Mischief in the Northeast

Arun Shourie, Minister for the Northeast, took such umbrage at my describing him as ‘minister for mischief’ that he stormed into the Lok Sabha last week denouncing me for ‘calumny’ because I had reminded the House of the aid and comfort he had provided the student agitators of the Assam movement which had opened the door to the terrorism that has since engulfed the Brahmaputra Valley.

Shourie has mummified his bile in a coffin called Mrs Gandhi’s Second Reign, published in 1984, the year she was assassinated. His paeans of praise to the goons of the All Assam Students Union (AASU) are thus easily retrieved. Likening the AASU movement to Gandhiji’s satyagrahas and the JP movement, Shourie exulted, ‘‘scarcely has the state of affairs been bared so effectively, scarcely have the character and concerns of the rulers been unmasked so decisively.’’ He added, ‘‘How many can name the students who lead the Assam movement?’’ Alas, 13 years on, all of us can name the sad, sorry, shameful lot from Prafulla Mahanta to Brighu Phukan to Atul Bora. Shourie goes on, ‘‘But have they not succeeded in driving home that the entire political structure of the country is now so far gone that it will not spare a thought even for matters that spell life and death to the country? Is a new leadership not being forged?’’

Oh, yes, indeed, it was being forged. Forged on two fronts: ULFA on April 7 1979 and the All Assam Gana Sangram Parishad in August the same year, the former as the Morarji government — much beloved of Arun Shourie — crumbled; the latter in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of that disaster. AAGSP (of which the vanguard was AASU) was the agitationist arm and ULFA the terrorist. Gandhi saw at Chauri Chaura that if non-violence did not restrain violence, violence would prevail. So he called off the civil disobedience movement. Shourie’s Gandhis were so hand-in-glove with violence that the floodgates were opened to mayhem and massacre.

The evidence comes from Shourie’s successor at several removes as editor of this paper, Shekhar Gupta, author of that little masterpiece, Assam — A Valley Divided, published contemporaneously with Shourie’s outpourings. Shekhar Gupta correctly traced the discontent in Assam to ‘a sense of separatism and a total absence of introspection’. Where the original Gandhi based his entire philosophy on introspection of the erring self, Shourie’s Gandhis suffered from ‘a total absence of introspection’. So they sank themselves in ‘xenophobia’, their ‘linguistic chauvinism taking comic forms’, threatening that ‘a polyglot state like Assam will remain divided forever’. Another observer, political scientist Samir Kumar Das (ULFA: A Political Analysis, Ajanta, 1994) writes of those whom Shourie eulogises: ‘‘ridden by fractious conflicts, they could not cement the divergent factions, so tension between the Assamese Varna-Hindus and the Muslims came to a head, especially in the wake of the fratricidal communal riots of early 1983’’. Of the AGP, formed in 1985 to fight the elections, Das concludes, ‘‘AGP’s rule could satisfy no one — the Bodos, the Karbis, the Bengalis, the minorities in general and, ultimately, the Assamese majority’’. This was the ‘new leadership’ discovered by Shourie on the campus of Guwahati University where, in return for his panygerics to them, he was repeatedly welcomed by the agitating students, rapturously, tumultuously.

It was these students who, in a display of rare patriotism, had boycotted Independence Day 1979 amidst ‘‘clear signs of the revival of sectarian tensions (leading to) widespread anxiety and concern amongst minorities’’ (Assam Challenge, K.M.L. Chhabra, a civil servant on the Home Ministry’s Assam desk, Konark, 1992). Shekhar Gupta noted that ‘‘it is the lack of political pragmatism among the AASU leadership’’ which had enabled the RSS to spread its tentacles into ‘mofussil towns’. Indeed, B.G. Verghese in The Indian Express of April 6 1983 — that is, at the time Arun Shourie was lauding the excesses of the agitationists — cautioned that ‘‘the intimidatory virulence of the protest by the AASU/AASGP volunteers (had) unleashed a frenzy’’. Such were the ‘Gandhians’ who so merited Shourie’s adulation.

And when the AGP took power in December 1985, ‘‘because of the ULFA’s linkages with the AASU and the AAGSP in the past, the ULFA,’’ wrote Chhabra, ‘‘has spread its network to the villages and claims to have infiltrated the AGP itself.’’ Did Gandhi hand over the Congress to Osama bin Laden? The AGP’s affinity to the ULFA was bluntly affirmed by AGP Home Minister Brighu Phukan in his interview to The Economic Times (January 11, 91): ‘‘Many colleagues often urged us not to take action against the arrested ULFA boys’’. Of 1272 FIRs lodged against ULFA in calendar year 1990, action was taken in only 6 cases and no one was convicted. The AGP-ULFA nexus was well-summed up by an AGP activist, Ranen Kumar Goswami, quoted by Das: ‘‘We do not call for finishing ULFA by killing its activists because they wish the Assamese people well and intend to do good to the country and its people. Circumstances have forced them to chart out a separate line’’.

That ‘separate line’ plunged the Brahmaputra valley into anarchy and chaos, misery and murder. It spawned the Bodoland demand of the All-Bodo Students Union which, says Chhabra, ‘‘patterned its agitation on the lines of the AASU programme’’, as did the All Cachar Karimganj Students Union demand Barakland in the Barak valley and the All Assam Tai Ahom Yuba Chhatra Parishad an Ahomland. AASU also set the tone for the Khasi Students Union to target Nepalese residents of Meghalaya, sparking Subhas Ghising’s demand for a Gorkhaland in the Darjeeling Hills, and fuelling the agitations by plains tribals in Karbi Anglong and North Cachar, the Mishings in Lakhimpur, the Koch Rajbongshis and, most lately, the All-Arunachal Students Union. ‘‘AGP rule,’’ concludes Das, ‘‘exacerbated ethnic tensions between Assamese and non-Assamese, and between tribals and non-tribals.’’ ‘‘Stretched a little further,’’ as Shekhar Gupta poignantly notes in the closing bars of his book, ‘‘every community and every faith becomes a nationality’’. These are the splitters and secessionists who are Shourie’s heroes, placed by him on the same pedestal as Jayaprakash Narayan and Mahatma Gandhi!

‘‘The ideological purity of the AASU leadership emblazoned during the Assam agitation,’’ says Chhabra, ‘‘began to get diluted with the demands of office and the compulsions of governance’’. Much like Shourie of Magsaysay degenerating into a BJP bimbo: ‘‘Just for a handful of silver he left us/Just for a ribbon to wear on his breast’’.

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