Memory of ’83 Massacre Haunts India State’s Elections

The last time the people of this village in the Brahmaputra River valley dared to vote in a state election, raiding parties from neighboring tribal settlements attacked with machetes, knives and bows and arrows, killing more than 1,000 people.

Most of the dead were women and children not quick enough to escape into the teak forests. One of the worst incidents of election violence in Indian history, it is known as the Nellie Massacre.

That was in 1983, when the state of Assam was in the grip of massive, student-led agitation against illegal immigration into India from Bangladesh. The students, representing an indigenous Assamese population fearful of being outnumbered by the Bangladeshi immigrants, called for a boycott of the elections, charging that many Bangladeshis were illegally registered to vote.

The long-settled Bengali-speaking Muslims of Nellie were not illegal immigrants, and they voted enthusiastically. But, surrounded by Assamese-speaking tribes, they paid a gruesome price. In all, according to Assam Chief Minister Hiteswar Saikia, more than 3,000 people were killed in election-related violence. The worst of it was in Nellie.

Election Dec. 16

Now, elections are approaching again in Assam, as the result of an agreement signed in August by the government of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and the Assamese student leaders. Election activities have already begun, and the voting will take place Dec. 16. Voters will elect 14 members of the national Parliament’s lower house and 126 state assemblymen.

For the first time in more than 20 years, since India’s border war with China, the foreign press has been permitted to travel freely in Assam to assess the political situation.

This time, Assam’s students, who are so well organized that they were able to shut down the state’s oil industry for a full year, have decided to take part in the election. They have formed a political party to challenge Gandhi’s Congress-I for control of the state.

Here in Nellie there is an understandable wariness about the electoral process. To these poor rice farmers and roadside merchants, democracy has a fearful history. For Imdad Ali, for example, the memory of the massacre is still fresh. The 21-year-old Ali’s pregnant sister and a cousin were killed then.

“They could not run fast because it was mostly paddy fields and everyone was slipping in the mud,” Ali said as he led a reporter to a stand of date palms near the place where his sister and more than 80 other villagers were buried in a common grave.

Afraid, but Will Vote

“The last time the government held elections, we went through this trouble,” he continued. “We were killed because we voted. We shall certainly vote again this time. But the fear that came into our hearts is still there.”

Another villager, tea stall owner Mohammed Akkas Ali, said: “As long as everyone votes, we have no fear. But if we are the only ones to vote, there is danger.”

Adding to the worries of the people of Nellie is another development. Under the terms of the Assam agreement signed by Gandhi and the student leaders, voters can be challenged in a special court to prove their citizenship.

The highly organized student groups have challenged nearly everyone in the state who has an obviously Muslim or Bengali name. According to local Muslim leaders, 2 million voters have been challenged, 4,000 of them by a single Assamese student.

“The foreigners (Bangladeshis) occupy the land of the local people,” student leader Bhrigu Kumar Phukan said when he was asked to explain the Assamese position. “Ultimately, political power would go to the foreigners.”

Cultural Melting Pot

Assam has 20 million people, about 59% of them Assamese-speaking and 25% Bengali-speaking Muslims. However, for centuries it has been a melting pot of different cultures and religions, ranging from Southeast Asians who speak a 13th-Century Thai dialect to untouchable outcasts from central India, brought in by the British to work on the tea estates. Religions include Hinduism, Islam and animism.

In order to vote in the coming election, one must prove residence in Assam before 1971. Most of the people of Nellie have lived here much longer than that. One man, Abdul Rahman, 80, says he was born here, yet he too has been summoned to appear and prove his citizenship.

“I was born here,” Rahman said through an interpreter. “When the white sahibs came to hunt in the jungles, I was a schoolboy.”

He said he has no documents to prove his citizenship. As is the case with many others, his records were destroyed by fire at the time of the massacre.

In Punjab, India’s other main trouble spot over the last five years, Prime Minister Gandhi also reached a settlement with dissidents, in that case the leaders of the Sikhs’ Akali Dal party. In September, peaceful elections were conducted in Punjab and a new government was installed with the promise of restoring order.

Tension Factors Combine

The future may not be as bright for Assam. The visit by foreign reporters disclosed deeper resentment and more complicated divisions than in Punjab. All the usual Indian tension factors--caste, color and language--come to a head in this remote region.

And here the issues are complicated by the intense demographic pressures from neighboring Bangladesh, where 100 million people live in an area the size of Wisconsin. There is not enough land to go around in Bangladesh, and Assam, which lies upstream on the Brahmaputra, is a kind of population release valve.

It is not likely that anyone will be able to keep more Bangladeshis from immigrating illegally to Assam. The border between India and Bangladesh is 2,400 miles long, and people cross easily. Even more unlikely to succeed is a plan to send back Bangladeshi immigrants already in Assam, as the Assamese students want.

“What will you do?” Assam Muslim leader A.F. Golan Osmani asks. “Leave these people at the border?”

Bitter Toward Gandhi

Osmani, a former state minister who now heads an organization called the All-Assam Minority Front, is leading statewide nonviolent protests against the Assam agreement between Gandhi and the student leaders. Like other minority leaders, he is bitter about Gandhi’s more conciliatory attitude toward the students compared to that of his mother, the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

“Had Mrs. Gandhi been here,” Osmani said, “they would never have concluded this accord.”

The minorities in Assam feel rejected by Rajiv Gandhi and the Congress-I Party, which is by tradition the defender of minority and disadvantaged peoples. The bitterness against the prime minister, who has enjoyed a political honeymoon in most other Indian states, may be greater here than anywhere else.

Another Muslim leader, Maulana Ahmed Ali, said in a recent political address: “It is about time the prime minister of India paused to ponder whether his name would be written in letters of gold or of blood.”