Assam Accord polluted state’s politics, spawned insurgency—Book

New Delhi, Aug. 18 (PTI): The Assam Accord of 1985 did not bring permanent peace to the state and seemed to have delivered only discord and divisions, says a new book.

Signed between the then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and the leaders of the Assam Movement, the Accord polluted the politics of the state and spawned insurgency, claims Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty in her book “Assam: The Accord, The Discord”.

“The common people were caught in a bind; they didn’t know who was the enemy, who a friend – the state or non-state actors,” she says.

According to her, Assam’s is an old story, where each player, in the course of time, has become both a victim and a perpetrator in each other’s eyes.

“Each player is wounded, exhausted, bitter.”

She says she has tried to “present as many facts as possible in order to help the interested reader figure out the complexities of the Assam story”.

Pisharoty rues that the mainstream narrative in India rarely includes Assam, especially when it speaks of the two milestones that have defined the making of the modern Indian polity – the Partition and the Emergency.

“Both events had a bigger role to play than acknowledged in shaping the people and the politics of Assam. Perhaps it would not be entirely wrong to call the Assam Movement an offshoot of the politics that emerged from the Emergency,” she asserts.

“Yet another point to consider is the impact of the Bangladesh Liberation War on the border state. The country rejoiced at the creation of Bangladesh; it became a jewel on the crown of prime minister Indira Gandhi, but the exodus of refugees from across the border evoked old historical fears and triggered widespread unrest in Assam that went unrecorded, unheeded, in mainstream India.

“In course of time, it festered and let loose a tide that is yet to subside,” she writes in the book, published by Penguin Random House.

A six-year agitation demanding identification and deportation of illegal immigrants was launched by the influential students’ organisation AASU in 1979. It culminated with the signing of the Assam Accord on August 15, 1985, in the presence of Rajiv Gandhi.

On December 24, 1985, for the first time in the state’s post-independent history, a regional party – the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) – assumed office at the Janata Bhawan, the state’s administrative headquarters. AASU president Prafulla Mahanta, as president of the newly formed party, became chief minister.

The subsequent years also the rise of the militant group ULFA, the state in turmoil and split in the AGP, then unification and again dissidence.

The book also discusses topics like language movement, NRC and citizenship bill and the surge of the BJP in Assam and its subsequent accession to power in 2016.

She says it was pertinent to set the Assam Movement against the conundrum that the state finds itself in currently – the controversial updating exercise of the National Register of Citizens (NRC), 1951, and the vehement public opposition to insert an amendment to the Citizenship Act, 1955, by the Narendra Modi-led NDA government.

She says that the biggest challenge the indigenous communities of Assam is staring at is whether to remain an Assamese, or a ‘khilonjia’ (indigenous) first, or bow to a rising wave prominently emanating since 2016 in the state to be a Hindu first.

“The BJP’s push for the citizenship bill livened up that question in people’s mind like never before. It led several among the Assamese Muslim community too to ponder where would they figure in such an eventuality.

“If the majority of the people opt for the latter in the bargain for a solution to the festering Assam problem, certain vital compromises would have to be made concerning the very veins of the Assamese/’khilonjia’ identity,” she writes.