Bloodstained road to Nellie

In that awful fortnight, when Indira Gandhi decided to force an election nobody wanted in Assam, you didn't have to go looking for trouble to write about

Why are we writing about what happened in Assam decades ago, now? In a series of two articles, on successive Saturdays, our customary National Interest slot?

First Person/Second Draft is an occasional series I started in mid-2013 inspired by Shoojit Sircar’s brilliant film Madras Cafe, set in the terror phase in Sri Lanka leading up to Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination. On India’s Independence Day that year, I was invited to deliver the annual Sri Lanka India Society lecture.

Fresh from watching the film, it gave me an opportunity to revisit many of the moments, places and people that featured in my decade of covering the Sri Lankan crisis, 1984-1994. The result was a series of three articles.

After that, there were more in the series, including three articles on Punjab. In the course of time, these might feature as much more detailed accounts in a book. Until then, I will keep bringing you occasional series like these, especially when something brings back any of the big stories I covered in my decades as a field reporter. These were stories I covered and witnessed myself. Changes in the course of time, and the benefit of hindsight now, give us an opportunity to write a second draft. That’s why the series First Person/Second Draft.

The idea of this Assam series was sparked about two weeks back, at a small and solemn gathering of friends and acquaintances at New Delhi’s Lodhi Estate electric crematorium. We were there to mourn Vinay Kohli, a distinguished 1966 batch IAS officer of the Assam-Meghalaya cadre. Several key fellow travellers and admirers were there. I met some after years, and a few after decades.

There was Madan P Bezbaruah of the 1964 batch, who was Assam’s home secretary during my years there, in the 1980s. There were also “young” Jitesh Khosla and Anup Thakur (both of the 1979 batch) with their wives. Like Mr Bezbaruah, both these Assam cadre officers retired at the rank of central government secretary.

But I call them “young” because that’s what they — and I — were during that troubled epoch in the northeast. I met them both on their first (or thereabouts) posting in service, as sub-divisional officers in Golaghat and Mangaldai, respectively.

I was, of course, there looking for trouble to report. And in that awful fortnight, when Indira Gandhi decided to force an election nobody wanted in Assam, you didn’t have to go looking for trouble. It followed you all the time, whether you were an officer or a reporter. Many vivid memories returned that morning at the funeral.

Then, serendipitously, my colleague Praveen Swami, the National Security Editor at ThePrint, reminded me that this first fortnight of February was going to mark that bloodiest one in Assam, where, by my reckoning, about 7,000 people were killed. Even the official estimate was nearly half of this.

That’s why this first article in this series of two. This one is on how the violence built up during the election campaign. The next article, on Saturday, February 18, will mark the exact date of the 40th anniversary of the Nellie massacre.

The next article will talk about how some of us, working with Arun Shourie then, unravelled an incredible story of incompetence, negligence, cover-ups and even complicity that resulted in those great killings over a fortnight. Some of these accounts draw from my 1983-84 book Assam: A Valley Divided, long out of print.

Looking back, with the benefit of hindsight as I just said, what stands out is how complacent, distracted, harassed, complicit and insensitive the police were then. Which takes me straight back to earlier rounds of violence in Nowgong district, where Nellie was also located.

A junior officer was prophetic about the situation a week before Nellie: “I wish the bubble in Nowgong (now Nagaon) had burst earlier, like in Darrang (district on the north bank of the Brahmaputra, with Tezpur as its headquarters). Now if it does so during the elections, you will be counting corpses in hundreds.” How prophetic his words proved to be.

In the confusion, most people ignored the happenings around Jagiroad in Nowgong district, a mere 15 km from Nellie. Nowgong is the land of the most “Assamised” tribals in the state. After their victories against the Kacharis, the Ahoms had allowed certain offshoots of the tribe to inhabit Nowgong. The Lalungs, who had been vassals to both the Kacharis and the Ahoms, were the main beneficiaries. They inhabited this most fertile section of the Brahmaputra valley freely, till the immigrant Bengali Muslims came on the scene at the turn of the 20th century. In the great immigrant scramble for land, the Lalungs were the worst sufferers. The tribe (population about 371,000, according to the 2011 Census) lost most of its good land and was pushed deeper.

Later, the British administrators clumsily tried to prevent the alienation of tribal land through a “line system” under which imaginary lines were drawn across various parts of the infiltration-prone districts. The Bengali settlers were forbidden from crossing the “line”, but always succeeded in exploiting the gullibility of the backward tribal living across it.

The line was pushed deeper. Even a cursory analysis of the violence in Nowgong showed that this, even now, remained the line that divided the two warring groups. The systematic tribal attacks came across the pre-Independence “lines”.

Meanwhile, tension mounted high in and around Hojai, the town famous for its agarwood traders (agarwood, a fragrant forest produce, is smuggled in from Burma and used for incense). That’s the town, incidentally, where Badruddin Ajmal, the Asaduddin Owaisi of Assam, comes from. He’s a fragrance trader, too.

This later made an indirect contribution to the carnage in Nellie in that the administration’s attention was concentrated on Hojai, which was regarded as a sensitive pocket. The town was placed under curfew and since, for the moment, the police seemed to ignore the western parts of the district, things happened with bewildering rapidity.

Now, the immigrant Muslims kidnapped five of a family of Lalungs. Their bodies were found the following day, and word quickly spread that the two young girls among them had been gang-raped. Even as tribal reprisals around the nearby village of Nagabandha left over 20 immigrant Muslims dead, the Lalung rajas (chiefs) from the major habitations of the tribe went into a huddle in a tea garden.

There are different versions as to what exactly transpired at the “durbar”. According to an account given to me by some educated Lalungs, the Lalung chiefs are said to have decided that they must kill at least 700 for each of their tribesmen killed.

It is amazing how a tribe known always for its docility suddenly turned into a mob of bloodthirsty marauders. Before Nellie, the only act of defiance the Lalungs, a Hindu Shaivite tribe, were credited with was the killing, in 1861, of a British officer who tried to prevent them from cultivating opium, which was then the mainstay of their economy.

The fortnight of chasing shadows in the wild had by now left the police force too exhausted to be effective. Police attention also shifted away across the river, to the north bank of the Brahmaputra, with killings and riots breaking out in the most poorly connected forested regions. It was impossible to sift fact from fiction. Sometimes a dozen dead became 1,290 in reality, and sometimes 120 reported initially weren’t even four. It was that kind of a fortnight. Gohpur, Chaulkhowa Chapori (river island) and all these took our attention away from Khoirabari, deep east on the north bank, where the second biggest massacres took place, besides Nellie.

Two weeks after the killings, I saw vultures still scraping dozens of skeletons lying in the fields. On March 3, when we reached the place, the wounded survivors were still hiding in fear. Nothing better characterised the atmosphere in those frenetic February days. Everyone feared everyone; fear and hatred made a dangerous mix and took a toll of 7,000.

(Next week in First Person/Second Draft: Uncovering the cover-up)

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