the ‘insurgency’ industry, choose to
rescue the beleaguered Asomiya society from the imminent doom — the takeover of
the State by Islamic forces backed by an Islamic Bangladesh? Perhaps it sounds
un-‘secular’, but that is the reality in a country and a State where the
practitioners of ‘secularism’ are united by the greed for political power at
the cost of national security.(The writer is the Consulting Editor of The
Sentinel
“In order to make spiritual progress you must be patient like a tree and humble
like a blade of grass”
- Lakshmana
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