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Hello Mr Prannoy Roy,
The Assam Assembly elections are over and so is your brief rendezvous with our State. The limelight we received and the show on the 8th of April, 2016 by the banks of the Brahmaputra with a good panel was unprecedented. This could only be equalled to the attention Assam received last year during the height of the Indrani Mukerjea fiasco where national news channels camped outside Indrani’s father’s house in Guwahati. We wished your channel had given the same importance to the devastating floods last year which affected 3 lakh people in Assam, but your channel (along with so called ‘mainstream’ media) didn’t find it a meaty enough piece of news.
We can forgive that for now, but not what happened on our screens on the night of April 8, as we had just finished the first phase of Assam elections and were gearing up for the second on April 11. You must be aware that Assam also has a strong presence of local and regional media in several languages including Bengali, Bodo and Assamese, and that these media houses extensively covered the elections by travelling the length and breadth of the State, and not just for a few days. Further, these channels include people from this region, who know inside-out what they are reporting on, without any pretence of being know-alls staying in Delhi and making others believe that they are authoritative voices on almost anything worth a discussion. We wonder what gives the national media the confidence to make extensive comments and analyses on Assam elections by just travelling around the State for just three or four weeks. We say this especially since Assam is an extremely heterogeneous society where the socio-economic and political dynamics are very different — especially across Upper Assam, Lower Assam and Barak Valley.
But of course, you and your panellists had a deep discussion on the most important elections in Assam in decades and also rued the fact that the region doesn’t get enough of importance. Then you went ahead to define us with your data and myopic analysis.
Out of the 31.2 million people in Assam, we were told — or rather enlightened by you — that the aforementioned 22 million people were migrants, and that the Assamese number just 10 million.
As per your grids and graphs, the Assamese fall into five categories: Ahoms, Bodos, Christians, Mising tribe and “other tribes”. It is surprising that your classification of who is an Assamese comes at a time when the whole State is trying to answer these very questions for itself. Sahitya Sabhas across several communities — Assamese, Bodos, Rabhas, Misings and so on — have been debating for the past year to arrive at a definition of ‘who is an Axomiya’, and till date a consensus has not been reached. But you, Mr. Roy, seem to have surpassed all these debates and have reached your version of the definition.
Now, who are the migrants according to you? The Muslims (11 million), Bengali Hindus (6 million) and the tea-garden workers (5 million). These masala figures you put up on our screens gives a scary picture of Assam. It looks like the State is under a siege by migrants, and this is very disturbing to all of us in Assam.
By your definition, both the writers of this letter are “migrants” as we are Bengali Hindus. We speak, read and write both the languages fluently, but identify ourselves as Assamese first. One of us comes from a family that had settled in Assam in the early 1900s and the other had come during Partition in 1947.
Here's a brief narrative of the migration into Assam by Muslims, Bengali Hindus and the different waves that followed.
If we go by your classification then no Muslim in Assam is an Assamese. Which is a very idiocentric thing to say, because historical records suggest Muslims came to Assam in the early 13th Century when General Mahammad Bin Bhaktyar Khilji tried to enter the State with his Turkish troops. It is assumed that some Muslim soldiers preferred to live on in Assam instead of going back and they married local girls, some of whose relatives also converted into Islam. It is interesting to note that the Ahoms, the descendants of the Tai people whom you called the original Assamese, had also migrated to Assam during the same time. Moreover, several Muslim artisans had come to Assam on the invitation of the Ahom kings and settled down here permanently.
A 35-foot-long bronze Statue of Asom General Lachit Borphukan with his soldiers installed in the middle of River Brahmaputra, in Guwahati. Borphukan was a commander in the Ahom Kingdom known for its leadership in the 1671 battle of Saraighat that thwarted a drawn out attempt by the Mughal warrior. | PTI
A second wave of migration occurred after the establishment of British rule through the Treaty of Yandaboo in 1826. The first such group were the literate Bengali Hindus who were brought to work in the British administration at subordinate levels. The second group of migrants were the tea-garden labourers, often referred to as tea-tribes or adivasis, and this was followed by landless Muslim cultivators who came to Assam and were mostly involved in settled agriculture, since most of the tribal communities — like the Bodos — were into shifting agriculture.
If the Muslims are migrants then so are the Ahoms. History is all about migration. It’s difficult to identify who is the ‘son of the soil’ and who is not.
Now, let’s come to the Bodos, who are Assamese according to your Venn Diagrams. This is a very misguided notion because the entire struggle for a separate Bodo homeland is based on the desire to carve out a separate identity that is distinct from ‘Assamese’. Unlike the Telangana movement for a separate State, the movement for the creation of ‘Bodoland’ — which seeks the 50-50 division of Assam — has never got the focus it deserves from the national media. We also say this from our personal engagement with the Bodo Territorial Autonomous Council (BTAD), where one of us has been conducting her doctoral research since 2012.
We are not even getting into the question of Christian Assamese; but the Muslims surely aren’t as per your analysis, in which the positioning of non-tribal Assamese is also peculiar. By your analysis, even Bhupen Hazarika and Prafulla Kumar Mahanta aren’t Assamese!
We didn’t expect this ‘masala journalism’ from one of the pioneers of Indian television who has given us memorable programmes like ‘The World This Week’ and ‘The News Tonight’. It infuriates us because Roy’s Classification of the Assamese Society comes on the heels of a news piece on the NDTV website which called the entire Dimasa tribe a militant organisation!
Bodo women, victims of ethnic violence, seen at a relief camp at Bhot Gaon village in Kokrajhar, Assam in 2012. | AP
This is too much of an oversimplification. We don’t want a rigid definition of Assamese. The word migrant in Assam can be a dangerous word as it is most often used in lieu of the term ‘outsiders’ or ‘foreigners’. The ‘son of the soil’ politics was used routinely by Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) to gain political mileage and create a fear psychosis to mask the corruption among its ranks when the party was in power in Assam. Even now, the Assamese-speaking population is wary of a takeover by ‘outsiders’, and this fear had resulted in violence against migrant workers from Bihar a few years back. This has also led to violent clashes between the Bodos and Muslims, most recently in 2012 and 2014. So, this classification of yours has the ability to flare up many dormant ethno-communal issues whose undercurrents run deep, and create divides in an already fractured society, without actually making us — or anyone — aware of the demographics of Assam, of which — initially, at least — you seemed to be so knowledgeable about.
So, don’t expect us to take this faux pas with a pinch of salt. We don’t want this brand of divisive politics broadcasted live from your studio. Perhaps, camping outside Indrani Mukerjea’s ancestral home in Assam is something your channel should stick to for now.
Warmest regards and Jai Aai Axom,
Mayuri Bhattacharjee (Migrant 1)
Anwesha Dutta (Migrant 2)
