Guiltless in Guwahati

Looking at a new Assam, from a terrace with some old friends

What do you say when people ask you what difference do you see when you visit Guwahati after five years? Let’s first look at what hasn’t changed. The filth, the mosquitoes, the magnificent river-front that could rival Shanghai’s Bund but is an endless dhobighat, the creaking airport taxis haven’t changed one bit.

Nor have the city’s roads. It is as if every old pothole has grown deeper, ruder. If you walk on Chandmari Road, along which much of the city’s upper crust lives, you may twist your ankle. If you drive on it spondylitis is guaranteed. It still looks like it’s been funded by the tyre and shock absorber industry.

At Dispur, the alleged state capital, the old tea warehouse that passes off for the civil secretariat is still there, even if access is a bit tougher with another layer of check-gates and barricades. But the sentries are as sleepy as they were in the past.

Another ten kilometres to the north, the Assam Agriculture University Campus still has only weeds and wild grass in its lawns and gardens. So much for leading the state’s farmers by example. Even at Hotel Bellevue, second home to so many of us during “newsier” times, not a tablecloth has changed in the dining hall, nor the pedestal fans, the menu or the wood-cut mural of the Mizo girls in an intense hop-skip motion in bamboo dance, a contribution, we always suspected, of owner Opu Chowdhury’s lovely Mizo wife Audrey.

When everything else shut down in Assam, when the agitators of AASU (All Assam Students Union) blockaded oil supplies to the rest of India, when not a soul stirred out because of a curfew imposed not by the government but by the “people” and when even the deputy commissioner’s wife came out at the head of the picketers the moment her husband had imposed the official curfew, the Bellevue was there, with its endless supply of chicken steak sizzler (still a favourite on the menu), Old Monk rum and Honeybee brandy and, above all, a phone that worked.

Scores of flowery intros were written looking out the windows of its circuit-house sized rooms. The shimmering Brahmaputra on one side, the verdant hills on the other, a sparkling purple jacaranda across one window and a flaming crimson flame of the forest outside the other, and you couldn’t go wrong with at least your first story.

The rivers, the mountains, even the trees are still there, and in full, glorious bloom only possible in a climate so generously laden with moisture. It is only the story that has disappeared.

A case of no news being good news, you might say. But there is, in fact, a bit of good news and it is not merely that the state which was sometimes considered a basket case now even produced more rice than it needs.

Ask Tarun Gogoi about the change. At 63 now, the Congress chief minister enjoys the fruit of perseverance and laughs at his own expense. “You know,” he says, pausing to manoeuvre the overly hot samosa in his mouth, “there was a time nobody would rent me a house to set up the PCC office.” In the heady agitational days Congressmen were treated as total vermin. The AASU had decreed a social boycott (samajik barjan) of the Congressmen who were declared enemies of the Assamese people.

“You must remember how unwanted we were. Even my brother did not want to meet me,” Gogoi recalls, savouring the irony as he rolls out the red carpet for his party’s top brass at the Congress chief ministers’ conclave this week.

Now not only has the Congress won a two-thirds majority in the Assembly, more recently it swept nearly 80 per cent of the seats in the panchayat polls.

If 72 per cent of voters turned out for the assembly election last year, in the panchayat polls the mark was bettered (to 76 per cent). ‘‘What does this tell you?’’ asks a civil servant (who must remain anonymous) with whom I spent many traumatised hours in the past exchanging notes on the day’s death and destruction.

‘‘What the Assamese are telling you by voting in such large numbers is that they are fed up of agitations. They are fed up of terrorism.”

Voting percentages in Assam (as in Kashmir) are a good barometer of popular mood.

In 1983 when Indira Gandhi rammed an election in the face of a popular boycott (resulting in 7,000 dead) a certain gentleman called Bhumidhar Burman got elected from Dharampur (near Nalbari) in lower Assam by polling a hundred per cent of the votes cast.

That is, all seven of the votes cast in his constituency. His rival did not manage to cast even his own vote. Burman was appointed health minister in Hiteshwar Saikia’s kangaroo cabinet. But that did not deter the agitators from putting up a sign outside his native house that said: “This spot reserved for burying Bhumidhar Burman.” Burman is back in the cabinet, as health minister.

Except this time he polled about 65,000 votes out of the 96,000 or so cast. In so many ways Assam’s emotional self-healing has been more comprehensive than that of post-terrorism Punjab. Ideological enemies of the agitational days, the most hated “traitors” to the Assamese cause are back in the mainstream.

Writer-journalist Homen Borgohain, who was one of the most strident critics of the agitation, is now the chairman of Asom Sahitya Sabha which gave the agitation its intellectual edge. No wonder Sonia has chosen Guwahati for the conclave of her 14 chief ministers.

I walk the familiar old streets of Uzan Bazaar to meet old friend Vasant Deka, professor of physics at Handique Girls College, once a key advisor to the AASU, but always so earnest, so honest, salt of the earth.

Spanking new concrete monsters have come up around him but he is exactly where he was, in a house that is more like an oversized hut. If any benefit has accrued to him from having his “boys” in power for two full terms, it is merely the benefit of hindsight.

But he is not the one to let the disappointment of his boys’ failure disillusion him. “So many positive things are happening. Young graduates are returning to farming, small industry is coming up. Arun Shourie is taking so much interest.” And Shourie also has the key to the treasury, as far as funds for the Northeast are concerned.THERE is more to the change than merely the proliferation of ugly apartment complexes where quaint ‘‘Assam-type’’ houses once stood, or the boom in STD PCOs and liquor shops. To see how the mood has changed you only have to go to the Cotton College campus.

It was once the nerve-centre of the agitation and even paramilitary forces were shy of messing with it. The Golden Temple in Amritsar, the Cotton College in Guwahati, they would say. You couldn’t say very much against the AASU anywhere in the Brahmaputra Valley.

But in Cotton College you could not commit that sacrilege even in your mind. But this week, as we sat facing a packed Sudmersen Hall at a debate on media and terrorism organised by talented film-maker Jahnu Barua’s Regional Institute of Journalism and Media (RIJAM), the mood was very different. The media was as usual the villain. But our crimes were more in the nature of: Why do you give so much publicity to terrorists? Why do you exaggerate militant acts? Why is the media only painting a picture of Assam as a land of agitation and violence?

It was in the same hall that many of us had once heard Prafulla Mahanta ask why Assamese people should not feel alienated when “India’s” national anthem (written by a Bengali hegemonist) did not even mention the hills and the valleys of Assam. That night some of us — all non-Assamese, spooks, hacks and other such low-life — sat down to find a solution and came up with a minor amendment: What if we dropped Sindh and reworked the two crucial lines as “Assam, Bang, Gujarat Maratha, Dravid, Utkal, Punjab”... Fortunately that very inebriated stroke of creativity was never put to test.

IF there was anything common between that evening and one this Tuesday on the terrace of the Bellevue, it was the “spiritual” level. The hosts and the guests were mostly Assamese, students and faculty of Jahnu Barua’s institute, some others from the creative community.

Soon enough someone pulled out a guitar and there was singing. This is the week of Rongali Bihu so that was obviously the flavour of the music. Until somebody switched to familiar strains of Saare jahan se achcha... And as the chorus built up to Hindi hain hum, hindi hain hum... everybody, students, teachers, guests, joined in. Even Sir Mark Tully, who was the only other “outsider” besides me.

Nobody was complaining of alienation, nobody asking for any amendments in Iqbal’s lyrics. The old story of Assam, the guaranteed front page, had obviously disappeared.

Yet, even Sir Mark would concede, it was the most fun that people like us could have when not chasing a story.

The writer can be reached at sg@expressindia.com

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