Assam: order comes first

Press, 7 March 1983, Page 20

Assam: order comes first

From ‘The Economist,’ London

The bloodshed in India's northeastern state of Assam has brutally demonstrated the first priority of government in the Third World. It is neither democracy nor economic development, necessary though both are in the longer run. It is order.

Tc say that is to- risk being denounced by everyone of goodwill and liberal persuasion: everyone, that is, who lives in those few countries where order can be taken for granted and therefore forgotten. Lucky are those who can demonstrate outside the Whtie House, for instance, secure in the knowledge that the worst they fear from those who- do not share their views is verbal abuse, who can afford to deride, “law and order” because they have never had to live in the absence of either.

Much of the Third World is not like that. And the facts that it often has order without law, and that what should be the forces of order are sometimes the forces of ruthless

repression, do not alter the basic human need for security. Ask those who live in Uganda — or Assam. The Government of India, in the last few weeks, has patently failed in its obligation to provide elementary security in Assam. But can it be blamed for that failure? It certainly has not failed through ignorance, general or particular. Whatever else they inherited from the days of British rule, India’s politicians and administrators have always remembered, sometimes to a fault, the lesson that their first job was to keep the peace, and the kingdom of heaven could follow later.

They needed to look no further back than the last bloodstained months of the Raj to know why. Nor had Delhi had any illusions about the problems of north-eastern India. It combines in one area all that a Third-World government would not want: a variety of tribal populations, of whom the troublesome Nagas and Mizos are merely

the best known; a clash to two major cultures, Hindu and Muslim, and of both with the very different (and Christian/pagan) cultures of the tribal peoples; the familiar clash of Bengali-speakers, Hindu and Muslim alike, with those speaking lesser tongues; and, next door, the stifling overcrowding and poverty of India’s state of West Bengal and independent Bangladesh, among the most wretched and potentially explosive regions on earth. That this mixture could burst into violence was no surprise. Successive governments of India have gone a long way in their efforts to make the mixture less explosive, by creating or upgrading mini-states or union territories (areas administered by the central government) to meet the political aspirations of various tribal groups. What no government could effectively do was combat the pressure of immigration from East Pakistan (which has become Bangladesh), part of it due to the departure of Hindus from the Moselm homeland, more to

the hunger for land. This year’s violence is the culmination of months of patient talking about this issue — patient on the side of the central government — and ultimately of the centre’s refusal to accept what no central government could well accept, the expulsion of several million people from their homes.

Many should not have been where they were. But there they were, and many had been bom there. Legal and illegal alike, they are a fact of life. Mrs Gandhi may have been mistaken not to use a constitutional device to avoid elections in Assam. But, with her history, it is a fair bet that she would have been condemned by her critics for doing it just as she has for not doing it In the event, the elections have proved a disaster; a demonstration — not least to those who think Third-World politics can be conducted like those of an English shire — that, if you have to choose, the right to life and limb matters more than the right to vote.