Assam’s wounds have not yet healed

Press, 19 March 1984, Page 18

Assam’s wounds have not yet healed

On February 18, 1983, Assamese Hindus killed 1011 villagers in Nellie, quietly nestled between river and hills. The name of the village became a synonym for suffering and strife in India. An Associated Press writer, BRAHMA CHELLANEY, recently visited Nellie with a police guard and escort from the Assam Government. One year after the massacre, the horror lingers, the problems are unsolved, and Nellie — a huddle of refugee camps — fears more violence and

starvation

Fear still haunts this remote cluster of hamlets in north-east India more than a year after the massacre of 1011 people in seven hours of violence.

The drum-beating Assamese Hindus who killed the villagers in a military-style operation on February 18, 1983, are long gone, but the underlying political causes of the unprecedented slaughter in the rice-growing area remain. Villagers fear they might be attacked again.

Government aid — what one official said seemed an effort by

India to wash away its guilt — is ending, leaving behind the spectre of starvation to add to the villagers’ misery. “We just received our final state rations,” said Sakina Khatoon, aged 35, one of Nellie’s 8000 survivors. “What will hppen to us now? Where will we get our food? How will we feed our babies?”

Located near the Brahmaputra, which Indians call the River of Sorrows, Nellie has come to symbolise suffering and strife in India’s oil-rich but impoverished Assam state, racked by four years

of crippling dissent and agitation.

The 1983 orgy of looting, arson, and murder followed by a decision by village residents to cast their votes in a bloc in favour of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s governing Congress party. The voting openly defied a call by student-led Assamese groups for a statewide boycott of the controversial Assam elections.

Most of the villagers are Muslim immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh, formerly east Pakistan. Native Assamese charge that they are being swamped culturally and economically by an unchecked influx of immigrants, and have been agitating for the expulsion of about one million alien settlers.

Nellie, 600 kilometres north-east of Calcutta, was not the only scene of massacre. More than 3600 people were slain in the election riots. In nearby Gohpur, Assamese Hindus were attacked by immi-

grants, while in Mangaldoi the tribespeople butchered Hindus. Civilian and police officials in Nellie accused the Congress Party of encouraging or cynically turning a blind eye to the influx of immigrants into Assam since they constituted a vote bank for Mrs Gandhi and she will need their ballots in the next elections.

The villagers felt the elections that triggered the slaughter put them under pressure from both sides, said one resident. “The agitators said that if we did not boycott the polls, we would be taught a lesson for all time to come. Mrs Gandhi’s party said that if we did not vote, we would be classifed as Bangladesh nationalists and deported. We had no choice,” the resident said.

“It was a political carnage. The bigger tragedy is that narrowminded politicians are preventing the complete rehabilitation and reintegration of the survivors with the larger society,” said the execu-

tive magistrate in Nellie. Pradeep K. Paul. ■

About 450 people were arrested and charged with the slaughter. The trial has not begun. Survivors have been unable to identify any of the detained men as the attackers.

“We were attacked in the early morning from all sides. I fled into the forest with my two little children. How we survived only God knows,” said Rabiya Khatun, aged 22, her head covered with one end of her sari.

More than 200 villagers thronged a reporter recently to voice their grievances and fear of being attacked again. Old men, women, and children showed scars inflicted by raiders armed with guns, bamboo knives, spears, and machetes. The survivors live in relief camps guarded by 13,500 paramilitary police. The camps, built on the ruins of the hamlets destroyed in the attack, are squalid huddles of tin-roofed bamboo shacks. “The native Assamese tell us they will kill us all once guarding paramilitary police troops leave,” said Abu Nazar who lost nine members of his family in the slaughter. “How long can we survive under their protection? A year already has passed.”

Victim’s relatives received a compensation of about SNZ7SS and the injured received about SNZ3OO.

The state provided free rations for nearly a year to the refugees, built a six'-kilometre road through Nellie to the river bank, erected medical facilities, and set up a large farm. Nellie now has electricity — one of the few places in backward Assam that has. “The new state Government spent a lot of money on the relief operations as if it was trying to wash away its guilt,” said one official who asked not to be identified. All this has come as some sort of a windfall to the villagers, who previously earned only about 70 cents a day as rice paddy cultivators. They stopped working in the paddies after the slaughter.

But the windfall had backfired. “The people have been living an idle and isolated life for about a year in camps protected by troops,!’ said a police official who requested anonymity. “The Government gave them new huts, clothes, food, and cash but has been unable to decide what to do with them.

“It clearly has pursued a shortsighted policy,” he added. “If they have to survive, the Government should make them do construction work or cultivation,” Mr Paul said. “Only then can they earn their bread.”