The authorities remain in the dark as to who's behind the Assam blasts.
It is now officially established that anyone can slap people around in India, including in such sensitive border states as Assam, and get away with it. Hours after more than 10 bombs went off simultaneously in Assam, various persons supposedly in charge of security were still bickering about who had done it. Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh lamented divisive forces — because they were unsure who had put RDX in Maruti cars in densely populated centres in Guwahati and pressed the detonator killing more than 60 people; Minister of State for Internal Security Sriprakash Jaiswal said the state government had been warned there would be blasts; the Inspector General of Police in Assam said “fundamentalist forces” were active in the state; the Assam Health Minister said it was the work of the United Liberation Front of Assam (Ulfa), a charge Ulfa almost instantly denied; and intelligence agencies said it could be a breakaway branch of Ulfa in cahoots with the Harkat-ul-Jamaat-e-Islami (HuJI). Right. Why not name the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia or the ETA or the Shining Path of Peru as well while you’re about it? They could’ve done it as well, couldn’t they? Hell, anyone could have done it.
The sense of helplessness is enough to make you grit your teeth and want to swear, but reflect a moment. How much do we really know about the cauldron of swirling, colliding ethnic identities that the north east is, and the stakes politicians of all hues have in keeping it all hidden away from public gaze? Very little. Assam is arguably the most complex of the seven north eastern sisters with layer upon layer of settlers who have made the state their home over the years, reluctant to allow other newcomers a share — whether in politics or jobs or identity.
It is tempting to put the blame at the door of the Congress since that is the party which has ruled Assam the longest, but doing so would be ahistorical. Even so, successive Congress chief ministers with their policy of ensuring the Ali (migrant Muslims), the Coolie (labourers in tea gardens) and the Bangali (migrants from West Bengal) stayed with them to see them home safe in elections in the 1960s and early 1970s, contributed in no small measure to a sense of grievance among other communities who made Assam their home but resented the sense of discrimination they continued to feel. These were the Karbis, the Dimasas and the Bodos and of course, the Muslims who came into Assam from Bangladesh and kept coming and kept coming.
In 2001, when the Congress came to power in Assam and Tarun Gogoi took charge as Chief Minister of Assam, it was hard not feel a rush of sympathy for him. The outgoing Asom Gana Parishad government in the state had left finances in a mess. Neighbouring militant groups were claiming Assam was actually part of Greater Nagaland. And the relentless migration from Bangladesh had prompted Governor Lt General SK Sinha to warn in a report to President KR Narayanan that 57 of Assam’s 126 assembly constituencies had shown more than a 20 per cent increase in the number of voters between 1994 and 1997 whereas the all-India average was just 7.4 per cent; and that the Muslim population in Assam had shown a rise of 77.42 per cent over what it had been in 1971 (there was no census in Assam in 1981).
Instead of setting things right, Gogoi’s response? He asked for the recall of the Governor. Lt General Ajay Singh, who has spent 18 years in the north east in various capacities as a professional soldier, followed Sinha. He repeated Sinha’s fears. He too was asked to keep his opinions to himself. Meanwhile the state government ‘reached out to misguided youth’ — the Ulfa which represents a kind of pop-marxism heavily flavoured with Assamese chauvinism and claims to be a revolutionary group which wants to establish a sovereign independent Assam, free of Indian exploitation through an armed struggle. In 2005, just before assembly elections talks between some members of Ulfa and the Government of India were held at Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s residence. This led to a ceasefire that lasted just one month. But as all anti-insurgency operations have to be carried out only after the state government has given permission, the Army was sometimes non-plussed: for it kept getting stop-and-go signals from the state administration when it was close to breaking the back of the Ulfa.
In 2006 Gogoi became chief minister again. In 2007, Assam was the state with the second highest number of terrorist incident-related deaths in India. Something was terribly wrong and no one seemed to know how to fix it.
We’re now in 2008 and, no one still knows what is going wrong in Assam. Just a few weeks ago, one round of bloodletting was the result of tribal clashes. Now, what is puzzling law-enforcers is there is no clear pattern in the blasts earlier this week. Some have taken place in Muslim majority areas. Others have taken place in residential centres with mixed populations. Still others — including in Dispur — seem to be aimed at symbols of state authority (a car parked outside the District Commissioner’s office was blown up). Another way of finding the culprits is to trace the explosives trail. That strongly suggests technology which can only be acquired by groups that have the patronage of India’s friendly neighbours in the east. But then these groups also have the advantage of being considered misguided youth by the state government. Meanwhile, it is the ordinary citizens of Assam who are now taking the law into their own hands. Because angry young men stoned policemen and set fire tenders on fire to voice their anger at the blasts, the unprecedented has happened: they have been declared to be at risk from themselves and curfew has been clamped in Guwahati, something that hasn’t happened in that town for several decades.
But take solace from the fact that the chief minister knows what’s happening and he has informed the home minister of India accordingly. May be. It is to be fervently hoped. But what do we know. We’re only the newspapers. And you shouldn’t believe everything you read in the papers.
