Distant thunder

My father-in-law was extremely annoyed by the election of President Pranab Mukherjee because as the proprietor of the Assam Tribune (my wife’s grandfather, RG Baruah, the paper’s founder, is considered one of the builders of modern Assam) he supported the Assam agitation in the early 1980s. President-da was at that time Union finance minister, but more importantly he was hatchet-man to then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. When the late Mrs Gandhi asked him what the matter in Assam was, hatchet-man replied that it was an anti-Bengali agitation — not an anti-Bangladeshi one — and that became the Congress party’s template for the “Assam problem”. Hatchet-man tried to get my father-in-law to “come to the mainstream”, as he put it; but even a conservative paper like Assam Tribune was not going to go against the popular mood despite innumerable personal entreaties by the then Chief Minister Hiteshwar Saikia (in whose house Prime Minister Manmohan Singh dubiously claims residence and thereby current membership in the Rajya Sabha, technically if not morally fulfilling the criterion of the PM having to be from Parliament). So hatchet-man directed the chairman of a bank that handled the paper’s day-to-day financial dealings to cripple the paper; he also launched tax cases against my father-in-law (none of this hatchet-baazi worked). Now my father-in-law is irritated because the paper’s 75th anniversary is coming up, and as during the golden jubilee he had wanted to invite the President to the celebration. At 80 he’s too old to hold his nose and invite this one.

The agitation invaded “mainstream” Indian consciousness with the 1983 Nellie massacre, in which nearly two thousand Bangladeshi Muslims were killed by members of a plains tribe. After Partition, such a large-scale massacre was unheard of; but soon after marriage my wife matter-of-factly told me that the Northeast tribes were ruthlessly violent, especially the Bodos and the Nagas. It seemed paradoxical, as the Northeast is one of the most beautiful places on Earth, filled with the most beautiful women on Earth. Yet it was one of the most violent places in India though it didn’t grab headlines in the way that Punjab and J&K did, because of the “tyranny of distance”, as a TV anchor has put it, between New Delhi and Assam). In 1990, for instance, as a Union home ministry correspondent I visited a mass grave of ULFA victims unearthed in the dense Lakhipathar forest near Digboi. It was a stench that buries itself in one’s memory. The next year when I visited Guwahati, my father-in-law refused to let me out of the house as ULFA had kidnapped a Russian mining engineer; his beheaded body was found in the Brahmaputra. It was proof of the notion that beauty and violence are sometimes inextricably interlinked.

The Bodos were then also violently agitating for political separation. Ironically shadowy government outfits had trained many Bodos in guerilla warfare, in response to the 1962 Chinese invasion. It was often alleged that the Bodos were used by Rajiv Gandhi’s government to destabilise the AGP government in Assam, the first government led by former student agitators. The Bodos got their political autonomy but that hasn’t helped much economically; the entire Northeast is still mostly in economic doldrums even though the PM of the last nine years is supposed to represent it. Thus, the recent past has seen lots of signs of Bodos looking for political consolidation, and many feel that the Bodo violence is aimed at driving Bangladeshis out of Bodoland into Dhubri, a border district, as part of this consolidation.

On Thursday morning, the young Bodo lady who stays with us in Mumbai, along with two large groups of fellow Bodos affiliated with her Byculla church, abruptly packed and left for Assam. She told my wife that the village elders had summoned them back, saying that after Eid “juddho hobo” (war is coming). The Bodos in Mumbai already had the scare of their lives with an unnecessarily violent demonstration at Azad Maidan last week (the Christian Bodos were attending services at the time and were too scared to disperse back to their homes; my wife was doubly worried because our son had to stay inside Xavier’s College till the rampage was over). You can expect that some of that fear that they faced in different cities at the hands of some hotheads is going to be channelised into a tragedy.

It’s no secret that a storm is brewing, so what is the government going to do? It is already rumoured that the faction in the Assam Congress is exploiting the violence to try and dislodge Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi. The CM at the very least should have publicly dismissed rumours and soothed his citizens. The nation’s home minister, Sushilkumar Shinde, seems blasé; my political correspondents in Mumbai say that’s because he’s hanging around only for six months or so, waiting to perhaps switch jobs with Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan. When the man who gave his party the wrong political template and let Assam burn is now enjoying a cushy sinecure in grand Rashtrapati Bhawan then what do you expect from the other political pygmies? And as my father-in-law asks, what is the alternative?

—The writer is the Editor-in-Chief, DNA, based in Mumbai