Locating Assam: Bardoloi, Nehru and migration

The consistent agitations in Assam by student movements and other organizations opposing illegal influx from Bangladesh is the stuff, if not of legend, than the story of the mobilization of communities in the region in a rare way. The campaign began in the late 1970s although the issues are far more historic and date back to a colonial era when settlers from East Bengal (now Bangladesh) were settled on the wastelands by British administrations and the Muslim League government of Sir Mohammed Saadulla. Those who challenged it were the Congress Party under Gopinath Bardoloi as well as other prominent figures such as Rohini Chowdhury, the firebrand nationalist leader.

These issues and much more have been mapped in an extraordinary and compelling new book which has come out recently by the historian Nirode K. Barooah titled “Gopinath Bardoloi, ‘the Assam Problem’ and Nehru’s Centre”. Dr. Barooah has painstakingly marshaled a formidable array of facts and figures, based on a lifetime of research in archives, official material, family materials, interviews and other documents, on how Nehru time and again tried to undercut his own party leaders in Assam.

But he also devotes one last stinging chapter to current day academics, writers and historians who have been generally extensively cited for their work where he makes short shrift of them. He says that their understanding of the independence movement in Assam under Bardoloi was shallow and lacked both coherence and balance: in short, they were prejudiced by their leftist ideologies or poorly informed by not going to the source of the materials and he is waspish, if not blistering, in his criticism.

Much has been written about the ‘Assam movement’ as the anti-immigrant agitation has been called but Dr. Barooah puts it in the tapestry of the independence movement and the critical issues of India’s freedom as well as of Assam’s survival as a state with honour in the Union, given the pressures from the “mainstream” Congressmen such as Nehru and Patel and even from those who were opposed to Bardoloi within the party in Assam.

He has sought to locate Assam in the struggle for “its soul” as Mahatma Gandhi once put it as much as against mainstream politics, while referring to the efforts by the League and Congress national leaders to marginalize it: the aim was to make Assam fall in line with British proposals which would place it at a disadvantage in the Grouping of Provinces under the Cabinet Mission Plan. If it had succumbed, its destiny would have been effectively controlled by Muslim-majority Bengal, and the North-east as we know today would have ceased to exist and formed part of Bangladesh. Nehru’s obduracy provoked the revolt by Bardoloi and the state party which was backed by Gandhiji.

“It is impertinent to think that Bengal should dominate Assam in any way,” the Mahatma remarked acidly to two Assamese leaders, Bijoy Bhagwati and Mahendra Mohan Chowdhury, who visited him at Noakhali to seek his advise in 1946.

In these past decades, despite being marginal to national politics (barring the rising of militancies, the growth of tea and oil and mustering a tiny total of 24 Lok Sabha MPs in the North-east), Assam, at least, has stutteringly, shakingly but unfailingly maintained and even sustained, one would argue, that struggle not to be absorbed wholesale into the Indian Union. This has taken place at great cost even under various Congress and non-Congress regimes over these past decades, with many civilian casualties in movements and struggles as well as crackdowns by the state and efforts at conciliation.

And while the seepage of migrants from Bangladesh into Assam appears to be abated, it continues to other parts of the world. That’s why it’s important to understand that migration, while being drive by push factors in the home country such as unemployment, landlessness, low incomes, poor living conditions and discrimination is also governed by pull factors where at least some of these critical issues at home appear to have a chance of resolution. The migrant has many positive qualities: he or she often is a resourceful and courageous human being, prepared to take risks to seek a better life for themselves and their families. Who does not aspire for such a basic minimum: that is the basis on which humankind survives, to do better, surely.

So when they come, they come braving the odds: bribery and betrayal, corruption and criminals, anguish and failure, and even death and imprisonment, in the simple human urge for a better life. Now no one argues they should be received with open arms: but there should be an understanding of that basic desire, for it is that which drives migration across the world.

Dr. Barooah’s book should be recommended reading for all policymakers and academics but especially for negotiators in the peace process, including ULFA leaders — it would both deepen and widen their understanding of the historic processes in which we are bit players.

North by North-east
By Sanjoy Hazarika