Gandhi Cools Another Hot Spot With Assam Pact

Less than a month after signing an agreement with Punjab Sikh leaders, Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi announced Thursday a settlement in Assam, another trouble spot where several thousand people have been killed during six years of student-led agitation against illegal and unwanted immigrants from other Indian states and neighboring Bangladesh.

The Assam settlement was signed by Gandhi and leaders of the Assamese anti-foreigners movement from the northeast Indian state. With the Punjab agreement signed in July, Gandhi now has been able to achieve at least temporary peace in the two states that most plagued the government of his mother, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, during the five years before her assassination last Oct. 31.

During Assam’s state assembly elections called by Indira Gandhi in March, 1983, more than 3,000 people, mostly Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh, were slaughtered by Assamese tribal raiding parties. In one town alone, Nellie, in Nowgong district, more than 800 were killed, most of them women and children.

Behind the turmoil in Assam, with a population of 20 million, is the fear by the majority Assamese that they will be overrun by Muslim and Hindu Bengalis from Bangladesh and India’s state of West Bengal. Leaders of the All-Assam Students Union, which began the anti-foreigner movement in 1979, also charged that the ruling Congress-I party of Indira Gandhi was systematically enrolling the illegal immigrants to increase party strength in Assam.

Both the Punjab and Assam agreements have obvious weaknesses, but Gandhi is being credited as a peacemaker for simply getting the two sides together, something his mother had repeatedly failed to do.

The Assam agreement, reportedly signed only four hours before Gandhi’s 7:30 a.m. speech, calls for the expulsion of any immigrant who arrived in the state after March 25, 1971.

Assamese student leaders who want illegal settlers expelled say there are more than 3 million such settlers in the state. But there are few records to prove when the colonies of Bengali Muslims and Hindus--more than 75% of whom are illiterate and fall below the Indian poverty line--arrived in Assam.

Moreover, in this land where population and poverty pressures force tragic tides of migration, there is no real place for the settlers to go. West Bengal is one of the poorest and most crowded states in India. Its capital, Calcutta, is already swollen with refugees who live and die on its streets.

Meanwhile, in adjacent Bangladesh, with a population of 100 million in an area the size of Wisconsin, the return of large numbers of Muslims would probably create a backlash against that country’s 12 million resident Hindus.

The agreement also calls for dissolving the state assembly elected in the bloody, controversial 1983 elections, creation of a caretaker government until elections can be held, extensive revision of the state’s voter registration lists (using a 1971 voter census as the base), and holding new elections for both the state assembly and the 14 Assam seats in the lower house of India’s Parliament, the Lok Sabha.