by John Keay
While the LTTE waged a war of attrition against the Sri Lankan forces plus a no less bloody vendetta against its own guerrilla rivals, Indian concern mounted. The Tamil Nadu factor was probably uppermost. ‘Seldom has a constituent unit of one country influenced the relationship between it and a neighbouring country with the same intensity, persistence, and to the same extent that Tamil Nadu does in the case of India’s relation with Sri Lanka,’ writes de Silva.24 The prospects no less than the instincts of Tamil Nadu’s AIADMK government demanded that it act as the protector of Sri Lanka’s Tamils. As well as providing the guerrillas with support and sanctuary it facilitated their acquisition of arms and urged New Delhi to deploy its international clout on their behalf.
Mrs Gandhi in New Delhi obliged because she had an agenda of her own. The Jayawardene government in Colombo, which had toppled the United Front of her friend Mrs Sirimavo Bandaranaike, was already looking beyond India for assistance. For help in containing the Tamil challenge and mediating a settlement, Colombo openly approached neighbours other than India, including Pakistan, and further afield, the UK and the US. Much to Mrs Gandhi’s fury, Washington was already arming and bankrolling Zia’s Pakistan in response to events in Afghanistan. The prospect of her least favourite superpower acquiring yet another role in the region alarmed Indian policy-makers. To safeguard its own regional superiority, New Delhi badly needed to assert an exclusive interest in Sri Lanka.
The Tamil Nadu dimension lent further cogency to this analysis, as did reports that some Indian citizens had already fallen victim to the strife. India could not therefore remain indifferent. Yet critics noted only the parallels with the run-up to the Bangladesh intervention. Now as then, the Indian government emphasised its humanitarian concern for the refugees, denied any involvement in the training and funding of the guerrillas, and eagerly embraced the chance to act as arbitrator. This has led one scholar to note ‘a new Monroe doctrine in Indian foreign policy after 1983’. Another explains the reference by insisting ‘that India had to manage the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka itself, in order to both maintain its hegemonic role and keep external powers out of its “backyard” ’.25
In mid-to-late 1983 senior Indian emissaries were twice despatched to Colombo, and Jayawardene visited India. It was believed that plans for an armed Indian intervention had already been drawn up, to forestall which Jayawardene welcomed the diplomatic initiative. TULF, the LTTE and other militant Tamil groups also endorsed the talks, in the hopes of winning some recognition for their separatist agendas. But at the time Mrs Gandhi was preoccupied with more pressing separatist challenges closer to home. When in late 1984 one of these claimed her life, it fell to her son and successor to resume the search for a role in Sri Lanka. This Rajiv Gandhi would do, bringing the Sri Lankan parties together, then edging them towards the ill-fated 1987 Accord under which Indian troops were finally despatched to the island. Proudly deployed as a guarantor of the peace, the Indian Peace-Keeping Force would quickly become fair game when the Accord unravelled.
Indian involvement in the Sri Lankan war officially internationalised the conflict; yet it had in fact long been so. The Tamil diaspora in the UK, the US, the Gulf and especially Canada (where Toronto soon hosted 150,000 Sri Lankan ‘asylum seekers’) had been funding the militant groups for years, and now managed procurement agencies for weaponry, communications equipment and bomb-making materials, plus the shipping to deliver them. The diaspora also lobbied foreign governments on behalf of these groups, with New Delhi’s diplomatic representatives reportedly offering their support. In a decade when India’s own integrity was coming under greater threat than at any time since Partition, some saw this as hypocritical.
The irony was not lost on President Jayawardene. When the weekly India Today had published the first hard evidence of direct Indian government involvement in supplying and training Tamil guerrillas, the Sri Lankan premier had been incensed. ‘This is not a friendly act at all,’ he had declared. Nor was it one that he had brought on himself; for as he pointedly added, ‘I am not harbouring the people who want to separate Punjab and Assam from India.’26
9
Things Fall Apart
Come, come,
Come out of your homes.
Chase, chase,
Chase the foreigner away.
This 1980s chant – ‘the rallying point of every meeting, the call to arms of every procession and protest’ – could well have been that of Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese majority baying for the suppression of the Tamil guerrillas.1 It, too, was inspired by what has been called the ‘politics of citizenship’, and it was providing Mrs Gandhi with another stern test of her commitment to the secular and non-interventionist principles bequeathed by her father. But the chant in its pithier original was in fact in the Assamese language; and the ‘foreigners’ whom Assam’s activists wished to expel were largely Muslim Bengalis from across India’s soft and ever problematic border with Bangladesh.
Assam, in India’s far north-east, had long been noted for an exceptional rate of population increase: through the first half of the twentieth century ‘it was the second-highest in the world (137.80 per cent), exceeded only by Brazil (204 per cent)’.2 In the census period 1961–71 it had continued to grow by around 35 per cent; hence the 1961 total was expected to have doubled by 1991. This was not because the indigenous people – a mixture of Assamese and numerous smaller groupings – were exceptionally fertile. Rather was it mostly down to massive inward migration.
Like the Lepchas and Bhutiyas in Sikkim, though on a much larger scale, those who considered themselves natives of Assam were in imminent danger of being outnumbered in their own state. The same phenomenon was notable in neighbouring states like Tripura and Nagaland. And everywhere the ill-regulated immigration brought increased pressure on resources, especially land and jobs, leading to fierce competition over the conventional means of redress, the ballot box.
The Assamese, like the Sinhala majority in Sri Lanka, had begun protesting against this ‘foreign’ presence soon after Independence. Riots followed in the 1950s and ’60s. The immigrants demanded parity for their own Bengali language with that of the Assamese; the Assamese retorted with demands for the immigrants to be sent home to what was then East Bengal/East Pakistan. But it seems to have been the mass movement of refugees from East Bengal/Bangladesh during the 1971 war that elevated the sporadic native protests into a sustained assertion of Assamese subnationalism.
Spearheaded by the All-Assam Students’ Union (AASU), by 1979 a campaign of civil disobedience had brought the local economy to a standstill and was holding the state government in Gauhati to ransom. Tea plantations and oil installations were targeted, both of them vital to India as a whole and neither of them controlled by the Assamese themselves; additionally, government offices were picketed, roads and railways blocked, schools and colleges closed. In a bid to reclaim the state for its indigenous people, the AASU insisted on its ‘three “D”s’: Detection (of the immigrants), Deletion (of their names from the electoral registers), and Deportation (back to Bangladesh).
Of these, ‘Deletion’ was the most controversial. The state had been something of a Congress stronghold, yet on good evidence many Assamese attributed this to immigrants being permitted to cross the border and register as citizens in return for their voting for Congress. Partition’s least convincing border, ill-defined, traversed by countless rivers, straddled by island chars and pocked by enclaves, was a valuable asset. It kept the smugglers in business, the border guards in pocket money and the Congress in power.
Since most Assamese are Hindus and most of the immigrants were Muslims, the conflict inevitably took on a communal character. Those indigenous Muslims who for generations had supplied Assam with clerks and professionals found themselves classed with the later waves of wretchedly poor and landless Bangladeshis. Conversely, many of the state’s native but barely Hinduised tribal peoples aligned themselves with the disgruntled Assamese. The BJP and its RSS allies, the ch
ampions of Hindutwa (‘Hindu-ness’), also sided with the Assamese, while Mrs Gandhi’s Congress here preferred to stress its secular traditions; anxious about its electoral prospects, it upheld the rights of the immigrants and called the AASU’s leaders communalist agitators.
Negotiations in 1980–82 got nowhere. The government offered to examine the electoral rolls and weed out the names of those who had entered the state illegally since 1971. The AASU preferred a cut-off date of 1951. There was talk of a compromise on 1961, but this too was unacceptable to the government, although nearly a million of the 1961–71 immigrants had in fact been Hindus. Fleeing what was then East Pakistan in the wake of the anti-Hindu riots triggered by the 1965 war and events in Kashmir, these Bengali Hindus might have been expected to vote against the Muslim-inclined Congress and for the AASU’s agenda. Yet, fearing the opposite, the government resisted the chance of disenfranchising them.
The state being unable either to quell the troubles or to reach a settlement with the AASU, its ruling ministry was dismissed in 1982. Delhi, in the person of Mrs Gandhi, now called the shots. Ably assisted by local Congress boss Hiteswar Saikia, ‘a stocky politician with the guile of a fox and the organising skills of an army general’, she plumped for fresh elections as the only way forward.3 Arguing that she had no choice in the matter since it was a constitutional obligation, she dismissed objections from many senior figures that the state was too disturbed for a meaningful contest and that the vote was sure to provoke violence. She nevertheless poured in more security units.
In the run-up to the poll in February 1983, the communal situation rapidly deteriorated. The AASU declared a boycott of the election, and did its best to interrupt preparations and discourage intending voters. Shootings and bombings became a daily occurrence, with some five hundred related deaths, many at the hands of law-enforcers. Strikes were met with curfews; the formalities of electioneering were being conducted amid the security trappings of a military crackdown. In the end, though few voted, they were deemed enough for Congress to declare victory.
On the morning of 18 February, four days after the main poll, the residents of a cluster of fourteen villages near the town of Nellie, about fifty kilometres north-east of Gauhati, received some welcome reassurance. Mostly non-Assamese and all Muslims, the villagers had, as ‘rightful citizens of a democratic country’ (in the words of one of them), cast their votes. Now all they wanted was to get back to their rice fields. News that it was at last safe to do so was confirmed by a local official apparently ignorant of a military despatch warning of trouble.
The villagers sallied forth soon after sunrise, men, women and children straggling companionably from their homes in the slanting light. As they reached their fields, smoke was seen coming from their villages. Then the surrounding scrub erupted. Dressed in white kurtas and dhotis, an estimated one thousand ambushers fell upon them. The attack had been well prepared, and the attackers set about their work with whatever implements they had been able to lay their hands on – machetes, spears, pitchforks, bows and arrows and the odd gun. According to one survivor, the massacre lasted six hours. But by the time the police appeared it was over. The attackers had fled, the villages were smouldering and the gruesome evidence of the worst single atrocity in post-Partition South Asia lay strewn across the glistening padi fields.
Photos showed the mutilated bodies of toddlers and children laid out in rows on the bare earth like something from the killing fields of Cambodia. Even the government put the fatalities in this one ‘incident’ at well over 1,800; most independent sources say over 3,000. The living wounded numbered less, the escapees less still. Of their assailants it was said that many were from the local Liwa tribe, that AASU activists accompanied them and that the RSS had approved the attack. But apart from the appalling death toll, little is known for sure. Though criminal actions were subsequently brought, none was ever heard. A six-hundred-page government report was compiled but never made public.
Twenty-three years later Teresa Rehman, a reporter from the crusading weekly Tehelka, visited Nellie. She found the survivors still resentful and their villages little changed. Most had accepted the compensation on offer – ‘Rs2,000 [about £100] and three bundles of tin to build a new house … [and] for every person who died Rs5,000 and every wounded person Rs1,500’. But they had had to wait many months in resettlement camps. Even then the pay-outs had been subject to peculation, and their new homes were no better than the ones they had lost. Mrs Gandhi, visibly moved during a whistle-stop visit soon after the massacre, had ‘promised us everything, right from a lamp to light our houses’, said a survivor, ‘but we have been waiting and waiting’. In 2006 there was still no electricity. Many of the fourteen villages had no road, and only four of them had primary schools, often without teachers.
The Nellie survivors wage a daily fight to numb their senses and their pain … The grim reality that is their present does not offer much succour as they grapple with the demons of the past.4
Throughout the state thousands more had died as a consequence of Mrs Gandhi’s insistence on holding the elections. Nor did her victory do anything to stem the violence or to reassure the Assamese. The AASU grew into a political party, the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP); and following an Accord with the government, the AGP did contest new elections in 1985. It won handsomely. But like the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) in Sri Lanka, the AGP would soon be upstaged by a United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA). Composed of radical separatists, ULFA drew its inspiration from ‘that mother of all revolutions’, the national struggle still being waged in nearby Nagaland.
And all the while the immigrants kept coming. Some would see the border’s double-wired fence, if and when completed, as more a sop to Assamese sensibilities than an effective means of ending illegal transit. As in the case of Nagaland, Assam and its myriad grievances would remain a running sore well into the twenty-first century.
*
India has one of the freest and liveliest presses in the world. The newspapers and news magazines invariably reported on Mrs Gandhi’s ill-fated interventions and often commented on them unfavourably. But to Indians who were neither Tamils, Kashmiris nor living in Assam, these obscure affairs seemed exceptional and peripheral. Sri Lanka was another land, Kashmir a matter of national security. As for Assam, it was a victim of the north-east’s unfathomable ethnic complexity. The casualties there were often tribal people or poor immigrants from Bangladesh, legal or otherwise. They scarcely counted in the great scheme of things. Painful memories like those of Nellie were best forgotten.
And there was a more obvious reason for downplaying them. Much nearer to Delhi, closer to the corridors of power and more subversive of the Indian consensus, another separatist gauntlet was being thrown down almost simultaneously. In tractor-rich, remittance-fed Punjab fanatical Sikhs were on the warpath.
Except that it was anything but peripheral, the Sikh challenge had much in common with the others. As with the Sri Lankan Tamils and the Assamese activists, many Sikhs had long felt that their identity was under threat and their particularist interests were being ignored in a majoritarian nation state. Grievances were voiced; demands for greater recognition and more autonomy followed. When these too were shunned, groups with more radical agendas vied with one another to raise the stakes: more autonomy became outright secession, civil disobedience gave way to acts of violence. Meanwhile cynical interventions by the central government only compounded the activists’ sense of injustice and brought conflict nearer. Mrs Gandhi never doubted that she was serving the wider national cause; but whereas in Assam and Sri Lanka a case could be made for her having acted in the best interests of party and country, this would be harder to sustain in respect of Punjab.
Following the 1977 elections – those which, in the aftermath of the Emergency, had brought the ill-fated Janata Party to power in Delhi – the pre-eminent Sikh ‘nationalist’ party, the Akali Dal, had formed a government in Punjab. But once in power the Akalis had made
little progress with implementing the devolutionary demands of their Anandpur Sahib Resolution. Like other non-Congress state governments, theirs was then dismissed on doubtful grounds by Mrs Gandhi following her return to power; and in 1980 Congress duly won back Punjab in a state election.
In the same year, and by way of response, a Sikh student body, disillusioned by the gradualist approach of the Akali Dal, revived the pre-Partition demand for an independent Sikh state. It was to be known as Khalistan (like ‘Pakistan’ it means ‘Land of the Pure’), and it was being heavily promoted by Dr Jagjit Singh Chauhan, once an Akali Dal Minister and now a medical practitioner in the UK. A Bangladesh-like breakaway was being urged as part of yet another partition.
The Khalistan movement has been described as ‘primarily an emigrant endeavour’.5 Dr Chauhan, like Velupillai Prabhakaran of the Tamil Tigers, drew most of his support from extremist elements of the diaspora in the UK, the US and Canada. In Canada the large Sikh community in British Columbia nursed a tradition of militancy reaching back to World War I, when Canadian Sikhs had organised a return to India to foment an anti-British ‘revolution’ (or Ghadr, as per the title of their weekly newsletter). On that occasion the revolutionaries had been rounded up as soon as their ship docked in Calcutta; but as early martyrs in the freedom struggle their sacrifice was respected both in India and among the diaspora. Drawing on such traditions, in the 1970s Dr Chauhan and a ‘National Council of Khalistan’ drafted territorial claims, planned diplomatic representation, printed passports, banknotes and postage stamps, and lobbied the UN for counsellor status. But the revoking of Chauhan’s Indian passport curtailed his direct involvement in Punjab. There, although his ‘Khalistan’ excited Sikh youths fearful of their career prospects or with diasporic connections, the impact of his movement remained marginal.