DISMISS this Worthless Anti National GOI to Save Our Motherland, Once Again on the Verge of Disintegration! Marathi Nationality Mistackled. North East

DISMISS this Worthless Anti National GOI to Save Our Motherland, Once Again on the Verge of Disintegration! Marathi Nationality Mistackled. North East Crushed. Assam Wounded. Kashmir and Tamilnadu Boil. Bengal on Red Alert. Indigenous Communities Slaughtered to Run the Money Machine and Sustain Harmonies! CHINALINK Discovered to Justify US Slavery! Obama Win Ensured, Global Hegemony Launches Anti Black Anti Muslim Anti Indigenous Hatred Campaign!



Troubled Galaxy Destroyed Dreams: Chapter 97

Palash Biswas


Election days away, Obama keeps sense of urgency, 1st LdAP foreign, Thursday October 30 2008 By BEN FELLER

Associated Press Writer= KISSIMMEE, Fla. (AP) - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama says he doesn't want to look back on the final days of the campaign and regret not doing something to help sway voters.

Both Obama and his Republican rival, John McCain, are stepping up their efforts to reach voters in swing states as next week's election draws closer.

In an interview broadcast Thursday on ABC's "Good Morning America," Obama said that when the polls close, he doesn't want to ask himself if there was an argument he didn't make or a hand he didn't shake.

Obama is targeting Florida, Virginia and Missouri on Thursday while McCain is taking the fight to Defiance, Ohio, in a quest to tilt the few remaining swing states his way.

Obama holds leads in polls nationally.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/7958581

DISMISS THIS WORTHLESS DUSTBIN, USED CONDOME OF US CORPORATE IMPERIALISM, the Government of India TO SAVE INDIA! Faces fascist and Imperialist happened to be exposed as it happened Never Before!The country has witnessed 64 serial blasts in six states in less than six months leaving 215 people dead and nearly 900 injured.

The security scenario in the country in the wake of serial blasts in Assam and the attacks on north Indians in Maharashtra are understood
to have figured prominently during the meeting of the Union Cabinet on Thursday night.

The meeting, chaired by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, took place on a day when the blasts in the north-eastern state claimed 61 lives.

Home Minister Shivraj Patil is understood to have briefed the cabinet on the prevailing security scenario in the country as also measures to contain the possibility of a flare-up in the wake attacks on north Indians in Maharashtra.

Union ministers from Bihar Lalu Prasad of RJD and Ram Vilas Paswan of LJP have criticised the Congress-led Maharashtra government's handling of the hate campaign launched by MNS chief Raj Thackeray as also its "failure" to protect the north Indians in the state.

Though there was no official word on what transpired at the cabinet meeting, an official spokesperson said a media briefing on the meeting, which went till late into the night, will be held on Friday.

The United States has condemned as "horrific attacks on innocent people" the serial blasts in Assam today and extended its deepest sympathies to the families of the victims.


On behalf of the US, Ambassador David C Mulford extended his deepest sympathies to families of those killed and injured in the blasts.

"I send condolences to the people of India. Americans share their sorrow and outrage at these horrific attacks on innocent people," Mulford was quoted as saying in a statement issued by the American embassy.


Curfew has been imposed in Guwahati following the serial bomb blasts in the city and some other cities of Assam on Thursday morning!In New Delhi,Home Secretary Madhukar Gupta has said that the Centre is co-ordinating with the Assam government to keep the situation under control!On the other hand,The Congress on Thursday sought to come to the rescue of beleaguered Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, under flak from its friends and foes alike in the wake of attacks on north Indians!Bihar's ruling JD(U) on Thursday threatened that all its five Lok Sabha members will resign if the violence was not checked by November 6. The casualty figures are likely to rise with the condition of many of the injured being critical. The injured included many women and children. Powerful, high-intensity bombs went off simultaneously at around 11.30 am. The first blast in Guwahati occurred at a vegetable and fruit market at Ganeshguri near the flyover adjacent to the high security secretariat and the Assembly.

Denying any intelligence failure behind a series of bomb blasts in Assam on Thursday, Minister of State for Home Shakeel Ahmed said the terror attack could be linked with the communal clashes in the northeastern state this month.


"No, there is no intelligence failure in this case. Even after intelligence reports, intensive policing is needed to avoid such tragedies," said Ahmed, also a spokesman for the Congress party.

"Although we can't say who is behind the blasts, there were communal clashes in different parts of Assam on October 03 and October 05 in which at least 57 people were killed and 2,25,000 people had to take refuge in relief camps," he said.

Without naming any organisation, he said, “Such acts of terror are the result of politics of hate that is being spread in different parts of the country."

Conceding that it was difficult at this initial stage to say who were behind the blasts or whether it was an act of people from across the border or from within, the Minister said, “Now even those who used to blame others are found to be involved in the acts of terror."

He was referring to the arrest of five people this month, some of whom are said to have been associated with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) or its affiliates. They were nabbed in connection with bomb blasts in Maharashtra and Gujarat on September 29.


Barrack Hussein Obama`s Win ensured, Global Hindu Zionist White hegemony launched Anti black Anti Muslim Anti Indigenous HATRED campaign most intense. kabul and Guahati clubbed together to justify War against terrorism! Barack Obama's presidential campaign is releasing two new ads that it's calling its "closing argument" for supporting Obama over Republican John McCain.

IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn said on Thursday that he was more optimistic about the global financial crisis now that some calm is returning
g to markets after action to halt the slide by US and European governments.

"If the extreme volatility of the markets shows that the financial crisis continues to have an impact ... I hope very much that this volatility will calm because the US and European (stability) programmes are solid," Strauss-Kahn told Le Monde daily on Thursday.

"They just need a little time to get going full speed," he added.


Meanwhile, the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) Thursday called for a thorough probe ‘iimpartially and with the same degree of intensity’ into all blasts in the country since 2003 for which activists of Hindu groups Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and Bajrang Dal are allegedly responsible. The CPI-M’s demand came in the wake of the arrest of a woman missionary, Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur, and two RSS workers for the Sep 29 Malegaon blast. Furthering their ties with Mayawati-led BSP, the CPI(M) will ask its cadre to vote for BSP candidates in the coming Delhi Assembly polls where the Left parties are not in fray.

In guahati,Angered by the Tarun Gogoi government's alleged failure to protect the citizens, people on Thursday attempted to storm into the state secretariat with two of the charred bodies of serial blast victims in Guwahati even as hundreds took to the streets in protest. ( Watch )

As Assam bled, a mob carrying two charred bodies on a push cart tried to storm its way in through the gates of the secretariat in Dispur.

Hailing the first democratic elections in the Maldives which ended the 30-year reign of Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, the US on Thursday said the results mark a "historic milestone" in the transition to "political pluralism" for the island nation.

Former political prisoner and opposition figurehead Mohammad "Anni" Nasheed defeated longtime ruler Gayoom in the presidential run-off in the country, the results of which were declared yesterday.

"The United States congratulates the people of Maldives on the successful completion of their first multi-party elections. Today's results mark a historic milestone in the transition to political pluralism for Maldives," US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said in a statement.

International envoys pushed on Rwanda and Congo on Thursday to end a rebellion on their border, with EU presidency holder France pressing for the rapid deployment of an EU force.



Army has FREE HANDS in Asaam and rest of the North East. They have infinite power under AFPSA umbrella and encounter remains the Fauzi Culture. Human Rights and civil rights suspended as well. Despite all these moves why this GOI fails so miserably to stop the Flow Of Blood!It is Baghdad in Guwahati. Three back to back major car bombs followed up by two booby- trapped bombs and if that was not enough seven more bombs in other parts of Assam saw at least 66 dead and 470 injured.A high alert was sounded in Sikkim and northern West Bengal, and the police intensified patrolling and launched intense checks following the serial bomb blasts in various parts of Assam, including nearby Kokrajhar Thursday.Sikkim Director General of Police Akshay Kumar Sachdeva told IANS by telephone from Gangtok that security was beefed up in all districts of the state that has a common border with West Bengal. With northern West Bengal sharing an extensive border with Assam, steps were also taken to pre-empt any possibility of militants sneaking into West Bengal.





What a Link to justify the War against Terrorism! What indian ruling Hegemony highlights , mind you, it is the US Strategic stance also! A series of explosions rip through the northeast Indian state of Assam! Suicide bomber hits a central government ministry in Kabul! Congolese rebels declare ceasefire. In the Philippines, Islamist separatist conflict threatens a forgotten indigenous people!

Intelligence officials are blaming these latest explosions on the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), a separatist militant group which has waged a long-running insurgency in the region. According to Assam police chief RN Mathur, "No other group can trigger so many blasts in so many places in such a coordinated fashion."

In recent weeks security forces have launched a massive crackdown on the group's senior leadership. "Ulfa is striking back in a massive way by taking on soft targets," Mathur said.

ULFA has waged a war for independence in Assam, and the expulsion of non-Assamese people from the state, for over two decades. An effort to start peace talks between the rebels and the Indian government broke down in 2006. If ULFA is responsible, this latest attack serves to highlight the numerous ethnic and national fissures which fragment India's multi-cultural, multi-ethnic mosaic. India's northeast in particular is home to numerous armed separatist groups. It is estimated that more than 10,000 people have died in this region in the past decade.

The Director General of Police office said that curfew has been imposed in four areas in Guwahati - Pan Bazar, Bhangagarh, Ganeshguri and Hatigaon.


Following the blasts, crowds angry clashed with police in some areas of Guwahati. Some people were injured in the clash and at one place the police even fired in the air to disperse an angry mob.

My country, your country, our country, our Motherland is on the verge of disintegration once again and the MOTHR is BONDED forever. Chettiar Gangsters of World Bank, IMF, WTO, White House, Pentagon combined with Planning Commission, FIMIN and RBI has BASTARDISED Indian Economy to feed the Greed corporate MNC Money Machine. While Washington planted PM, Defacto PM the Elite Brhmin from bengal an Italian citizen ganged up to dismantle the socil Political fabrics of this divided bleedin geopolitics!

The northeastern state was hit by four blasts earlier this month, killing at least two people and wounding 100 others.

Previous bombings in the state have largely been blamed on the outlawed United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), which has been fighting the government for an independent homeland since 1979.

In the past two decades, more than 10,000 people have lost their lives to insurgency in the state, which is known for its tea, timber and oil reserves.

Public support for the ULFA has dwindled in recent years after a series of attacks in public places that claimed heavy civilian casualties.

Non-Assamese people make up nearly one-quarter of the remote state's 26 million people. The state has some 800,000 people from Bihar state, many of whom have lived in Assam for decades.

Ringed by China, Myanmar, Bangladesh and Bhutan, India's northeast is home to more than 200 tribes and has been racked by separatist revolts since India gained independence from Britain in 1947.


The BASTARD Ruling hegemony would never address the Nationality issue! Never! We see some ripples, of course, while a man like Narendra Modi of Gujarat claims Economic Independence and proposes not to pay any central tax! Mainland Tribal bases like Jharkhand, Telengana and Chhattishgargh repressed time to time. Only MILITARY solution happens to be the Right Answer for the Power hegemony. They keep on India BURNING to mobilise BLIND Nationality for the Enslaved Population and kill the selected unwanted demographies violating Human and Civil Rights!

They mistackled MARATHI nationality and pitted entire North India against Maharashtra playing Divide and Rule as well as subversion game most shrewdly!

Entire NORTH EAST Remains under Military Rule!

So is kashmir!

Tamil as DRAVID nationality treated as Foreign!

Now,Assam BLEEDS once again! As the worth less Government of India discovers CHINA LINK this time to avoid responsibility of Assam Wounds!All the blasts took place almost simultaneously at about 1130 hrs IST at crowded marketplaces.

Paresh Barua, the most wanted ULFA Commander is said to be based in China nowadays. Paresh barua had been in Dhaka for years. Other ULFA bases also remain intact in Bangladesh. ULFA brigade operates from Myanmar. Pranab Rushed to Myanmar and struck a deal with the Military Junta there.

What happened? This was the worst Assam had seen in its 20-year insurgency and contrary to government claims, the ordinary people believe it as an HuJI attack and Congress government was protecting them by bringing ULFA’s name into picture. Sify.com reports. according to sify reporter: With the intensity, timing and ground position of the ULFA coupled together, the needle of suspicion points at the militants of the Islamic organizations that have been taking wings under a blind government of Assam that is keen to defend itself than tackling terrorists.

“Let them protect the Islamic militants. Congress is not interested in national security. They are more interested in their vote bank and see the results today,” said the AASU Adviser Dr Samujjal Bhattacharya.


Rhetoric apart, Assam was ripped apart by the most devastating terrorist attack!

Diwali on Tuesday brought added joy in West Bengal with cyclone 'Rashmi' sparing the state on the occasion of the festival of lights. Days of angry clouds that threatened to build up to a cyclone,gave way to a clear autumn morning indicating that the worst was over, bringing people out on the streets for some last-minute shopping.

Sweet shops and fireworks kiosks did brisk business.

It is festival time for the Ruling Hegemony!
It is Business time for the Money machine!

It is manipulation time for the Political parties!

During the day, streams of worshippers visited Kali temples, including the ones in Kalighat and Thanthania here, besides Dakshineswar and Adyapeeth in the northern suburbs and Tarapeeth, the seat of Tantra in Birbhum district.

External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee visited the Lake Kalibari in south Kolkata and offered puja.

As fireworks illuminated the evening sky crowds did the rounds of community Kali Puja pandals decked up with streams of twinklers and earthen lamps.

It is TIME for Death for the Enslaved Majority in india!

I remember the faces glittering DURING Bihu FESTIVAL!

Echoes of APBHRANSH Ahamia songs haunt me anytime!

I remember my people, the dalit Bengali refugees based in Nagaon, Kacchar, Hilakandi, Karimganj, Lakhimpur, Kamroop and maligaon districts. I visited Barfak Villages in Maligaon and I remember the helpless faces.

I remember Bihu Guru Prafulla Gogoi. Mausumi saikia, the Bihu empress and her troup! I may not forget Bihu Expert Isamail and his younson, the kid who writes charming poetry.

I remember all those lines of ahmia literature , I have read!

I see clear the activities in KAMAKHYA shrine and the live FISH Market on the bank of Great Brahmaputra.

I see Blood, only blood spiled everywhere. The BLOODSTREAM runs through this divided geopolitics and if you happen to be sensitive enough you may feel the HEAT.

Earlier they suspected HuJI militants struck terror in the hub of North-East, considered by far the worst attack! They have been habitual to link Subvertive activities to CIA til Indira`s Demise and then began to blame ISI! With strategic reaaliance with United states of America, GOI dares not to name CIA. It is rare opportunity for the Super Slaves ruling India to Blame China and Justify the Slavery! Hindutva Forces tend to see MUSLIM hand in everything wrong in India! UPA and NDA stand united to crush the Nationalities as well as Minorities.

How similar happens to be the stance of Ulfa and that of Indian political parties!

Insurgent group ULFA has sought expulsion of Bangladeshi immigrants from Assam, a demand which is significant as most of the top leaders of the outfit are believed to be sheltered in the neighbouring country.

ULFA chairman Arabinda Rajkhowa, who made it clear that his outfit will not tolerate any kind of "intrusion" in Assam, also sought ouster of Nepali migrants from the state.

"ULFA opposes any kind of intrusion in Assam. Not only Bangladeshi intruders, migrants from Nepal must also be identified and deported," Rajkhowa said in an e-mail interview.

The demand for ouster of Bangladeshis is significant as ULFA's top leaders, including Rajkhowa and Paresh Barua, are believed to be taking shelter in Bangladesh and directing operations from there.

Expulsion of illegal Bangladeshi migrants from Assam has been a major political issue in the state and a cause for community clashes there several times.

Rajkhowa, who is said to be a proponent of talks within the group, also seemed to be unperturbed by the arrest of members of the People's Consultative Group (PCG), which is a mediator between the central government and the insurgent group.

"The arrest of PCG members by India neither had any impact upon the ULFA's endeavour for a peace process to resolve the conflict nor did it succeed to harm the process," he said when asked to comment on the arrests.

Mind you, Indian citizenship Act is changed just to deport the Partition Victim Bengali speaking Refugees resettled Countrywide. Buddhadeb convinced Adwani to bring the Bill as he was unsure of the support needed for a constitutional Amendment. Pranab Mukherjee played key role to enact the Biil. A nationwide drive against partition victim bengalies launched with an unprecedented alliance of NDA, UPA and the Left!

Why ULFA should be treated otherwise as it raises the Nationality question suppressed by Miltiray hand of the brahaminical hegemony!

Now see how the Marxist Hypocrisy works!

The Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) Wednesday announced launching of a weeklong countrywide campaign against communalism and terrorism beginning Thursday. The top leaders of the party will address rallies in different parts of the country, CPI-M politburo member M.K. Pandhe said here Wednesday.

The decision to launch the campaign was taken in the central committee meeting of the party held in the second week of this month, Pandhe told IANS.

“Special emphasis would be given to the areas affected by communal violence and terror attacks,” Pandhe said.

Delhi state secretary of the CPI-M, Pushpinder Grewal said the party has circulated 160,000 leaflets in Delhi against communalism and terrorism.

How the US Intervention is justified in Third world countries,just try to link these stories!

On the other hand, Trinamul Congress chief, Miss Mamata Banerjee accused the Centre of being soft in its handling of “atrocities” by the CPI-M in West Bengal and wondered whether it has any tacit understanding with the Marxists.
“The Centre acted with reasonable promptness while dealing with worse situations in Maharashtra, Orissa and in some other states. But when the CPI-M with the help of the state administration has been unleashing a reign of terror in West Bengal, it is surprisingly sitting tight,” alleged Miss Banerjee.
She said that CPI-M is going the Nandigram way at Salboni, Goaltore and in Garbetta.
“If CPI-M thinks that they will use force to suppress our movement then they are making a fool of themselves. We know how and where to oppose. This being the festive season, we were busy meeting different people, but CPI-M has chosen this season to cause disruption and violence,” she said.
She reacted to Nano Bachao Committee’s statement that they won’t allow the Trinamul to enter Singur. “Tata’s contractors have no business to say such words. The CPI-M has shown the audacity by not allowing Mahasweta Debi and some theatre personalities to perform in Asansol as they are against CPI-M.
She said that the Punjab government has turned down Tata’s proposal to set up Nano over there as they demanded Rs 1,200 crore, various “benefit” against Tata’s Rs 570 crore investment, it appeared in The Tribune on 24 September.
She alleged: “Here Mr Tata in connivance with CPI-M has said “no” to Nano after 21 days of Raj Bhavan accord was signed by the state industry and commerce minister and the Leader of the Opposition.”
She also said that for the past 30 years the state government did little to do away with vector-borne diseases and at present it has taken on epidemic proportions.
She noted that today also at least three people died of dengue and alleged that the state government is fudging the figures. Her party will open medical camps in Wards and conduct blood tests with the help of IMA doctors and create awareness among people.
She said Mr S Jindal is setting up a mega steel plant and CPI-M has no business to put up red flags and Dr Manas Bhuinya too has written a letter to the chief minister seeking his intervention to stop CPI-M atrocities in the area.

Meanwhile,Kerala's exposed Terror links with Kashmir militants are set to upset the electoral strategies of the CPI(M), targeting the Muslim vote bank in the state.
Comrades here had been dreaming big on the anti-imperialistic sentiments of the Muslim community in the post-nuclear deal scenario. Many Muslim leaders, too, had sounded that the deal would be a key agenda in the next elections.

But the appalling revelations about the militant network in the state has brought terrorism to the forefront of political discussion. Going by all indications, the issue would be a hot electoral topic for the first time in the state.

Setting the tone for the poll agenda, Indian Union Muslim League state secretary Dr M K Muneer on Wednesday said his party did not want the votes of the National Development Front, a right wing Muslim outfit facing serious allegations in the unfolding terror drama. The League is a constituent of the Congress-led United Democratic Front in the state.

Now have a US FEEL on War Against terrorism!

Deadly car bombs hit Somaliland

A series of suicide car bombs exploded across northern Somaliland and Puntland on Wednesday. Reports indicate that at least 29 people were killed when five bombs ripped through key targets including the presidential palace, the Ethiopian consulate and UN offices, all within minutes of each other. Both regions had until now been largely spared the daily violence rocking southern and central Somalia.

Puntland's President Mohamoud Musa Hirsi Adde said the attacks were "organised from the same place and by the same people." Responsibility for the attacks is currently unclear, however most suspect Islamist insurgents, given the coordinated nature of the bombings and the targeting of Ethiopia. US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Jendayi Frazer said they bore the markings of al-Qaeda.

Jean Ping of the African Union noted they "came at a time of renewed efforts by IGAD, the AU and the United Nations to bring about lasting peace, security and reconciliation in Somalia." Regional leaders are currently meeting in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, to discuss the ongoing crisis in Somalia and the performance of the transitional federal government.

Suicide attack on Afghan government ministry

Three people were killed and nine injured when a suicide bomb ripped through an Afghan ministry in Kabul on Thursday. Two men using small arms fought police guards at the entrance to the Ministry of Culture and Information while a third gained entry to the building and detonated the bomb. The Taliban have claimed responsibility for the attack in statements to news agencies. Although security in the capital has improved, with attacks down by 50 per cent on last year, this incident is the latest "audacious" attack by Taliban militants. A number of high-profile incidents in the capital have demonstrated increasingly sophisticated tactics, such as the mixing of both suicide bombers and gunmen, which analysts believe is designed to gain maximum press coverage.

Congolese rebels declare ceasefire

Rebels led by General Nkunda fighting government forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo have declared a unilateral cease-fire after a four day offensive in North Kivu province. Forces of the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP) were just 25 kilometres from the major city of Goma when they declared a halt to fighting late yesterday. A statement signed by Nkunda said the intention was "not to panic the population of Goma as well as those who are in displaced persons camps in the immediate environs of the city". Despite the ceasefire, chaotic scenes have erupted in the city with reports that Congolese soldiers are out of control. Tens of thousands of people have fled the city contributing to an already dire humanitarian situation. According to the UN, fighting since 28 August has pushed the number of displaced civilians in North Kivu to more than one million.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned that the conflict "is creating a humanitarian crisis of catastrophic dimensions." He also suggested that the conflict threatens the entire region, referring to reports that Rwandan soldiers were involved in the fighting against Congolese government forces, and that heavy weapons fire had taken place across the DRC-Rwanda border.

Collapse of the Moro peace process: disaster and opportunity

Roughly 300 people have been killed and over 650,000 displaced in more than two months of fighting between Philippine security forces and renegade Moro Islamic Liberation Front fighters. The escalation of violence follows the Supreme Court's decision to block the implementation of a Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain between the government and the MILF in August.

According to a report by Amnesty International released on Wednesday, the suspension of peace talks between the government and Moro rebels in Mindanao threatens the lives of "hundreds of thousands of civilians." Another report by the Asian Centre for Human Rights concludes that the collapse of the peace talks may provide an opportunity for both parties to address inherent flaws within the peace process. According to the report, the indigenous Lumad people of Mindanao, who never resorted to armed rebellion, were never included in the peace process with the Moros. If the MOA-AD had been signed on 5 August 2008, it would have meant the loss of at least one million hectares of Ancestral Domains belonging to these indigenous peoples. The non-inclusion is not the only a flaw in the peace process but constitutes a clear violation of the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act of 1997.

As a series of blasts rocked Assam, killing 64 and injuring over 282, the home ministry officials went into a huddle and the BJP did not waste any time raising the issue of illegal migration from Bangladesh.

Home Minister Shivraj Patil met National Security Advisor M.K. Narayanan along with senior intelligence officials to discuss the situation. Sources said that it appeared to be the handiwork of banned terror outfit ULFA, which specialised in conducting simultaneous multiple blasts.

The BJP, condemning the blasts, said that they were the result of UPA government's vote-bank and appeasement politics. BJP's prime ministerial candidate L.K. Advani said that it once again highlighted the issue of Bangladeshi illegal immigrants in the country.

Senior BJP leader Jaswant Singh charged, “it is a cumulative consequence of decades of electoral rape of the state.''

Addressing a joint press conference along with senior leaders Arun Shourie and Yashwant Sinha, he said that ``unchecked illegal immigration has continued despite the highest court of the land calling it unconstitutional.'' He was referring to the striking down of the Illegal Migration (Determination by Tribunal) Act of 1983 by the Supreme Court.

The Court had held that the IMDT Act disabled the state and enabled the infiltrators. Jaswant Singh further said that ULFA in Assam and Naxals in Andhra Pradesh had been allowed by the Congress-led government to flourish. “The NDA government had driven out the ULFA members and leaders with the help of the King of Bhutan. But the organisation was revived by the Congress, which had an understanding with the banned outfit during the last elections,” he said.

Ruing “the complete lack of governance”, Shourie said that the ULFA in Assam and Naxals in Andhra, due to unconditional ceasefire by the UPA, got time to regroup, rearm and recoup.''

He said that most states with Congress-led governments like Maharashtra and Assam were burning and yet the Centre could not do anything about it.

In his characteristic deliberate drawl, Jaswant Singh said that while someone in the PMO kept looking up the Thesaurus to find new words, the home minister could not go beyond “condemning” the attack. He was referring to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's statement that the anti-national powers had to be fought “dauntingly”. He called them “verbal inanities which are paralysingly inconsequential.”


CPI(M) demands action against saffron outfits

Condemning the use of terror as an "instrument of political mobilisation", the CPI(M) on Thursday demanded action against "Bajrang Dal and other RSS outfits" under the Unlawful Activities Act for their alleged involvement in "nurturing and promoting violent activities".

Referring to the recent arrest of Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur, it said BJP leader L K Advani had sought to compare the Sadhvi and Nathuram Godse as he attempted "to desperately distance" the RSS-BJP from the recent arrests and claim that both were not members of RSS when they committed the crimes.

"The point here is not the technicality of being a current member. The point has to do with the venomous ideological indoctrination that the RSS and its affiliates undertake which nurtures and promotes such violent activity," party Politburo member Sitaram Yechury said.

In an editorial in the forthcoming issue of CPI(M) organ 'People's Democracy', he said the CPI(M), at the October 13 meeting of the National Integration Council, had referred to the alleged involvement of "Bajrang Dal or other RSS organisations in various bomb blasts across the country."

In this context, he referred to the 2003 blasts in Parbani, Jalna and Jalgaon in Maharashtra, the 2005 explosions in Mau district of Uttar Pradesh and the August 2008 blasts in Kanpur. "Internal security of our country can be strengthened only when all such cases are also probed impartially and with the same degree of intensity."

"Given this, action against the Bajrang Dal under the Unlawful Activities Act must be initiated," Yechury said.



Economic confidence drops to 15-yr-low: European Commission
Business and consumer confidence in the 15 nations that share the euro fell to a 15-year low in October, the European Commission said on
Thursday, as a credit crunch hits consumer spending and forces companies to shed jobs.

The data show that the euro area risks a recession and adds pressure on the European Central Bank to reduce borrowing costs again when it meets next week and on European governments to do more to ward off a long economic downturn.

The survey said that shoppers are far more worried about the economy meaning they are even less likely to spend heavily in coming months as they fear losing their jobs. Consumer confidence hit its lowest level since 1993.

Industry and construction also dropped but still remain above their worst-ever level recorded during the early 1990s downturn.

The EU's economic sentiment indicator for the euro area fell to 80.4 in October from 87.5 a month earlier. It measures confidence among consumers and among several business sectors-- industry, services, retail and construction.

Consumers across the 27-nation European Union expect unemployment to increase, the EU executive said. Industry and services managers also expect to employ fewer people while industry and construction companies said they saw sales prices falling.

Consumers see prices falling over the next year as inflation creeps back from record highs over the summer, it said. They said they believed their own financial situation would worsen over the next year and said they were less likely to make major purchases such as a new home or car in the near future.


Uma Bharati offers party ticket to Sadhvi Pragya!

The BJP on Thursday accused the UPA government of failing to combat terror, saying the serial blasts in Assam were symbolic of the sense of insecurity in the country!


The Marxist Stance on GORKHALAND Movement is no different from the mainstream politics!

The Himalayas as well as the Aboriginal bases are treated as TARGET PRACTICE FIELD WAR zones, Hunting Grounds for the HOUNDS and simple Killing Fields most safe! As these ares remain isolated from the Mainstream nation even after sixty years of Independence. Nationality issue, ironically make volatile the Mainstream Parts of the nation as it happens in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamilnadu, Andhra and Bengal!

Meanwhile,The banned ULFA denied its involvement in the serial blasts that rocked Assam killing 61 people and injuring over 470 people.

"The ULFA is in no way involved in the blasts in Guwahati, Bongaigaon, Barpeta and Kokrajhar and we condemn the incidents," an e-mail statement signed by Aanjan Borthakur of the group's central publicity unit said.

The group also offered its deep condolences to the family members of those killed in the blasts and wished for the speedy recovery of the injured. The ULFA urged the authorities to ensure proper treatment of the injured. Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi and government spokesman Subhas Das had earlier claimed the hand of "anti-national extremist elements" in the blasts while Kamrup (Metro) Deputy Commissioner Prateek Hajela claimed the HuJI was involved in the serial blasts.

See, the casual attitude of the HOME Ministery!

A high-level central team comprising senior Home Ministry officials will visit Assam to make an on-the-spot assessment of the situation arising out of serial blasts in the state.

Union Home Secretary Madhukar Gupta told PTI that an NSG team will also visit the spots of the serial blasts.

When asked about the nature of the explosives used, he said forensic experts were already examining the blasts sites.

On whether additional para-military forces would be sent to the state, he said there were enough forces already deployed there.

"We will retain them for some more time and probably not deploy them on poll duties (in six states)," he said.

When asked about who could be behind the blasts, he said it was too early to identify the group.

And review this tory about chinese link!

The outlawed United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) is now looking to China for shelter following mounting pressure from Myanmar and Bangladesh with the outfit’s top commander Paresh Baruah now believed to be somewhere near the Myanmar-China border scouting for help to relocate its bases, intelligence officials said. Police and intelligence officials said there could be up to 50 ULFA militants now holed up in China’s Yunnan Province led by its ‘Lt’ Partha Jyoti Gogoi.

“We also have a report that ULFA’s commander-in-chief Paresh Baruah is now in a temporary base of the outfit located somewhere along the Myanmar-China border after he sneaked into the region from his permanent base in Bangladesh,” a senior intelligence official said on customary conditions of anonymity.

“ULFA is facing the heat from both Bangladesh and Myanmar in recent months and that could be the reason for the outfit to think of alternative bases,” the official said.

ULFA, a rebel group fighting for an independent homeland in Assam, has, of late, been facing heavy reverses - more than 100 rebels have been killed in anti-insurgency operations, while the outfit suffered a major setback in June after two of its potent striking units, the Alpha and the Charlie companies of the 28th battalion, declared a unilateral ceasefire with the government.

“Reports of ULFA setting up bases in China’s Yunnan Province cannot be ruled out given the fact that the outfit’s relation with most of the neighbouring countries is good,” Prabal Neog, pro-talk leader and former commander of ULFA’s 28th battalion, told IANS.

The ULFA team in China, led by Gogoi, is apparently being patronised by the Kachin National Organization (KNO), an ethnic armed group of Myanmar now having some bases in the Yunnan Province. Most of the 50 member ULFA rebels are from eastern Assam’s Tinsukia district.

“We had bases in Bhutan and Bangladesh, we had been to Nepal before, and then the Pakistani links are well known. In Myanmar we have our main camps and bases and so having links with China is definitely not impossible,” Neog said.

ULFA’s China linkages are, however, not new, but such things were always kept very secret. Paresh Baruah visited China in the 1980s, while ULFA chairman Arabinda Rajkhowa put out an appeal to the Chinese leadership on Dec 25, 2003 to provide safe passage to the rebels from Bhutan for temporary shelter in China.

Rajkhowa in his fax communication to the Chinese leadership said: “We have come under massive attack of Indo-Bhutan joint forces and our combatants have been forced to retreat up to the Sino-Bhutan border due to all out air and artillery campaigns”.

Beijing, however, turned down ULFA’s appeal.

“Logistically speaking it would have no impact on their military campaign by setting up bases in China as the distance would be immense from the Yunnan Province to Assam, probably about 40 to 50 days of trekking,” said Sunil Nath, a well-known writer and former publicity chief of the ULFA.

Nath surrendered before the authorities in 1991.

It is not that China or sources in China have always maintained a distance from Indian separatists. Indian insurgents had not only visited China in the past for help, but had received assistance from sources within the country.

Leader of the Isak-Muivah faction of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN-IM) Thuingaleng Muivah is on record having said the Naga rebels had earlier obtained arms from China.

“More than anything else, it would be a major boost to ULFA’s sagging morale if they manage to set up bases in China. They want to send a message probably that they can extend their base to as far as China,” said Wasbir Hussain, director of the Centre for Development and Peace Studies, a Guwahati-based think-tank.

And see this report!

– The security forces have recently come to know of a camp of the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) just around five kilometres across the international border in Bangladesh following the arrests and surrender of a few cadres who came to Assam from that camp. Security sources said that the camp is located at Bakapura in Sherpur district of Bangladesh, which is just across the international border with Meghalaya. Sources revealed that according to information available, around a hundred to 150 cadres of the ULFA are staying in the camp. Though no senior leader of the ULFA stays in the camp, middle rung leaders of the militant group including Antu Chowdang, Pradyut Gohain and Drishti Rajkhowa are believed to be heading the camp. Sources also alleged that the ULFA must be receiving direct or indirect help from the DGFI, the intelligence agency of Bangladesh or from the Bangladesh Rifles as it would not have been possible for the militant group to run a camp so close to the international border.

Sources said that the senior leaders of the ULFA including the chairman of the outfit Arabinda Rajkhowa and the commander in chief Paresh Baruah also spend most of their time in Bangladesh, they usually stay in Dhaka and the security agencies do not have any report of them visiting the camp adjacent to the international border.

Sources pointed out that after the declaration of unilateral cease-fire by the A and C companies of the 28 battalion of the ULFA, the level of violence has come down in the upper Assam districts as the militants belonging to the B company of the battalion, who were entrusted with the responsibility of carrying out operations in the districts of Sivasagar and Jorhat, have not been able to move around freely.

According to information available with the security forces, around 150 cadres of the B company of the 28 battalion of the ULFA are still in the camps in Myanmar, but they are not in a position to come down freely because of operations by the security forces and also because of the fact that they are not keen on coming face to face with their former colleagues, who are on cease-fire.

Sources also claimed that the ULFA has not been able to carry out any major operation in recent months due to pressure from the security forces and also because of the fact that the cadre strength has come down drastically. The cadres who are outside the country in Bangladesh and Myanmar have not been able to come to Assam as freely as they did before. However, sources admitted that the militant outfit might continue efforts to trigger off blasts to create disturbance and the outfit made several such attempts in the run up to the Independence Day but fortunately the recovery of the explosives foiled their bid.


The first of the 13 bombs, suspected to have been planted by Bangladesh-based HuJI members, went off at around 11.30 AM under the Ganeshguri flyover near the high-security capital complex housing the Assembly building, followed by explosions at Paltan Bazar and Fancy Bazar in Guwahati.

Around the same time, bombs also went off in crowded market places of Kokrajhar, Bongaigaon and Barpeta districts in lower Assam.

Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi put the toll at 61 dead and 470 injured. Of the six blasts in Guwahati, RDX was used in two of the explosions, he said adding a special task force was being set up to unearth the conspiracy behind the blasts.

Black smoke billowed from the Deputy Commissioner's Office housing the district courts, which bore the brunt of the attacks in Guwahati, as vehicles, including a number of cars, turned into mangled heaps of metal.

Police suspected that the bomb was planted in the court complex on a two-wheeler. At least 25 people were killed and 235 injured in the blasts in Guwahati where an indefinite curfew was clamped following protests by residents, who accused the police of delayed action.


INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES are ascribing the serial blasts that shook Assam Thursday morning (October 30) to United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) or Harkat-ul-Jehad-al-Islami (HUJI), a Bangladesh based outfit, which has been behind a number of incidents in the country.


Opposition leader LK Advani ascribed them to be a government failure. He asserted that the attacks has proved United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government failure to provide security to the people.


Reacting to the serial blasts, which killed at least 48 people, Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh has asked the people to fight the terror unitedly and remain calm. He condemned the attacks as inhuman and said that people should come together to defeat the motives of the terrorists.


Commenting on the attacks, minister of state for Home, Shri Parkash Jaiswal, also said that involvement of ULFA and HUJI was possible, but refused to take any stand on the issue. As has been the wont of the UPA government, the minister termed the attacks as routine and said that this happens every second month in the country. He assured thorough investigation into the attack.


Advani said that these blasts have added to the insecurity in the country and could have been the handiwork of the illegal migrants from Bangladesh.


Meanwhile, in Guwahati tension prevailed as strong crowds thronged the streets and shouted slogans against government. People targeted fire brigade and ambulances, which had come for the rescue operations.
Other Articles by Abhishek Behl, Merinews
Curfew clamped in Guwahati, 48 killed in blasts
11 blasts in 15 minutes rip Assam, 26 killed
20 feared killed as serial blasts rock Assam
Firing in Mumbai bus, one killed
Delhi Giants fall short by 5 runs, Chennai wins
more >> Government officials were not allowed to come near the blast site till police intervened and prohibitory orders were forced by the administration.


People alleged that police reached the blast site almost one hour late and it was only the local people, who came to the rescue of the people immediately after the explosions.


Similar tension was witnessed in all areas of Guwahati, where people have been seething with anger as their dear ones battle for life in the Guwahati Medical College (GMC). At least 26 people have been confirmed dead and hundreds were injured when the blasts ripped apart the north eastern state.


Experts meanwhile said that it was likely that HUJI or a similar outfit could be behind the attacks rather than ULFA. The Assamese outfit has been under constant pressure of late and it was difficult for the organisation to execute attacks on such a large scale and in such a lethal manner, they added.


However, in a confirm report a bomb was found in scooter and has been defused.


While 19 were killed and 64 injured in Kokrajhar, 12 died in Barpeta where 46 others were wounded. Five people were injured in Bongaigaon, said Principal Secretary (Home) Subhash Das.

A red alert has been sounded across the state and army has also been put on alert in view of the security situation, he said after Gogoi held a review meeting with his cabinet colleagues and top officials.

Special task force to identify culprits: Gogoi

The Assam government will soon constitute a special task force to identify the culprits behind Thursday's blasts.

Terming the violence as "very serious", Chief Minister, Tarun Gogoi told reporters that "if necessary, help will be taken from experts outside the state and the conspiracy angle, if any, will be probed".

Urging the people and the political parties to extend cooperation at this hour, Gogoi said "this is a warning for us to be extra cautious in future".

The Chief Minister said earlier only a few areas in the north eastern region was insurgency affected but of late due to its border with other countries militancy has spread to various parts states.

The Chief Minister said the seriously injured will be taken outside the state for treatment.

He said the army and para military forces have been alerted and although the people got agitated after the blasts the situation was now under control and curfew which was imposed during the day has been lifted from 5.30 pm.

International border sealed, security beefed up in Meghalaya

Security along the Assam-Meghalaya boundary has been put on high alert while the Indo-Bangladesh border sealed as an alert was sounded across the north east region following serial blasts in Assam that killed 56 people.

The police top brass in Meghalaya held an emergency meeting this afternoon to review the state's security scenario and discuss measures to prevent untoward incidents in the aftermath of the violence in the neighbouring state.

"We have ordered the security forces to check all vehicles, especially those coming from Assam," IG (SB) S B Singh said after the meeting.

Random check points have been put up along all roads connecting the state with Assam and a manhunt launched to nab the perpetrators of the blasts, a security source said.

The Assam boundary has been virtually sealed as indefinite curfew has been imposed in Guwahati and no vehicle from Meghalaya is allowed to enter the neighbouring state.

Police sources said vigil along the Assam boundary has been enhanced and police posts along the boundary asked to intensify patrolling and frisking to prevent movement of anti-national elements.


President, PM condemn Assam serial blasts

President, Vice President and the Prime Minister on Thursday strongly condemned the serial blasts that ripped through Assam claiming several lives and said people should stand united to defeat the designs of terrorists.

"There is no place for violence in our society. At this moment all of us should stand united against divisive forces in the country," President Pratibha Patil said in a message.

Observing that such terrorist acts coinciding with the festive season were intended to disturb social harmony, Vice President Hamid Ansari urged all citizens to unite in combating this scourge.

In his message, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said such barbaric acts targeting innocent men, women and children only highlight the desperation and cowardice of those responsible.

Offering his condolences to the families of those killed and sympathies to those injured in the blasts, he hoped that people would rise unitedly against these attempts to disturb peace and harmony and to destroy the social fabric.

"We will take all possible steps to maintain peace and bring the perpetrators of such acts to justice," the Prime Minister said.

Meanwhile, Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee expressed sorrow at the loss of lives in the serial blasts and offered his sympathies for the families of the bereaved.

"I hope that such acts do not result in disturbing peace in the region, which is in the interest of the people of the country as a whole," Chatterjee said.

He also wished speedy and complete recovery of those injured.

'Jehadi elements behind blasts'

With militant outfit ULFA denying its involvement in Thursday's serial blasts in Assam, the police said it was the handiwork of jehadi outfits, including Bangladesh-based HUJI.

"The needle of suspicion points to jehadi outfits who are behind subversive activities in the state," IGP (Special Branch) Khagen Sharma told PTI here.

The jehadi elements, including Bangladesh-based HUJI, could be working in groups or individually, the senior police official said the modus operandi pointed to their involvement.

"While investigation will go on, the police have been zeroing in on Islamic fundamentalist forces which of late have been active in the state and the region," he said.

Six suspected jehadi militants were recently killed by the security forces in Dhubri district.

Pointing out that several ISI-backed militants have been arrested in the past, Sharma said their interrogation revealed that their activity was on the rise.

The police official, however, denied there was intelligence failure on the part of the authorities. Kamrup (Metro) Deputy Commissioner Prateek Hajela also suspected the involvement of HUJI militants.

Chronology of recent bomb blasts in India

Following is the Chronology of some recent major bomb blasts in the country:

September 2008: Six serial blasts occurred in Delhi, killing 15 people and injuring more than 50.

July 2008: Nine explosions in Bangalore create terror killing two persons and injuring twelve.

May 2008: Eight serial blasts rocked Jaipur in a span of 12 minutes leaving 65 people dead and over 150 injured.

October 2007: 2 persons killed in a blast inside Ajmer Sharif shrine during Ramadan in Rajasthan.

August 2007: 30 people dead, 60 hurt in Hyderabad 'terror' strike.

May 2007: A bomb at Mecca mosque in Hyderabad kills 11 people.

February 19, 2007: Two bombs explode aboard a train from India to Pakistan, burning to death at least 66 passengers, most of them Pakistanis.

September 2006: 30 people dead and 100 injured in twin blasts at a mosque in Malegaon.

July 2006: Seven bombs on Mumbai's local trains left over 200 people dead and 700 others injured.

March 2006: Twin blasts at a railway station and a temple in Varanasi killed 20 people.

October 2005: Three bombs placed in busy New Delhi markets a day before Diwali killed 62 people.


Army allows cops to quiz its officer in Malegaon blast

A serving lieutenant colonel has come under the scanner for his alleged role in last month's Malegaon blasts and the army has allowed police to question him.
With media speculating on the role of the officer in the blasts during Ramzan that killed six Muslims, the army in a press release today announced "full cooperation" to the police and facilitate his questioning.
The army decision comes on a request from the Anti- Terrorism Squad of the Maharashtra Police which has already arrested Ramesh Upadhaya, a retired army major from Pune in connection with the blast.
Interestingly, earlier in the day, Deputy Army Chief Lt Gen S P S Dhillon told reporters that the army headquarters had not received any official communication on the issue and promised to "come clean" by the evening.
"While no formal application has been received from the police authorities, the Army HQ has decided to extend full cooperation and facilitate interaction of the officer with the investigating officials of the police," the army release said.
Accordingly the officer has been moved to Mumbai to facilitate interaction at a mutually convenient place, it said. The officer was posted at the Army Education Corps School in Pachmarhi in Madhya Pradesh.
The army said further action would be taken as necessitated based upon the outcome of interaction and clarification as planned.
"The Army headquarters will continue to provide all assistance to the investigating agency, as and when required by them," it said.
The release recalled that in the course of probe by police in the Malegaon blasts some inputs of possible linkages of a serving army officer with suspects have come to light.
Accordingly the police sought to interact with the officer concerned and seek clarifications from him so as to proceed with further investigations.
Uma Bharati offers party ticket to Sadhvi Pragya
Extending its support to Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur, arrested in connection with the Malegaon blasts case, Uma Bharati's Bharatiya Janshakti Party (BJS) on Thursday offered her a party ticket to contest the upcoming assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh.
"If she (Pragya) wishes, our party will field her from any seat in Madhya Pradesh against the BJP," BJS National Secretary Inder Prajapat told reporters in Indore.
"We had a discussion with Sadhvi Pragya's lawyer in this regard and if she agrees then the party would consider fielding her against any powerful leader of the BJP," he said.
Strongly defending Sadhvi, Prajapat said that she was "totally innocent" and it was a conspiracy to frame her with political motives and to defame the saint community.
"We hope that people's court will ultimately acquit her in the case," he said.
The BJS has also offered Thakur legal aid, he said, adding Uma Bharati has already termed the sadhvi's arrest as a "conspiracy" and demanded a high-level probe on the issue.
Pragya was arrested in connection with the September 29 Malegaon blasts and is in the custody of Maharashtra Anti-Terrorist Squad till November 3.
6 arrested in connection with UP migrant's lynching
Six persons were on Thursday arrested in connection with the murder of an Uttar Pradesh migrant in a suburban local train in Mumbai, a senior Government Railway Police officer said.
The six arrested have been identified as Vikas Dattu Waghmare (26), Manoj Ramdas Palande (30), Avinash Narhari Thombre (24), Ajay Dilip Hadap (18), Sanjay Hadap (18) and Ketan Kashinath Hadap (23), Additional Director General of Police (GRP) K P Raghuvanshi said.
"All the six were produced in the railway court in Kalyan today and they were remanded to police custody till November 3," Raghuvanshi said.
The incident was not a "hate crime" but it was a thing that happened on the spur of the moment, he said.
He also said that all the six arrested have no political affiliation.
The GRP had detained around 20 persons for questioning in connection with the case.
The victim, Dharam Dev (25), a resident of Faizabad in UP was aboard a Mumbai CST-bound local train from Khopoli when the incident occurred.
Dev, who worked as a helper at a construction site, was occupying the window seat in the train when a group of eight to ten commuters, who appeared to be local villagers, forced him to vacate the seat, police said.
The local group then asked Dev and his friends if they were 'bhaiyyas' and started abusing them, they said.
According to the statement given by the victim's friends, they were slapped and kicked, rendering Dev unconscious.
The local group got off at Karjat, while Dev and his friends remained in the train. The victim's friend then called up the Railway Protection Force (RPF) control number, which is displayed in the trains.
Officials from the RPF then boarded the train at Badlapur and Dev was rushed to a nearby hospital where he was declared dead.

Stop attacks on North Indians, Maya to Maha Govt
In the wake of killing of a youth hailing from Uttar Pradesh in Mumbai, Chief Minister Mayawati asked the Centre and Maharashtra government to take immediate action to stop attacks on North Indians, saying they have ‘failed’ to prevent such incidents.
"The Centre and Maharashtra government should initiate immediate measures to check attack on North Indians in Maharashtra," Mayawati said in a letter shot off to the Union government and Maharashtra Chief Minister.
Terming the attacks as ‘unfortunate’, the Chief Minister said that both Centre and Maharashtra government have failed to check such ‘unconstitutional acts’.
Mayawati also announced an ex-gratia of Rs 2 lakhs for the family of the victim, Dharam Dev, who hailed from Sant Kabir Nagar district of the state.
She also directed the district administration to provide all possible help to the family.

Inflation not a serious concern as two months ago: Montek

Observing that inflation is not serious problem now, Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia on Thursday said the aim should be on high growth track of nine per cent.
Inflation has moderated owing to fiscal and monetary policies taken by the government and global developments and hence it is not as serious a concern as it was two months ago, Ahluwalia said while releasing a report, 'Technology: Enabling the Transformation of Power Distribution in India' at Infosys.
Commenting on economic growth slipping to seven per cent, he said, "What we now feel is the pain involved in going down from nine per cent to seven per cent. But what we should aim is at going back on the high growth track of nine per cent... We need to focus on growth."
Noting that underlying rate of inflation was much lower than the wholesale price-based index. The annualised rate of inflation was, therefore, around four per cent, Ahluwalia said.
On the GDP growth slipping from nine per cent to seven per cent, he said even on a pessimistic note if the GDP growth slips to seven per cent, it would still be the highest in emerging markets.
"Even if the GDP growth is seven per cent, it will still be one of the highest in emerging markets, but lower than China by two per cent," he said.

India should continue civil nuke cooperation: Kakodkar
India should continue to pursue seriously the three stage indigenous programme and the International civil nuclear cooperation will boost it in many ways, Chairman, Atomic energy Commission Anil Kakodkar, said here on Thursday.
India could reach a stage of energy independence by supplementing its indigenous programme with the imported reactors without compromising environment, Kakodkar said, while addressing the scientists, engineers and staff of Department of Atomic energy on the occasion of 99th Birthday celebrations of Homi J Bhabha.
"We are entering a new era in which we would continue to implement the domestic three stage programme and supplement it with additional nuclear power generation capacity through external inputs," he said.
"This also underscores the importance of our approach that as we build additional Pressurised Heavy Water Reactor (PHWRs) and Light Water Reactors (LWRs) units on the basis of domestic and imported technology respectively, we would make Fast Breeder Reactor (FBR) technology along with its rapid deployment, robust enough to support a short doubling time and competitive commercial performance," he said.
"This is already a part of our current R and D mission and I have no doubt that the entire approach is feasible," he said.
IMF offers $ 100 bn loan to countries facing financial crisis
The International Monetary Fund will offer as much as $ 100 billion in a new kind of loan to countries that are battered by the financial crisis, making available new cash to help ease the world credit crisis.
The new three-month loans, aimed at economies the IMF judges to be troubled but basically sound, wouldn't require countries to make the often severe changes in their policies that the IMF has demanded for decades, a media report said on Thursday.
That makes it potentially easier for crisis-hammered countries such as Mexico, Brazil and South Korea -- which the IMF judges to have basically sound economic policies -- to shore up cash reserves, their currency, and their ability to help ailing companies as shaken foreign investors withdraw, the Wall Street Journal said.
Those countries, it noted, have shunned the IMF because of the strings attached to the loans, which often force sharp budget cuts or interest-rate increases. The conditions are designed to help governments save money and pay for necessary imports, but they also often deepen an economic downturn, making the IMF deeply unpopular around the world.
Now it essentially is dividing developing countries into an A-list of nations that qualify for loans without strings, and a B-list of everyone else, the Journal said.
The new programme, which will use up to about half the IMF's resources, represents a big break from such requirements. "Exceptional times call for an exceptional response," it quoted IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn as saying.
IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE
It is time the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha engages itself in responsible politics, writes Vivek Chhetri


Dreams unto reality
The demand for a separate state is being heard loudly again all over the Darjeeling hills for more than a year now. But the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha, the party at the forefront of the movement, seems to have landed itself in a quagmire now by practising a kind of politics that discards the ground realities. One year into the movement, it is time for the Morcha to reassess it programmes and strategies to pull off something beyond symbolic victories.
Overthrowing Subash Ghisingh, the leader of the Gorkha National Liberation Front, who had ruled the hills for nearly twenty years, was easy for the Morcha. The GJM leader, Bimal Gurung, could capitalize on the people’s frustration for having to endure years of political ineptitude and constant interference in their socio-cultural life. Having got rid of Ghisingh, the Morcha suddenly seems to have lost itself in an open playfield from where there are no roads down which it can go. This is perhaps the most challenging phase of the Gorkhaland movement and the leaders are yet to prove that they have identified the right path.
Instead of making sustained efforts to generate goodwill towards the statehood demand in the Centre, Gurung’s party is now busy enlisting the support of the hill people, who are in any case total converts to the cause of Gorkhaland. The Morcha’s earlier strategy of non-cooperation with the state government was understandable as a policy aimed at hurting the enemy. The hill people had stopped paying all forms of state taxes, including telephone and electricity bills, to the government. However, when the state government had just started feeling the pinch, with the collective electricity bill dues crossing the Rs 9 crore mark, the Morcha decided to pay the bills for a period of three months starting from October.
Then the Morcha decided to go ahead with its agenda of switching the number plates of cars from WB (West Bengal) to GL (Gorkhaland) as part of its “home rule” movement. This is a sore issue, which threatens to divide the hills and the plains once again. The area of the proposed Gorkhaland includes Siliguri and parts of the Terai and the Dooars (that falls in the Jalpaiguri district), apart from the three hill subdivisions of Darjeeling, Kurseong and Kalimpong. The majority of the people living in Siliguri and Dooars have not taken kindly to the switching of number plates, largely refusing to use GL in their vehicles.
The Morcha’s programme of making the people wear traditional dresses during the festive season also hit a sour note with the front turning it into a diktat. An appeal would have been more acceptable. And when the hill people had virtually accepted the dress code, those who had refused to wear the attire were smeared with black paint right in the heart of Darjeeling.
There are some basic principles of politics that even novice politicians should understand. A party cannot keep inconveniencing its supporters and still hope to get their support, especially when it is unable to deliver the goods with any consistency. If one gets branded as anti-Gorkhaland simply on refusing to accept the party’s diktat, one is bound to be offended. The Morcha needs to consider the people’s psychology before being brash with them.
The political history of the hills show that the civil society here has always lived under the shadow of the political bigwigs. When Morcha supporters applied black paint on the people, few came forward to condemn the act. This only goes to show the helplessness of the hill people. There is a clear need for the people of the hills to be more aware of their rights and responsibilities. Political parties too must start functioning on the basis of ideologies, and not just emotions.
Politics in the hills has never been practised in a systematic way. It is well known that the Gorkhaland movement largely owes its success to the support it receives from the adivasi community in the Terai and Dooars. And yet, apart from changing the name of the Morcha to the Gorkha Janmukti Adivasi Morcha in the region, no sustained effort to retain the tribal community’s cooperation has yet been made. It comes as no surprise then that the Adivasi Vikash Parishad is gradually convincing the tribal community to refrain from joining the Gorkhaland movement. It is time that the Morcha concentrates more on the Dooars and the Terai than on the Darjeeling hills.
It is also time that the intellectuals debate whether the demand for Gorkhaland is to be argued on the basis of identity or of development. If Gorkhaland is about differentiating the Indian Gorkhas from the citizens of Nepal and asserting their place in the mainstream, then there can be no plausible reason for the adivasi communities to support the movement. However, if the Morcha maintains that better development is why the new state needs to be created, then, of course, there is a slew of other alternatives to statehood that can serve that cause just as well .
Gurung had repeatedly promised a Gorkhaland by 2010, and the hill people have unconditionally stood by him. If Gurung’s promise is to come true in two years, the front has to stop going round and round in the Darjeeling hills. It should expand its support base by taking into account the wishes and desires of people living elsewhere as well.
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1081030/jsp/opinion/story_10001146.jsp


Ghosts Of 9/11: Muslim Nationality Movements or Pan-Islamic Jihad?
By Wajahat Ahmad
29 July, 2008
Countercurrents.org
"O mankind! We created you from a single pair of a male and female, and made you into nations and tribes, that you may know each other" (The Holy Quran (49:13)
Post 9/11, significant sections of Western media have tended to misrepresent Muslims as a monolithic nation, a supposedly unified Global community of believers- sharing a national consciousness that subsumes their diverse ethnic, cultural, linguistic, national, racial, or territorial identities under an all encompassing identity of the "Ummah".
The disparate Muslim nationality movements of Palestine, Kashmir and Chechnya are being clubbed with fringe pan-Islamic militant movements like Al-Qaeda and seen as part of a putatively wider 'Global Islamic Jihad' against the West. These nationality movements are either the legacy of British colonialism—when arbitrary boundary creation of post colonial States failed to take into account national aspirations of peoples like Kashmiris in South Asia and Palestinians in the Middle East— or as a result of imperial expansion of States like Russia which forcibly included many nationalities in her expanding frontiers.
The international discourse on 'war against terror' has tended to conflate the political violence in regions like Palestine, Kashmir and Chechnya with Islamic militancy as exemplified by Al-Qaeda. The idea of 'war against terror' trumpeted by George Bush Inc., given currency by some conservative and influential sections of the western media, has tried to link the distinct nationalist struggles of different Muslim ethnic groups to an emerging wave of 'Islamic fundamentalism' or 'Islamic terrorism'.
Writing in Times Online, British Conservative MP, Michael Gove, in an article, dated May 2, 2007 and titled, The real darkness at the Heart of Islamist terror, averred, "And when it comes to foreign policy, when we choose not to intervene, when we decide that we shan't get involved, whether in Bosnia, Chechnya or Kashmir, we are not respected for our modesty and restraint on the world stage. We are damned again, for not acting in accordance with Islamist ambitions."
The discourse has been reinforced and used by States like Russia, India and Israel to delegetimize the nationalist movements of Chechens, Kashmiris and Palestinians respectively and also to ward off any possible international opprobrium in response to their repressive policies in these occupied regions.
The goals of pan-Islamist movements like Al-Qaeda and those of Muslim nationalists in Palestine, Chechnya or Kashmir are widely divergent. The nationalist leadership—both insurgent and non-violent— of these regions has repeatedly distanced themselves from the ideas of Al-Qaeda and affirmed that their struggles are essentially aimed at achieving Statehood for their Stateless nations and not for the realization of any pan-Islamic idea.
The Palestinian struggle is avowedly nationalist in character, seeking a homeland for Palestinians, denied to them by an expansionist Israeli State. It is largely a struggle between two national identities-Israelis and Palestinians-which claim the same territory. Though Al-Qaeda leaders like, bin Laden, Ayman Al Zawahri etc. have made many rhetorical pronouncements that harp on the theme of 'liberating Muslim homelands' like Palestine, the Palestinian leadership including that of Hamas -an organization with strong Islamic moorings- have firmly dissociated themselves from these rhetorical declarations of the so called Pan-Islamic 'Jihad'.
Even the Arab States- locked in fratricidal conflicts with one another- have refused to sacrifice their national interests at the altar of the Palestinian struggle. Not surprisingly most Arab States pay only lip service to the Palestinian struggle. One of the largest Arab States, Egypt, prioritizing her national interest over Arab Muslim concerns regarding the Palestinian Question, has since her defeat in the 1973 War, bought a long peace with Israel and refused to be the frontline State for the Arabs in the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Another Arab Muslim nation, Jordan enjoys friendly ties with Israel. Not surprisingly, Jordan played a key role in crushing the Palestinian militants during the Black September episode of 1970, when she enjoying active support from Pakistani and Iraqi military, launched a military offensive –led by the late Pakistani military General Zia-ul-Haq, who at that time was a Brigadier and head of the Pakistani training mission in Jordan-against Palestinian guerrillas in Jordan, forcing them to flee to other Arab countries.
After 9/11 Israel has used the 'war against terror' discourse as a shield to increase and legitimize its military repression in Palestine and label the Palestinian resistance as 'mindless terrorism' to delegitimize it. The recent Palestinian Intifada is a completely indigenous uprising which has not seen any participation of the warriors of the supposedly ubiquitous 'Islamist International' of Al-Qaeda & Co. One of the new avatars of the Palestinian political struggle, the Hamas, may employ Islamic imagery in Palestinian political mobilization or swear by an Islamic code of conduct, yet its aims are firmly restricted to achieving Palestinian statehood. Islam remains an important marker of Palestinian ethno-national identity but the contours of the 'Palestinian Jihad' are circumscribed by a territorial nationalism, which is far removed from any global Jihadi agenda.
Similar are the cases of Chechnya and Kashmir. The Chechens like many other nationalities in North Caucasus were subjugated by a bloody Czarist imperial expansion carried out by Russian Rumanovs, which succeeded only after overcoming a long and fierce Chechen resistance from 1816 to 1856. In 1944 the Chechens were deported enmass to Central Asia by Stalin's regime in the name of Russian 'national interest'.
The recent Chechen national liberation movement (1994 to 1996, which still drags on), started and lead by Chechen progressive nationalist leaders like Dzokhar Dudayev and Aslan Maskhadov, needs to be seen in the context of a long history of Russian imperial expansion in the Caucasus and the resistance of various mountain peoples to it. Even though the latter breed of Chechen guerrilla commanders like Shamil Basayev, Salman Rudayev etc. ,have made an increasing use of Islamic symbols and imagery-Islam being an important marker of identity of Muslim nationalities- in their fight against Russia, but their primary goal has been the realization of an Independent State for Chechens. The Russian contention that Chechnya is an extension of the larger militant - Islamist network has not attracted many buyers but Russia has definitely taken advantage of the post 9/11 international scenario -which has seen a drastic decline of international community's tolerance for violent ethno-nationalist movements across the Globe- to subjugate the Chechens through the use of harsh military means.
Kashmir existed as an independent kingdom until 1947 when the nation-states of India and Pakistan were created in August 1947 by a division of 'British India'. India and Pakistan went to war over Kashmir in late 1947, which left Kashmir divided and under the control of the two countries. In both parts of Kashmir a historic movement for self-determination has been going on since the 1950s. The U.N resolutions on Kashmir -determined by the State centric positions of India and Pakistan -rendered only two possible political choices for Kashmiris viz. accession with India or accession with Pakistan. Contrary to Kashmiri popular aspirations - espoused by Plebiscite Front of "Pakistan-administered-Kashmir" and the one led by Afzal Beigh in Indian-administered-Kashmir -, which sought an independent nation-state, the option of an Independent Kashmir was not included in the U.N resolutions. Internationally Kashmir continued and still continues to be largely viewed as a territorial-ideological dispute between India and Pakistan. Kashmiri nationalism got a partial international recognition only after the Kashmiri mass uprising of 90s.
Pakistani militants' presence in Kashmir has been more a result of Pakistani State's historic involvement in Kashmir Conflict, than merely a result of any ambitious Islamist agenda pursued by the Pakistani militants. The marginalization of Kashmiri Muslim nationalists in the Kashmiri liberation movement was largely due to Pakistan's bear hug than due to any mass appeal in Kashmir to the Pakistani theory of 'shah-rag' misrepresented by groups like "Jamaat-i-Islami Kashmir" as a religious imperative for Kashmiri Muslims.
Riding the wave of the 'war on terror', India like the United States passed draconian anti terror ordinances in the quick aftermath of 9/11. India tried to portray the Dec 13, 2001 attack on her parliament as her version of 9/11 and observed a day 'against world terrorism'. India tried to lump the insurgency in Kashmir with the Al-Qaeda International. Kashmiri separatist leadership denied it as a gross distortion of the historic Kashmiri struggle of self-determination. Syed Salahuddin, commander of largest Kashmiri insurgent group, Hizbul Mujahidin and chairman of the United Jehad Council, repeatedly distanced the armed struggle in Kashmir from the so called pan-Islamic 'Jihad' of Al-Qaeda. Kashmiri separatist leaders like Yaseen Malik of Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) have also publicly stated that 'Al-Qaeda is unwelcome in Kashmir'.
In the backdrop of increasing Islamphobia post 9/11, significant sections of Western media have tended to misrepresent Muslim nationality movements as extensions of global Islamist projects. On the contrary these movements have been waged by Stateless nations struggling for creation of nation-states of their own. For the peoples of Chechnya, Kashmir and Palestine the grand ideologies of many Internationalist isms are either irrelevant or at most secondary to their sentiments of nationalism.
Wajahat Ahmad is a Lecturer at Center for International Peace & Conflict Studies, Islamic University for Science & Technology, Awantipora, Indian-administered-Kashmir. Feedback at wajahatahm@gmail.com
http://www.countercurrents.org/ahmad290708.htm

219
The “Northeast,” seen as India’s “Mongoloid fringe,”1 was
one of the last areas to be taken over by the British in the subcontinent.
Having conquered almost the whole of it by the first quarter of
the nineteenth century, the British turned to secure the frontiers of
their Indian Empire from the perceived threats of Russian expansion
in Central Asia and from the westward surge of the Burmese Empire.
The debacle in Afghanistan forced them to leave it as a useful buffer
between Tsarist Central Asia and British India, but the defeat of the
Burmese army encouraged them to take over the Northeast of India.
The British decided on limited administration of the Northeast.
The Inner Line Regulations ensured that the hill regions beyond the
plains of Assam were largely left to their traditional chiefs once they
accepted British suzerainty. The princely kingdoms of Tripura and
Manipur were treated as dependencies, remote-controlled by political
10
SUBIR BHAUMIK
Ethnicity, Ideology and Religion:
Separatist Movements in India’s Northeast
1. Nandita Haksar, India’s leading human rights lawyer known for her campaign
against excesses by security forces in northeast India, says “the northeast is very distinct
from the rest of India essentially because of race.” See Haksar, “Movement of
Self Assertion in the Northeast,” in Madhushree Dutta, Flavia Agnes and Neera
Adarkar, eds., The Nation, the State and Indian Identity (Kolkata: Stree, 1996).
220 SUBIR BHAUMIK
agents but not administered on a day-to-day basis. For the British, the
Northeast remained a frontier, never a constituent region of the
empire.2 Only Assam was integrated, its rich tea plantations and oilfields,
its agricultural output and potential for industries providing
enough justification for direct administrative control.
Even in neighboring Burma, the British followed the same policy.
Lower Burma was administered directly from Kolkata, but the British
chose to extend “limited administration” to the hill regions of Upper
Burma. A rich plain like Bengal, Assam or Lower Burma, thriving on
settled agriculture, rich in minerals and oil, was worth direct control
despite native resistance. But a remote and difficult hill region was
better left to political agents, spies and missionaries to closely watch
rivals across strategic frontiers and convert the tribesmen to
Christianity to secure their loyalty toward the empire. If the plains fed
the economic sinews of the empire, the hills played the buffer against
rivals in the Great Game and provided fighters for the colonial army.
But though northeast India and Upper Burma remained a partially
administered frontier, some senior British officials, in the years before
the final withdrawal, proposed to integrate these two hill regions and
develop it as a “Crown Colony” to ensure a limited but strategic presence
in rimland Asia.3 Due to strong nationalist opposition in both
India and Burma, the Crown Colony plan failed to materialize.
Guerrilla War in Rainbow Country
BEFORE THE ADVENT OF THE BRITISH, no empire based in mainland
India had controlled any part of what now makes up the country’s
Northeast. Migration from the Indian mainland was limited to
preachers and teachers, traders and soldiers of fortune. Mainland cultural
influence was also limited to Assam, Manipur and Tripura, where
the kings adopted variants of Hinduism as the state religion. The
uninterrupted freedom from mainland conquest for a great length of
2. Alexander Mackenzie first articulated the concept of a “northeast” frontier. See
Mackenzie, History of the Relations of the Government with the Hill Tribes of the Northeast
Frontier of Bengal (1884), reprinted as the Northeast Frontier of India (Delhi: Mittal
Publishers, 1979).
3. J. P. Mills in 1942–43 first proposed the “unification of the hill regions of
Northeast India and Upper Burma.” Later Reginald Coupland fine-tuned the proposal
that the area should be administered as a “Crown Colony” even after the British
withdrawal from the subcontinent. See Coupland, The Constitutional Problems of India,
Part 3 (London: Oxford University Press, 1944).
ETHNICITY, IDEOLOGY AND RELIGION: SEPARATIST MOVEMENTS IN 221
INDIA’S NORTHEAST
history, coupled with the region’s racial distinctiveness, gave its people
a sense of being different from those in mainland India. So, India’s
northeast territories “look less and less India and more and more like
the highland societies of Southeast Asia.”4
After Partition, the 225,000-square-kilometer region remains sandwiched
between Chinese-Tibet, Burma, Bangladesh and Bhutan,
linked to the Indian mainland by a tenuous 21-kilometer wide “Siliguri
Corridor.” It is a polyglot region, its ethnic mosaic as diverse as the rest
of the country. Of the 5,633 communities listed by the “People of
India” project, 635 were categorized as tribals, of which 213 were
found in the northeast Indian states. This project also listed 325 languages
—of which 175 belonging to the Tibeto-Burman and the Mon-
Khmer family were found in northeast India. Some of the bigger
tribes, such as the Nagas, number around one million—the smallest,
such as the Mates of Manipur (population: eight thousand), have just
a few thousand left.5 Even the bigger tribes are often mere generic
identities rather than nationalities, without a common language (as in
the case of the Nagas), held together more in opposition to the Indian
nation-state than by an organic growth of national consciousness.
All of India’s major religions are practiced here, with Christianity
dominating the hills and Hinduism and Islam dominating the plains.
Animistic faiths and Lamaist sects are also found in the region.
Assamese and Bengali speakers are the most numerous—but linguistic
preferences in the region have often changed due to political considerations
and have sometimes concealed ethnic and religious divisions.
In Assam, the migrant Muslim peasantry of Bengali origin
chose to register as Assamese speakers during every census after
Independence to melt into the local milieu. The Assamese also coopted
Muslim migrants as “Na-Asasimyas” or neo-Assamese—if
only to ensure a predominant position of Assamese language in the
state; in such situations linguistic predominance is what ethnic domination
is often built on. But when these Muslims were targeted by the
Assamese on a large scale during the 1983 riots, many of them started
registering as Bengali speakers, leading to a decrease in the number of
Assamese speakers in the 1991 and 2001 Census.
4. Peter Kunstadter, Highland Societies of Southeast Asia (New York: Alfred Knopf,
1967).
5. Subir Bhaumik, “Negotiating Access: Northeast India,” Refugee Survey Quarterly
19, no. 2 (2000).
222 SUBIR BHAUMIK
In the pre-British era, the population flow into what is now northeast
India almost wholly originated from the east. Being closer to the
highlands of Burma and southwestern China than to the power centers
of the Indian mainland, this region was exposed to a constant
flow of tribes and nationalities belonging to the Tibeto-Burman or
the Mon-Khmer stock, one settling down only to be overrun by the
subsequent wave. The incomplete process of racial assimilation, the
frequency of fresh migrations and the restrictive nature of empirebuilding
in the region account for its current ethnic diversity.
But the direction of the population flow changed with the advent
of the British. The colonial masters brought peasants and agricultural
laborers, teachers and clerks from neighboring Bengal and Bihar to
open up Assam’s economy. The trickle became a tide, and the sweep
was soon to cover states like Tripura, where the Manikya kings offered
Bengali farmers “jungle-avadi” or forest clearance leases to popularize
settled agriculture that would, in turn, increase the revenue.6 The
hill regions were protected by the Inner Line Regulations; the plains
and the Princely domains were not. The steady population flow from
mainland India, particularly from undivided Bengal, accentuated the
ethnic and religious diversity and introduced a nativist-outsider element
to the simmering conflict.7
The Partition led to a rise in the flow of refugees and migrants from
East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Tripura’s demography changed qualitatively
in two decades, with the Bengalis becoming a clear majority.
The pace of demographic change was slightly slower in Assam than in
Tripura, but it was pronounced enough to upset the “sons of the soil,”
provoking both armed and unarmed protest movements. The fear that
other northeastern states would “go the Tripura way” has weighed
heavily on indigenous peoples and early settlers throughout the
Northeast and provoked the more militant of them to take up arms.8
6. J. B. Ganguly, “The Problem of Tribal Landlessness in Tripura,” in B. B. Datta
and M. N. Karna, eds., Land Relations in Northeast India (Delhi: Peoples Publishing
House, 1987).
7. See Myron Weiner, Sons of the Soil: Migration and Ethnic Conflict in India (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1978); Sajal Nag, Roots of Ethnic Conflict: Nationalities
Question in Northeast India (Delhi: Manohar, 1990).
8. Subodh Debbarma, vice-president of the Tribal Students Federation (TSF) of
Tripura, told a news conference in Guwahati, Assam, that “Assam would soon
become another Tripura, where the sons of the soil have become aliens within half a
century.” Reported in Sentinel daily newspaper (Guwahati), 3 June 2002.
ETHNICITY, IDEOLOGY AND RELIGION: SEPARATIST MOVEMENTS IN 223
INDIA’S NORTHEAST
This paper examines the complex interplay of ethnicity, ideology
and religious identity in shaping the insurgent movements in northeast
India and examines their external linkages. The paper explores
the degree to which these factors have promoted or restricted the
growth of local nationalisms that could sustain the separatist movements
in a position of challenge to the Indian nation-state.
Ethnicity, Guerrilla Warfare and the “Foreign Hand”
A TRADITION OF ARMED RESISTANCE to invaders developed in the
region even before the British came. The Ahom kings fought back the
Mughals, the Tripura kings fought back the Bengal sultans, but when
the British went into the Northeast, they encountered fierce resistance
in the Naga and the Mizo (then Lushai) hill regions in Manipur and in
what is now Meghalaya. The Naga and the Mizo tribesmen resorted
to guerrilla war, holding up much stronger British forces by grit and
ingenious use of the terrain until, in some places of the Mizo hills,
entire villages were “populated only by widows.”9
After the British left, the Indian nation-state faced uprisings in
Tripura almost immediately after Independence and in the Naga Hills
since the mid-fifties. The Communists, who led the tribal uprising in
Tripura, called off armed struggle in the early fifties and joined
Indian-style electoral politics. But since the 1980 ethnic riots, Tripura
has witnessed periodic bouts of tribal militancy, with the Bengali
refugee population its main target. The Naga uprising, the strongest
ethnic insurrection in northeast India, has been weakened by repeated
splits on tribal lines. Talks between the Indian government and the
stronger faction of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland
(NSCN), started in 1997, are continuing, but a possible resumption of
Naga insurgency remains a worst-case scenario for Delhi in the
Northeast.
Armed uprisings erupted in the Mizo Hills following a famine in
1966. A year later, guerrilla bands became active in Manipur and
Tripura. Since most of these rebel groups found safe bases, weapons
and training in what was then East Pakistan, the defeat of the
Pakistani armed forces in 1971 adversely affected the rebels from
northeast India. For nearly seven years, they were deprived of a major
9. Suhas Chatterjee, Mizoram under the British Rule (Delhi: Mittal Publishers, 1985).
224 SUBIR BHAUMIK
staging post in a contiguous foreign nation. China, which trained and
armed several batches of Naga, Mizo and Meitei since 1966, had
stopped help by the early 1980s. By then, however, Bangladesh’s military
rulers, foisted to power by the bloody coup that killed the country’s
founder Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, had revived the Pakistani policy
of sheltering, arming and training rebel groups from northeast
India. Almost all the separatist groups in the Northeast—Nagas,
Mizos, Meiteis, Tripuris, and now even those from Meghalaya—have
subsequently received shelter and support in Bangladesh. On the
other hand, Indian agencies used the Northeast to arm and train, support
and shelter the Bengali guerrillas against Pakistan in 1971 and
then the tribal insurgents from Chittagong Hill Tracts against
Bangladesh.10
Since the 1980s, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has
also used Bangladesh to establish contact with some of the rebel
groups from Northeast India. A few of them have received
weapons, specialized training in explosives and sabotage, and even
funds. Surrendered insurgents have said the ISI has encouraged
them to take on economic targets such as oil refineries and depots,
gas pipelines, rail tracks and road bridges.11 Burma and Bhutan have
also been used as sanctuaries by some of these rebel groups but
there is little evidence of official patronage from governments of
those countries. There are some unconfirmed reports of Chinese
assistance to the NSCN, the Meitei rebel groups and the United
Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA).12
10. For details of Chinese and Pakistani and then Bangladeshi support to separatist
groups from northeast India, see Bhaumik, Insurgent Crossfire: Northeast India (Delhi:

Lancers, 1996). Also see Sanjoy Hazarika, Strangers of the Mist: Tales of War and Peace
from India’s Northeast (Delhi: Viking, 1994).
11. Munim Nobis, former “foreign secretary” of ULFA, quoted in Hazarika,
Strangers of the Mist. The Group of Ministers (GOM) report in India on security, intelligence
and border management categorically mentions use of Bangladesh territory
by the ISI to “destabilize” India’s northeastern region. Report published in 2000.
12. Surrendered ULFA leader Luit Deuri told this writer in a BBC interview on 19
January 2001 that a Chinese agency codenamed “Blackhouse” had supplied them
huge consignments of weapons through Bhutanese territory. Much of the weapons
the NSCN initially procured from the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia between 1988 and
1995 are believed to have been routed to it by the Chinese agencies, the use of the
surrogate designed to conceal the origin of the supply. Recent seizures of a huge
quantity of weapons from the Meitei rebel groups by the Burmese army in
November 2001 from around Tamu—nearly 1,600 pieces of automatic weapons—
have prompted speculations about the supply from January 1990.
ETHNICITY, IDEOLOGY AND RELIGION: SEPARATIST MOVEMENTS IN 225
INDIA’S NORTHEAST
By the early 1980s, the whole region was gripped by large-scale violence.
There were fierce riots in Tripura and Assam. Separatist movements
intensified in Mizoram, Nagaland and Manipur, later spreading
to both Assam and Tripura. India’s young Prime Minister Rajiv
Gandhi took the initiative to arrive at settlements with the militant
students of Assam, the separatist Mizo National Front (MNF) and
the Tribal National Volunteers of Tripura. But other insurgencies
continued and new ones emerged. If the separatist movements such
as those of the Nagas and the Mizos had challenged federal authority,
the recent insurgencies of the Bodos, the Hmars, the Karbis and
the Dimasas directly confront the regional power centers—the new
states of Northeast. If the Nagas and the Mizos fought for a separate
country and finally settled for a separate state within India, the smaller
ethnicities such as the Bodos or the Hmars fight for autonomous
homelands they want carved out of the states such as Assam and
Mizoram.
Very often in the Northeast, a negotiated settlement with a separatist
movement has opened the ethnic fissures within it. The Hmars,
the Maras and the Lais fought shoulder to shoulder with the Lushais
against the Indian security forces during the twenty years of insurgency
led by the MNF. But twenty years of bonding through the
shared experience of guerrilla warfare failed to develop a greater
“Mizo” identity. The Bodos, the Karbis and the Dimasas all joined the
Assam movement to expel “foreigners” and “infiltrators.” But after
settlements with the Indian government, they felt the Assamese “had
taken the cake and left us the crumbs.”13 The result: fresh agitations,
often sliding into violent insurgencies, spearheaded by smaller ethnicities
demanding separate homelands. The ethnic imbalance in powersharing
has often caused retribalization, which has had its own cascading
effect in restricting the growth of local nationalisms that could
challenge the Indian state.14
13. The late Upendranath Brahma (former president of the All Bodo Students
Union), interview by author, Agartala, 16 April 1988. Bhaumik analyzed this phenomenon
of minor tribes and clans challenging the preponderance of the bigger ones in
“Northeast India: The Second Ethnic Explosion” (paper presented at the Queen
Elizabeth House, Oxford University, 22 January 1990).
14. Bhaumik, “Northeast: Evolution of a Post-Colonial Region” in Partha
Chatterjee, ed., Wages of Freedom: Fifty Years of the Indian Nation-State (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1998).
226 SUBIR BHAUMIK
After fighting India for forty years, Naga “nationalism” remains an
incomplete process, its growth retarded by at least three major splits
within the separatist movement, mostly along tribal lines. Even a
China-trained leader like Muivah, a Tangkhul Naga from Manipur
state, has no hesitation branding Angamis as “reactionary traitors”
and his own tribe, the Tangkhuls—who form the bulk of the
NSCN—as “revolutionary patriots.”15 On the other hand, the
Tangkhuls who dominate the NSCN are seen in the Nagaland state as
“Kaccha Nagas” (impure Nagas).16 The trend has been no different
in Mizoram or Manipur. The Kuki demand for a separate homeland
that pitted them against the Nagas has driven some smaller clans away
from them and led to the emergence of a separate “Zomi” identity.
Tribes such as the Paites prefer to be called “Zomis” and their militias
have sided with the NSCN against the Kuki militant groups. The
Hmars, Lais and the Maras have joined the Chakmas and the Reangs
to challenge the Mizos.
In Tripura, the Mizos in the northern Jampui hills demand a
regional council within the Tribal Areas Autonomous Council of
Tripura to preserve their “distinct identity,” whereas their ethnic kinsmen
in Mizoram are wary of similar demands by smaller ethnicities.
The Reangs in Tripura resent attempts by the Tripuris to impose the
Kokborok language on them. And they look back at the brutal suppression
of Reang rebellions by the Tripuri kings as “evidence of ethnic
domination that cannot be accepted anymore.”17 These intratribal
tensions have weakened efforts to promote a compact “Borok”
or tribal identity against perceived Bengali domination.
India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, excluded the
Northeast from the process of linguistic reorganization that Indian
states were subjected to in the mid-fifties. Stress on language and ethnicity,
he reckoned, would open a Pandora’s box for a remote, sensitive
region such as the Northeast. So he let the hill regions stay with
15. Thuingaleng Muivah (NSCN’s general secretary), “Polarisation,” NSCN document,
published from Oking (headquarters), 1985.
16. Bhaumik, Nagas, India and the Northeast (London: Minority Rights Group, 1994).
17. Dhananjoy Reang (founder of the NLFT), interview by author, Kumaritilla,
Agartala, 16 October 1999. Reang was earlier vice president of the Tribal National
Volunteers (TNV) and a pioneer in the tribal guerrilla movements of Tripura. But
now he bitterly complains of how Reangs have been intimidated, their women raped
and men killed by the NLFT.
ETHNICITY, IDEOLOGY AND RELIGION: SEPARATIST MOVEMENTS IN 227
INDIA’S NORTHEAST
Assam, and the two former princely states—Manipur and Tripura—
were administered as Union Territories from Delhi. But the Naga
insurrection forced Delhi to create the Nagaland state to take the
steam out of the armed uprising. Once a million Nagas got a separate
state, other ethnicities, some more populous than the Nagas, were to
make similar demands. When refused, they would do what the Nagas
did—challenge the Indian state with arms.
In the five decades after Partition, the Northeast has been India’s
most sustained insurgency theater. The intensity and the focus of the
movements have changed over the years, and a number of the movements
have been co-opted by the Indian state through power-sharing
arrangements. But the call to arms has remained a popular option
with the battling ethnicities of the Northeast—either in challenging
Delhi or while settling scores among themselves. And quite often, a
number of armed movements in the region have used separatist rhetoric,
despite being essentially autonomist or nativist in character,
merely to attract attention in Delhi.18
Once India carved out the state of Nagaland in 1963, Assam’s role
as a sub-regional hegemon was threatened, its position as India’s political
subcontractor in the Northeast destined to end. Within a decade
of the creation of the Nagaland state, Delhi had to affect a political
reorganization of the whole region, through which three new administrative
units were formed. These three became full-fledged states in
the 1980s, as India desperately sought to control violent ethnic insurgencies
in the area. On the other hand, the breakup of Assam not only
produced fresh demands for ethnic homelands within what remained
of it, but it also drove a section of the ethnic Assamese to insurgency.
With the hills gone, the Assamese turned to their valleys to find they
were fast becoming a minority there. The anti-foreigner movement
rocked Assam between 1979 and 1985 and led to large-scale, free-forall
types of ethnic riots. The ULFA, now the leading separatist organization
in Assam, was born out of this movement. Its initial credo was
ethnic cleansing—it sought by the force of arms to drive the “foreigners”
(read: migrants from Bangladesh) out of Assam.
18. TNV fought for an “independent Tripura” but came to a settlement with Delhi
in 1988 after it agreed to reserve a mere three additional legislative assembly seats for
tribals. Such instances of using “secessionism” more as rhetoric than as a matter of
conviction abound in the Northeast.
228 SUBIR BHAUMIK
But over time, the ULFA’s politics has changed. Sheltered in
Bangladesh, Burma and Bhutan, and having to face the military might
of the Indian state, the ULFA has denounced the Assam movement
as “one that was led by juveniles, who failed to understand that migration
per se was not bad and had helped many countries like the U.S.A.
to become what they are today.” The ULFA says that the Bengalis—
Hindus and Muslims alike—have “immensely contributed to Assam”
and “those of them who feel themselves as part of Assam should be
treated as its legitimate dwellers.”19 It is difficult to ascertain how
much of this policy shift—projecting itself as the “representative of
the Asombashis” (dwellers of Assam) rather than the Asomiyas
(Assamese)—stems from tactical considerations such as seeking shelter
in Bangladesh and gaining the support of Assam’s huge Bengali
population, and how much of it is a genuine attempt to rise above the
ethnic considerations to forge a secular, multi-ethnic identity to fight
Delhi.
But the ULFA is being pragmatic only in trying to project territory
and a multi-ethnic credo as the basis for a future independent Assam.
It is only acknowledging the polyglot nature of the state of Assam—
and the rest of the region—despite its broad racial difference with the
Indian mainland. It is seeking to restore the multi-ethnic and assimilative
nature of the Assamese nationality formation process, which was
ruptured by racial-linguistic chauvinism of the upper-caste Assamese
power-holder elites in the 1960s, as a result of which tribe after tribe
exercised the exit option from Assam, fueling the demands of an
ever-increasing number of ethnicity-based states in northeast India.
Significantly, though the ULFA has targeted Hindi-speaking populations
for large-scale attacks after 1990, it has avoided any attack on
Bengalis, Nepalis or tribal groups that it sees as potential allies in the
struggle against “Indian colonialism.” The Hindi speakers have been
seen as “Indian populations supportive of the colonial rule.”20 But its
growing lack of faith in ethnicity as the basis for its political militancy
stems from a realization that there could be no “pure ethnic homeland”
in Assam or anywhere else in northeast India. A broad-based
19. Central Publicity Department, “Probojon Loi” (Regarding Infiltration), document
issued by the Central Publicity Department (ULFA, 1992).
20. The Assam Tiger Force (ATF) claimed responsibility for attacks on the Hindi
speakers in Assam, but Assam police say it is certain the ATF was a ULFA front.
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INDIA’S NORTHEAST
Assamese nationalism, unless it caters to the distinct ethnic aspirations
of the tribes and other communities in Assam, is a non-starter.
The ULFA therefore, shrewdly enough, projects a future independent
Assam as a federal Assam, where Bodo, Karbi, Dimasa, Rabha,
Lalung or Mishing, or even Bengali homelands can exist, so long as the
“basic values of Assamese society and culture are accepted.”21 A security
adviser to the Assam government describes this as “a clever ploy
to broaden the support base of the ULFA insurgency against India.”22
But Assam’s political leadership now talks the same language, of the
need to accept the polyglot character of Assam, and of satisfying the
aspirations of the ethnic, linguistic and religious minorities, if not for
anything else, only to stave off another breakup of the state.23
So, though ethnicity has been the mainstay of separatist movements
and often formed the basis for the creation of political-administrative
units in northeast India, its self-corrosive propensities have restricted
the growth of local nationalisms strong enough to confront Delhi.
Meghalaya came into being as a tribal state; today the three major
tribes, Khasis, Jaintias and Garos, fight for the spoils of political
office on ethnic lines, while some militant organizations such as the
Achik National Volunteer Council are fighting for a separate state for
the Garos. Mizoram has problems with its ethnic minorities. The
Reang and Chakma tribes complain of ethnic and religious persecution
and allege that the dominant Mizos, almost wholly Christian,
want to convert them to Christianity and the Mizo way of life. The
Lais and Maras want to join the Reangs and the Chakmas to form a
separate unit, a Union Territory, which they want to be administered
from the Centre.24 The Naga-Kuki clashes throughout northeast
India that left hundreds dead in the 1980s and 1990s raised the
specter of Bosnia or Kosovo, of how conflicting homeland demands
could lead to ethnic cleansing in pursuit of the impossible—creation
of “pure ethnic states.”
21. Freedom, ULFA’s weekly e-newsletter, 25 May 2001.
22. Jaideep Saikia (Security Advisor to Government of Assam), Mukhomukhi (Faceto-
Face), a chat show hosted on Doordarshan’s Seventh Channel (Kolkata), Rainbow
Productions, 17 February 2002.
23. Pradyut Bordoloi (Assam’s Minister of State for Home), interview by author,
BBC World Service, 29 March 2002. Bordoloi described Assam as a “multi-racial, multiethnic,
multi-lingual and a multi-religious entity.”
24. Memorandum jointly submitted by the Lai, Mara and Chakma district councils
to the Indian government on 17 August 2000.
230 SUBIR BHAUMIK
Independence or the Indian Revolution?
IN SOME PARTS of what became India’s Northeast, Communist parties
subtly articulated ethnic issues to create a support base among the
indigenous tribespeople. In Tripura, the Communists played on the
tribal’s sense of loss and marginalization following the end of sovereign
princely rule and the kingdom’s merger with India. Having first
secured popularity in the tribal areas through a powerful literacy
movement (Jana Shiksha or Mass Literacy), the Communist Party of
India (CPI) absorbed into its fold the main tribal organization, Gana
Mukti Parishad, at the peak of its nationwide armed struggle in 1948.
The CPI adopted the Parishad’s political program as its own on questions
of tribal rights, loss of tribal lands and the threat to the distinctive
social organization of the tribespeople but avoided demanding
secession. Hundreds of Parishad activists and leaders turned into
Communist guerrillas and fought “for the Indian revolution” rather
than for an independent homeland like the Nagas.25
But when the CPI gave up armed struggle and purged those advocating
the “adventurist line,” the tribal guerrillas in the Communist
force, Shanti Sena (Peace Army), gave up their weapons and returned
to normal life. And taking advantage of the situation, the Congressdominated
state administration started resettling the newly arrived
Bengali migrants in large numbers in the tribal-compact areas of
Tripura. Since the tribespeople were largely supportive of the
Communists, the Congress wanted to alter the demographic profile of
the constituencies by promoting the organized rehabilitation of the
Bengali migrants. It did help the Congress—it won both the parliament
seats in 1967 after losing them to the Communists in three successive
elections—but as the tribals lost out in the number’s game,
they lost faith in the Communist party and began to turn to militant
ethnic politics.26
Having first manipulated ethnic concerns to build up a party
nucleus and political base, the Communists succumbed to electoral
concerns in Tripura. With other tribal parties and insurgent organizations
surfacing to articulate the ethnic issues, the Communists have
25. For details on the Communist uprising in Tripura, see Bhaumik, Insurgent
Crossfire, and Harihar Bhattacharya, Communism in Tripura (Delhi: Ajanta, 1999).
26. Bhaumik, ibid.
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INDIA’S NORTHEAST
fallen back on their support base among the Bengalis. Since 1978,
they have won all but one of the state assembly elections, but their
popular base in the tribal areas has taken a beating. In 2000, for the
first time, the ruling Communists lost the state’s Tribal Areas
Autonomous District Council to a militant tribal party, the Indigenous
Peoples Front of Tripura (IPFT).
The IPFT enjoyed the backing of the separatist National Liberation
Front of Tripura (NLFT). The NLFT’s rhetoric is secessionist but its
leaders have said they are open to negotiations on an “appropriate
power-sharing arrangement for maximum possible tribal control in
the state assembly, the autonomous district council and on the state’s
resources.”27 The IPFT has now been renamed Indigenous
Nationalist Front of Tripura, with two more tribal parties joining it.
One of them is the Tripura Upajati Juba Samity (TUJS), the first
exclusively tribal party in the state, and the Tribal National Volunteers
(TNV), which led a bloody insurgent movement targeting Bengali settlers
and the security forces between 1978 and 1988. The ruling
Communists admit that they face a stiff challenge in the next state
assembly elections in 2003 with the INFT tying up with the Congress,
which typically wins some seats in Bengali areas.
The Communists in Tripura used a tribal organization and its leadership
to promote their complex ideology in a backward agrarian society
where slash-and-burn agriculture was still prevalent and industries
were virtually absent. The Ganamukti Parishad had retained its distinct
character even after its merger with the Communist Party organization,
but during the two decades that followed the end of the
Communist armed struggle, it played a much reduced role in influencing
the Communist political agenda. Having widened their political
base to win elections, the Communists tried to overlook the ethnic
issues until they were forced to support the tribal autonomy movement
in the 1980s. The INFT has moved into the vacuum, aggressively
ethnicizing the state’s political discourse and questioning the relevance
of Communist ideology for the tribespeople. Unlike the TUJS,
which accepted the role of a junior partner in the coalition with the
27. Nayanbashi Jamatia (NLFT leader), telephonic interview by author, used in
BBC Bengali service on 3 March 2002. Jamatia said the NLFT leadership had communicated
its desire to negotiate with Delhi through the Assam Rifles, which, he
admitted, had been in touch with them.
232 SUBIR BHAUMIK
Congress that ruled Tripura between 1988 and 1993, the INFT is
likely to dominate the coalition because it is likely to win more seats
than the Congress.
In Manipur and Assam, the Communists continue to win a few
seats in the state assembly. They have strong pockets of support that
were once built up through the struggle for peasant rights, but they
share power only as minor partners in regional coalitions. In Manipur,
the CPI has joined the Congress-led ruling coalition formed in
February 2002 to keep the BJP out of power in the state. But in
Assam, it opposed the Congress and came to power by teaming up
with the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP), a party that grew out of the
“anti-foreigner” agitation of the 1980s, which the Communists had
opposed as “parochial” and “chauvinist.”28 The AGP later ditched the
Communists and forged an alliance with the BJP before the 2001 state
assembly elections.
But the Communist ideology, in its Maoist manifestations, did find
takers among the secessionist groups in the Northeast. The People’s
Liberation Army (PLA) of Manipur, throughout the 1980s, said it was
“part of the Indian revolution,” its stated mission to “bring down the
bandit government of Delhi.”29 Only much later did it limit itself to
fight as the “vanguard of the struggle for the independence of
Manipur.”30 Its reading of Indian polity as being “semi-colonial and
semi-feudal” bears striking resemblance with the class character analysis
of the Indian state done by Indian Maoist groups such as People’s
War or the Maoist Communist Center (MCC).
The PLA’s core leadership was trained in China. Though the ethnic
rebel armies of the Naga and the Mizo hills had received military
training in China before them, the Chinese only tried to politicize a
few Naga leaders such as Thuingaleng Muivah, the present general
secretary of the NSCN. Muivah says he had some exposure to
Marxist-Leninist ideology before he led the first batch of Naga rebels
to China in 1966 at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.31 But
there was no attempt to politicize the Mizos or most of the Nagas,
who were devout Christians. China merely wanted to use them against
28. Peoples Democracy, mouthpiece of the CPI (M), 27 March 1981.
29. Dawn (mouthpiece of the PLA of Manipur), 3 June 1980.
30. Thuingaleng Muivah, “Never Say Die,” interview by author, Mannerplaw,
Thailand, published in Sunday magazine, Kolkata, June 16–22, 1996.
31. Ibid.
ETHNICITY, IDEOLOGY AND RELIGION: SEPARATIST MOVEMENTS IN 233
INDIA’S NORTHEAST
India to counterbalance the continued Indian support to the Tibetans.
But the PLA’s core leadership—the first batch of eighteen “Ojhas”
(pioneers)—went through heavy political training. The Chinese had
hopes they would coordinate their struggles with the Indian Maoist
groups and strengthen the cause of the Indian revolution.32
Later, ULFA, a separatist organization committed to Assam’s liberation
from India, had voiced the Marxist-Leninist (M-L) “colonial
thesis” of India’s peripheral regions, such as Assam being an “internal
colony” of India. Individual ULFA leaders, some of whom came
from left political backgrounds, have expressed admiration for CPI
(M-L) leader Charu Majumdar, hailing him as the “first real hope of
the Indian revolution.”33 The Autonomous State Demands
Committee, which wants an autonomous state for Karbi tribesmen in
central Assam, have close connections with the CPI (M-L)—at least
two of their senior leaders are in the CPI (M-L)’s central committee.
But the ASDC has lost out on influence to an armed insurgent group
in the area, the United Peoples Democratic Solidarity (UPDS). This is
a repeat of the Tripura scenario—pro-Left organizations seeking to
use ethnic issues to build up influence, but finally losing out to groups
directly articulating ethnic concerns and keen to use the distinctive
ethnicity as a plank for political power-sharing or protest.
The Maoist groups in mainland India, despite their very limited
presence in the Northeast, support the “struggle of the oppressed
nationalities” in the region.34 In private, Maoist leaders differentiate
between those struggles led by a “conscious leadership” (meaning
those who repose faith in Marxist-Leninism) and the rest.35 The
Maoists are perhaps aware of the potential for a tactical understanding
with the ethnic separatist groups in the battle against the Indian
state—but they have their preferences. The ULFA in Assam, the PLA
in Manipur, or even an NSCN led by Thuingaleng Muivah would be
more acceptable to them than a National Liberation Front of Tripura,
32. Nameirakpam Bisheswar Singh (former PLA chief), interview by author at his
Babupara residence in Imphal, 16 May 1986.
33. Arun Mahanta, an important ULFA functionary in a personal e-mail to the
author, made this comment about Charu Majumdar on 6 May 2000.
34. Biplobi Yug (Revolutionary Age), monthly journal of the Peoples War group’s
Bengal unit, 18 August 2001.
35. Comrade Sagar (real name: Niranjan Ghose), Peoples War’s central publicity
secretary, interview by author, BBC Radio World Today, 19 May 2001.
234 SUBIR BHAUMIK
which not only pursues violent ethnic cleansing against Bengalis and
smaller tribes such as the Reangs and the Chakmas, but also declares
“evangelization” of the tribes of Tripura as a key objective.
The Cross, Saffron and Crescent
THOUGH ETHNICITY AND IDEOLOGY—the former more than the latter
—remain major influences on separatist and autonomist groups in
northeast India, religion is increasingly beginning to influence the
political agenda of some of these groups. Religious distinctiveness,
when coterminous with ethnicity, exacerbated the sense of otherness
in the Naga and the Mizo hills. Since the tribespeople in both these
former head-hunting hill regions had been largely converted to
Christianity since the last quarter of the nineteenth century, they felt
emotionally alienated from the Indian cultural ethos, which was often
equated with the “Hindu entity.”36 Christianity reinforced and complemented,
rather than supplanted, the sense of distinct ethnicity and
otherness among the Nagas and the Mizos. Separatist groups such as
the Naga National Council (NNC) and the MNF laced their separatist
rhetoric with free use of Biblical imageries—and the MNF even
christened its military operations (e.g., its first uprising on 28 February
1966 was referred to as “Operation Jericho”). But rebel regiments
were named after tribal heroes such as Zampuimanga rather than after
Biblical heroes.37
When the NNC decided to send the first batch of Naga rebels to
China, the powerful Baptist Church was upset with the rebel leaders.
The NNC as well as the NSCN, which is led by the China-trained
Thuingaleng Muivah (who continues to revere Mao Zedong and
Zhou Enlai as the “greatest leaders of the century”),38 have subsequently
made conscious efforts to appease the church. Muivah, much
36. The NSCN manifesto says: “Though as a doctrine, Hinduism is not a recruiting
force, it is backed by a Hindu government. The forces of Hinduism, viz., the numberless
Indian troops, the retail and wholesale dealers, the teachers and instructors, the
intelligentsia, the prophets of non-violence, the gamblers and the snake-charmers, the
Hindi songs and Hindi films, the rasgulla makers and the Gita, are all arrayed for the
mission to supplant the Christian God, the eternal God of the Universe. The challenge
is serious.” The Manifesto was issued from the Oking, the NSCN headquarters inside
Burma, on 31 January 1980 by its chairman Issac Chisi Swu.
37. Nirmal Nibedon, Mizoram: The Dagger Brigade (Delhi: Lancers, 1983).
38. Muivah, interview in Sunday.
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INDIA’S NORTHEAST
less of a practicing Christian than is the NSCN chairman Issac Chisi
Swu (who prays regularly), was the one to coin the phrase, “Nagaland
for Christ,” which found its way into the NSCN’s lexicon. This writer
found the “Nagaland for Christ” slogan boldly hanging over the
churches in the NSCN camps where Sunday services were regularly
performed by the NSCN’s “Chaplain Kilonser” (religious affairs minister)
Vedai Chakesang and his team.39 Though personally attracted by
Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong thought, Muivah was quick to
see that most of his leaders and fighters were devout Christians, and
that religion and ethnicity could complement each other to foment
separatism among the Nagas.
The MNF was much more serious about its Christian identity and
much more particular about fostering religiosity. Senior leaders such
as Zoramthanga, then MNF vice president (and now chief minister of
Mizoram state), personally conducted church services in the rebel
camps. Many MNF leaders became preachers after their return to
normal life. Consumption of alcohol and drugs, so easily available in
the Northeast because of its proximity to Burma, was strictly prohibited
among the guerrillas, who were encouraged to propagate their
“evil influences” to the rest of the society.40
But MNF chief Laldenga, after becoming chief minister following
the political settlement with the Indian government, snubbed the
church when it started pressurising his government to ban the sale of
alcoholic drinks. Laldenga did not want to lose one of the most
important sources of revenue for his government. The Congress took
advantage and proclaimed in its election manifesto its commitment to
promote “Christian Socialism” in Mizoram.41 The MNF was defeated
in the ensuing elections in 1989 with the church’s support. After
Laldenga’s death, Zoramthanga took over as party president and
repaired the MNF’s relations with the church. He assured the church
leaders of his commitment to continue with prohibition and the
MNF is said to have won the last state assembly elections with church
support.
39. Bhaumik, “Brothers in Arms,” Sunday, 20 June 1987.
40. MNF “order” no. 3 (1986), entitled “Eradication of Drugs and Liquor in Mizo
Society,” issued to all units of the organization.
41. Congress (I) manifesto for the 1989 Mizoram state assembly elections, issued
in Aizawl, Mizoram.
236 SUBIR BHAUMIK
In neighboring Tripura, first-generation Christian converts constituted
a large percentage of the leadership and the fighters of the
Tribal National Volunteers (TNV). Its chairman, Bijoy Hrangkhawl,
remains a devout Christian. Non-Christian tribesmen who joined the
TNV were encouraged, though not forced, to convert. But the state’s
strongest rebel group now, the NLFT, insists on conversion of non-
Christian recruits. Some of those who have broken away from the
NLFT—such as its former area commander Nayanbashi Jamatia—
are Hindus or animists who say they strongly resent “the leadership’s
interference with personal faiths and religions.”42
The NLFT, in keeping with its stated objective of turning Tripura
into “the land of Christ,” has also issued fiats to tribal communities
to convert to Christianity as a whole.43 That has provoked the predominantly
animist Reangs and the Hindu Jamatia tribesmen to resist
them. Even after the NLFT “banned” the worship of Durga
(Goddess of Power), Saraswati (Goddess of Learning) and Laxmi
(Goddess of Wealth) in the hills, the spiritual head of the Jamatia
tribe, “Hada Okrah” Bikram Bahadur Jamatia performed the Pujas
(worship).44 But his followers had to face attacks and Bikram Bahadur
Jamatia escaped two assassination attempts. Some leading tribal
priests, such as Shanti Kali, were killed by the NLFT; even their womenfolk
were raped by the rebels. On 7 August 1999, the NLFT kidnapped
four senior leaders of the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). All four are said to be dead. The NLFT
allegedly enjoys the support of the Tripura Baptist Christian Union
(TBCU). According to TBCU sources, both voluntary and forced
conversions to Christianity have increased among the tribespeople in
Tripura since the TNV, and then the NLFT, intensified its activity.45
For many tribesmen, Christianity is a source of a new, extra-territorial
42. Nayanbashi Jamatia (NLFT leader).
43. The Constitution of the NLFT, “Sacrifice for Liberation,” issued on 22
December 1991, talks of its armed wing as the “National Holy Army.”
44. Statement of the “Hada Okrah” Bikram Bahadur Jamatia, reported in Dainik
Sambad, Bengali daily of Agartala, Tripura, 16 September 2000.
45. TBCU sources say the number of Christian converts has gone up sharply since
the TNV and NLF started operating in the hilly interiors of Tripura. In 1981,
Tripura’s Christian population stood at 24,872. By 1991, it had risen to 46,472. TBCU
sources say there are now nearly 90,000 Christians in the state, almost wholly made
up of converts. The TBCU’s mouthpiece, the Baptist Herald, details the major acts of
conversions.
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INDIA’S NORTHEAST
identity providing confidence to challenge the dominant cultures of
the Bengali migrants rather than being absorbed by such cultures.
In Manipur, the Meitei separatists, mostly born Hindus, advocated
a revival of the state’s leading pre-Hindu faith, Sanamahi. They also
tried to undermine the use of the Bengali script for the Meitei language
and promote the Sanamahi script to encourage ethnic revivalism
for strengthening the appeal of the separatist movement. But
there were hardly any reports of conversion to Christianity among the
Meitei rebel groups. They undermined the role of religion, either in
practice or by abnegation.
In Assam, the ULFA stayed silent on the question of religion, and
its guerrillas played a visible role in containing religious riots in the
Hojai region of the Nagaon district.46 The ULFA has been accused
of recruiting Muslims of Bengali origin in greater numbers in the last
few years, apparently to appease sentiments in Bangladesh, where
Muslims continue to find refuge. But this writer has been to several
ULFA camps and has interacted with a wide cross-section of ULFA
leaders and guerrillas—some still fighting and others surrendered—
and has hardly seen any religious activity in the camps. Hindu, Muslim
and Christian cadres of the ULFA participate in Assamese festivals
such as Bihu, which has more to do with harvests in what is still
essentially a peasant society.47
In Tripura, where the NLFT has run into stiff resistance not only
from Hindu tribesmen but also from left-minded rebel groups such
as the All Tripura Tiger Force (ATTF), religion has also played a divisive
role in the Bodo separatist movement in Assam. The National
Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB) is predominantly Christian.
It supports the church’s demand for the use of the Roman script for
the Bodo language—similar to the NLFT’s support for a similar
church demand to use Roman script for the Tripuri Kokborok language
—and its guerrillas have killed many Bodo intellectuals, cultural
icons and writers who oppose the demand. Their victims include a
46. “ULFA jangira bandhuk uchiye danga thamalen” (ULFA stops riots at the point
of gun), a report in Ananda Bazar Patrika, Bengali daily of Kolkata, 21 December
1992.
47. This writer has extensively visited a number of ULFA camps in Bhutan and
Burma as well as those of other northeast Indian rebel groups. Absence of religious
activity is conspicuous in ULFA camps and those of the Meitei rebel groups.
238 SUBIR BHAUMIK
former president of the Bodo Sahitya Sabha (Bodo Literary Society).
The All Bodo Students Union (ABSU), the Bodo Peoples Action
Committee (BPAC) and the underground Bodoland Liberation Tigers
Force (BLTF) remain committed to the “traditional Bodo way of life”
and oppose the demand for using Roman script for the Bodo language.
The overt Christian religiosity of some separatist groups has provoked
Hindu nationalist groups such as the RSS to see a “foreign
hand” behind the ethnic rebellions of northeast India. RSS leaders,
upset with both the spread of Christianity in ever-new areas of the
Northeast as well as rebel attacks on their leaders and institutions supported
by them, refer to the church’s use of “liberation theology” slogans
like “To Christ through People’s Movements” (used by some
Baptist denominations in the Northeast) as evidence of its connivance
with ethnic separatism.48 To counteract this alleged nexus, the
RSS is trying to infiltrate a number of ethnic movements, mostly
spearheaded by smaller tribes who oppose imposition of Christianity
by bigger ethnic groups and rebel armies. Along the Tripura-Mizoram
border, the RSS has a strong presence in the camps where the Reangs,
displaced by violent evangelistic Mizo groups, have taken shelter.
There have been reports that the Reang rebel group, Bru National
Liberation Front (BNLF), has received backing from the RSS—as
have the Jamatias opposing the NLFT. The RSS has even asked the
federal home ministry to provide arms and funds to the Reang and
the Jamatia groups. But most of the organizations supported by the
RSS represent mainland Indian communities.
The Congress had also used the religious factor in the Northeast
when it built up a Zeliang Naga leader, Rani Gaidiliu, to counter the
Naga separatist movement. The Rani’s followers practiced the animistic
Haraka faith and were opposed to Christianity. But unlike the
RSS, which sees religion as the major cause of the ethnic divide in the
Northeast, the Congress used religion to promote challenges to separatist
movements and weaken them by simultaneously playing on the
religious (Haraka versus Christian) and the ethnic (Zeliangs as different
from Nagas) divide.49 Its stand on the religious question in the
48. V. Sudarshan (RSS chief), interview by author, Kolkata, 20 January 2002.
49. S. C. Dev, Nagaland, the Untold Story (Kolkata: Glory Printers, 1988).
ETHNICITY, IDEOLOGY AND RELIGION: SEPARATIST MOVEMENTS IN 239
INDIA’S NORTHEAST
Northeast has been governed by electoral concerns—from the use of
the sects of Anukul Thakur and Anandmoyi Ma, Hindu cult figures, to
win the Bengali Hindu vote in Tripura, to the use of Pir of Badarpur
or Jamaat leader Assad Madani in Assam to win the Muslim vote, to
the championing of “Christian Socialism” in Mizoram—and its use of
religious issues in the Northeast smacks of rank opportunism.
But though the RSS has been stridently vocal about the church-separatist
nexus, its preoccupation with the emerging threat of Islamic
radicalism in the Northeast and the rest of the country has occasionally
prompted its leaders to try and promote “Hindi-Christian understanding”
in the region. The RSS chief V. Sudarshan recently told a
news conference that “the resurgence of militant Islam based in
neighboring Bangladesh and continuous infiltration from that country
were the biggest threat to the region that Hindus and Christians
must fight together.”50 But efforts to bridge the Hindu-Christian
divide in the Northeast by playing up the issue of illegal infiltration
from Bangladesh were not very successful after Hindu fundamentalists
elsewhere in India attacked Christian preachers, including the brutal
murder of Australian priest Graham Staines, which evoked a lot of
protest from the Christians in the Northeast.
By the time India was partitioned, the Muslim population in northeast
India was mostly concentrated in Assam with a small sprinkling
in Tripura. Assam, similar to undivided Bengal, was ruled by a Muslim
League government during the Second World War. During that phase,
a large number of peasants from Eastern Bengal were encouraged to
settle down on the “chars” (river islands) of the Brahmaputra and its
tributaries. But just before Partition, Sylhet was detached from Assam
and given to Pakistan. Some Hindu leaders felt that “amputation of
the diseased arm” had been good for Assam.51 But the inflow of
Muslim migrants to Assam has continued even after the breakup of
Pakistan. Some religious parties in Bangladesh still feel that Assam
should have gone to East Pakistan during the Partition because of its
large Muslim population.52 In Assam and princely Tripura, Islamic
50. Sudarshan’s news conference as reported in Shillong Times, Meghalaya, 16 May
1997.
51. Sardar Patel, quoted in R.N. Aditya, Corridors of Memory (Kolkata: KLM Firma,
1970).
52. Jamaat-i-Islami monograph, “Bharat Baghe Mussalmanra ki Hariyeche”
(Dhaka, 1969).
240 SUBIR BHAUMIK
parties tried to merge those territories with Pakistan during and after
1947—and parties such as the Jamaat-i-Islami continue to feel these
areas of northeast India would be a “normal appendage” of
Bangladesh.
But until the rise of the BJP in India and its growth in parts of
Assam by skillful exploitation of the Babri Masjid issue, Islamic radicalism
was practically absent in Assam and the rest of the Northeast.
The riots during the Assam agitation, though apparently aimed at
“outsiders” and “infiltrators,” did target the Muslims of Bengali origin
in a big way. More than two thousand of them were killed in the
riots at Nellie and Chaulkhowa Chapori from February to March
1983. The ferocity of the violence split the groups leading the Assam
agitation along religious lines, and a number of Assamese Muslim
leaders broke away from the All Assam Students Union (AASU) and
the All Assam Gana Sangram Parishad (AAGSP) immediately after
the 1983 riots, alleging that the agitating groups had been “infiltrated
by the RSS.”53 But there was no violent Muslim backlash. Only some
defense groups, such as the All Assam Minority Students Union
(AAMSU), were organized in the predominantly Muslim area. And
though political parties and the police in Assam made exaggerated
projections of their strength and intentions, and the local Assamese
press floated stories about their linkages to Islamic fundamentalist
groups in Bangladesh, these groups were essentially defensive in
nature.
Immediately after the riots and the Assam accord of 1985 that
brought an end to the agitation, the Muslims of Bengali origin joined
their linguistic Hindu brethren to form the United Minorities Forum
(UMF). Traditionally they had voted for Congress but they felt let
down by the Congress government in 1983. One of the founders of
the UMF said: “For the first time in post-Partition Assam, the Bengali
Hindus and Muslims felt the need to come together to protect their
interests. We found we were in the same boat. Since we were more
than 40 percent of the state’s population, we were sure we could
defend our interests against rising Assamese chauvinism.”54 But after
53. Seema Guha, “Assam Movement: Shadow of the RSS,” Sunday, 28 February –

6 March 1983.
54. Gholam Osmani (former UMF president now back in Congress), interview by
author, 28 May 1995.
ETHNICITY, IDEOLOGY AND RELIGION: SEPARATIST MOVEMENTS IN 241
INDIA’S NORTHEAST
the rise of the BJP, Bengali Hindus in Assam, unlike their brethren
in West Bengal and Tripura, largely turned toward the politics of
Hindutva in a decisive way. The Muslims were left with little
choice—in elections, they began to vote for the Congress and most
of the UMF leaders returned to that party. But the younger and
more religious elements did form some militant groups, defensive
to begin with but now increasingly proactive. The Idgah Protection
Force (IPF) was formed just before the demolition of the Babri
Masjid at Ayodhya, and some of its supporters were responsible
for the attack on the Hindus at Hojai in 1992, in which ninety
Hindus were killed. Incidentally, the victims were mostly Bengali
Hindus who had started supporting the BJP and its campaign to
construct a Hindu temple at Ayodhya in place of the disputed
Babri Mosque.
Following the Hojai riots, a number of Muslim radical groups
have surfaced in Assam, essentially feeding on the community’s
growing insecurity in a state where the power-holder elites see
them as “agents of Pakistan or Bangladesh.” The Assamese fear of
being reduced to a minority in their own land, fuelled by the changing
demography of the state during the last forty years, has given
rise to strong anti-Muslim feelings. Assamese political groups
advocate the scrapping of the Illegal Migrants Determination by
Tribunals (IMDT) Act promulgated in 1983 by the state’s Congress
government. These groups say the act, by placing the burden of
proof of someone’s foreign identity on the state, is actually protecting
“illegal foreign migrants” in Assam.55 The Assamese
groups have received strong support from the BJP, which, in
Assam now, has a strong base both among Bengali and Assamese
Hindus. Recently, the regional party, Asom Gana Parishad (AGP),
has called for a special session of the Assam legislative assembly to
discuss the infiltration issue. The ruling Congress government has
ruled that out, suspecting a fresh move by the AGP and the BJP to
whip up passions against the IMDT Act, a legislation the Muslims
see as their only source of legal protection against arbitrary and
forced deportations.
55. Sarbananda Sonowal (AASU president), interview by author, aired in South
Asia Report, BBC World Service Radio, 22 August 1994.
242 SUBIR BHAUMIK
In the 2001 state assembly elections in Assam, the AGP and the
BJP worked out a political alliance to fight the elections together. For
the first time, Assam witnessed the politics of “religious consolidation,”
as the AGP was now reconciled to the BJP’s political stand of
treating Bengali Hindus as refugees and Bengali Muslims as infiltrators,
preferring to shelter the former and push back the latter into
Bangladesh. The Congress came back to power with the support of
its votebanks among the Muslim and the Tea tribes (descendants of
those who came from Bihar’s tribal regions to work the British tea
estates in the nineteenth century), who account for more than 40 percent
of the electorate. The BJP’s subsequent efforts to penetrate the
Tea tribes, exploiting the religious divide within the community
(Assam’s tea laborers are largely first- or second-generation Christian
converts, but many remain Hindus), have not met with much success.
Assam’s Muslim and Christian minorities, faced with “religious consolidation”
of Bengali and Assamese Hindus who would account for
more than 40 percent of the population, have decided to stick it out
with the Congress. Their combined strength does give them a chance
to share power and ensure security.
But this does not appease some Muslims in Assam who have
formed militant Islamic groups. The Muslim United Liberation
Tigers of Assam (MULTA) is the strongest of these groups.56
Formed in 1997, the MULTA has close connections with the Sunni
radical group, Sipah-i-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP). The MULTA leaders
signed an agreement with SSP leaders at a meeting at Jamait Ul
Uloom Ali Madrassa in Chittagong in February 2001. The SSP
decided to back the MULTA in its militant activities in Assam. At the
political level, the MULTA demands 30 percent reservation in education
and employment for Muslims in Assam and also a similar reservation
for seats in the state assembly, quite in keeping with their share
56. The Assam police lists a total of seventeen Muslim fundamentalist groups it
says are active in Assam, including the MULTA. The other groups are Muslim United
Liberation Front of Assam (MULFA), Adam Sena, People’s United Liberation Front
(PULF), Muslim Security Council of Assam (MSCA), United Liberation Militia of
Assam (ULMA), Islamic Liberation Army of Assam (ILAA), Muslim Volunteer
Force (MVF), Islamic Sevak Sangh (ISS), Islamic United Reformation Protest of
India (IURPI), United Muslim Liberation Front of Assam (UMLFA), Revolutionary
Muslim Commandos (RMC), Muslim Liberation Army (MLA), Muslim Tiger Force
(MTF), Muslim Security Force (MSF), Harkat-ul-Jihad-al Islami of Bangladesh, and
Harkat-ul-Mujahideen of Pakistan.
ETHNICITY, IDEOLOGY AND RELIGION: SEPARATIST MOVEMENTS IN 243
INDIA’S NORTHEAST
of the state’s population. But at the religious level, they want the
establishment of a chain of Islamic courts in Assam to dispense justice
in keeping with the tenets of Shariat.57
The Assam police have arrested some MULTA activists, while some
have surrendered. During interrogation, some of them have confessed
to receiving training at al-Qaeda and Taliban camps in
Afghanistan with logistic support provided by Pakistan’s Inter-
Services Intelligence (ISI).58 The MULTA also recently participated in
a convention of Islamic radical groups in Bangladesh held at Ukhia
near the coastal town of Cox’s Bazaar on 10–11 May 2002. Six
Bangladesh-based Islamic militant groups, such as Harkat-ul-Jihad-al
Islami (HUJAI) and Islamic Shashantantra Andolan, were joined by
two Burmese Rohingya Muslim rebel groups and the MULTA at the
convention, which was attended by more than sixty delegates of the
total nine groups who joined the convention. The convention decided
to form an umbrella organization to coordinate the jihad for turning
Bangladesh from a “Dar-ul-Harb” (Land of Infidels) into a “Dar-ul-
Islam” (Land of Islam)—but it also decided to intensify efforts for
the creation of a “Brihat Bangladesh” (Greater Bangladesh) by incorporating
areas of Assam and Burma’s Arakan province that are now
largely settled by Muslims of Bengali origin. Indian intelligence sees
the Bangladesh Islamic Manch as a replica of the United Jihad
Council in Pakistan. While the United Jihad Council coordinates the
struggle for Kashmir’s forced merger with Pakistan, the Bangladesh
Islamic Manch, in its inaugural declaration, says it will work for the
“willful merger” of areas of Assam and the Arakans, which have large
Muslim populations of Bangladeshi origin.59 That Assam has India’s
highest percentage of Muslims in any state other than Kashmir only
reinforces their fear.
At last, the scare scenario that generations of Assamese have been
fed is finally coming true. Groups that would prefer to merge areas of
Assam with a Muslim majority and contiguous to Bangladesh have
finally emerged. Security analysts in Assam envisage the “eastward
surge of the Jihadis”—a projected growth of Islamic militant activity
57. Saikia, “Swadhin Asom or Brihot Bangla” (Independent Assam or Greater
Bengal), in Contours, a collection of his columns (Assam: Sagittarius, 2001).
58. Ibid.
59. “Bangladesh Islamic Manch—Formation and Alignments,” report prepared by
the Special Bureau’s Bangladesh Desk, June 2002.
244 SUBIR BHAUMIK
in the arc that begins at India’s Siliguri Corridor (North Bengal area
that connects India to its Northeast)—goes through Bangladesh and
stretches in India’s Northeast and Burma’s Arakan province with linkages
running west toward Pakistan and the Middle East and east
toward Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.60 The presence of
Islamist parties, such as the Jamaat-i-Islami and the Islamic Aikyo Jote
in Bangladesh’s present ruling coalition, has fuelled fears that the
country founded on the ideals of Bengali nationalism might become
the fulcrum of jihad in the eastern slice of South Asia, which is quite
as sensitive and conflict-prone as its west.61 The repression of Hindu,
Christian and Buddhist minorities in Bangladesh after the change of
guard in October 2001, widely reported in Bangladesh’s vibrant and
largely secular press, has provided substance to such apprehensions.62
If globalization is the mantra of the new millennium, then conflicts,
just as economies, are likely to be globalized. And if the religious
divide fuels a “clash of civilizations,” South Asia and its regions
will be sucked into it. Religion, which led to the Partition of the
Indian subcontinent but did not overtly influence the “little nationalisms”
of northeast India, may begin to play a more important role
in politics of the region. Not the least because ruling entities such as
the BJP in India and the four-party, BNP-Jamaat-led coalition in
Bangladesh are choosing to play up and play by the religious divide.
60. Saikia, Contours.
61. Bertil Lintner, “Beware of Bangladesh: Cocoon of Terror,” Far Eastern Economic
Review, 4 April 2002.
62. Bangladesh press reports detailing atrocities on minorities are quoted in the
Annual Autumn Souvenir of the Bangladesh Hindu-Buddhist-Christian Council.
http://www.apcss.org/Publications/Edited%20Volumes/ReligiousRadicalism/PagesfromReligiousRadicalismandSecurityinSouthAsiach10.pdf

Report on the International Seminar on the Nationality Question
Our Special Correspondent
The All-India People's Resistance Forum organised an international seminar on the nationality question in Delhi on February 16 to 19, 1996. Participants included a number of communist parties from home and abroad as well as organisations involved in national struggles in different parts of India. The AIPRF itself placed two major papers before the seminar: 'Globalisation - Structural Adjustment and National Resurgence' and 'Nationality Question in India'. A comprehensive account of the seminar is outside the scope of this report. Here only selected themes are taken up which arise from the posing of the nationality question by various participating communist parties.
In its paper the AIPRF noted that the national question in colonial and semi-colonial countries was part of the democratic revolution directed against imperialism and feudalism in which the national struggle united the working class, the peasantry and the toilers and excluded the big bourgeoisie and the big landlords. In India there is no single oppressor nation in contrast to the situation in Tsarist Russia, Sri Lanka, Turkey and Palestine. The centralised Indian state which represents the interests of imperialism, the big bourgeoisie and the feudal landlord classes suppresses all of the nationalities in the country. The intermixture of religion and the national struggles, the still developing nationalities amongst the tribals and the conflicts between the developing nationalities add to the complexity of the national question. The nationalities in India developed in the medieval period based on the development of the vernacular languages. The diverse conditions of the agrarian economy and trade meant that there was great diversity amongst the different regions of India. The British conquest stifled the emergence of nationalities and set off a chain of tribal and peasant rebellions. The rise of the anti-colonial movement stimulated the various national languages. The National Congress was compelled to take this into account and at its Nagpur Congress in 1920 it accepted the need to restructure its organisation on the basis of linguistic provinces. After 1947 the Congress did not fulfil its promise to establish linguistic provinces. Only after the agitation for the formation of the Andhra Province was the government compelled - despite the opposition of big capital based in Bombay - to establish the reorganisation of the states on the basis of linguistic affinity which led to a partial resolution of the national question.
The AIPRF then makes a distinction between three types of nationality movements. The first category is composed of 'those nationalities which, historically, have never been a part of India and were territorially annexed to the Indian Union'.
It must be stated unequivocally that this logic is entirely specious. Any notion of an 'historic India' if examined has to correspond to the oppressive multi-national states established in ancient, medieval and colonial times. No notion of an 'historic India' is required to defend the right of secession of the Kashmiris, the Assamese, the Mahipuris, Nagas and Mizos. This right exists on the basis of the democratic right of national self-determination. This permits them the right to secede from the existing reactionary Indian state or the future democratic state as they so desire.
A second category is suggested of the relatively 'developed nationalities' which have become consolidated in linguistic states where the nationality question expresses itself as a conflict between the centralised economic and political power of the centralised Indian state and the aspirations of the bourgeoisie of the various nationalities. By this logic the Akali Dal, the TDP, ACIP, DMK, AIADMK, the CPI and the CPI(M) articulate these demands. The third category embraces movements for statehood in areas such as Telengana, Vidarbha and Uttarakhand where the uneven development of capitalist development leads to disadvantages in particular regions as well as amongst the tribal nationalities of Jharkhand and Chattisgarh where the mineral and forest wealth are being ruthlessly exploited by the big bourgeoisie, the regional bourgeoisie and the landlords.
In the realms of administration and education the all-India big bourgeoisie foists the English and Hindi languages throughout the country and thereby stunts the development of the languages of the nationalities. The language question may only be resolved by permitting equality of the national languages in the Indian state. The Indian ruling classes attempts to promote unity of the state on the basis of Hindi identity, it targets the minority communities through anti-Muslim and anti-Sikh pogroms.
The nationality movements suffer from a number of problems. They are not always clear that imperialism, the big bourgeoisie and the feudal elements are the main forces which are retarding national development. Moreover, questions of nationality are mixed with religious fundamentalism and the nationality movements often adopt national chauvinist stands against the smaller nationalities as has occurred in the case of the Assamese against the Bodos and Karbis. If the nationality struggles take up the question of feudal exploitation the majority of the masses of the nationality may he mobilised.
A consistent democratic approach to the nationality question necessitates support for the Kashmiris and the nationalities of the North-East, the establishment of a voluntary federation of the nationalities based on the right to secession, autonomy for the minority nationalities in each national republic, the end of the current centralised economic and political control by the central government, the use of national languages in the administration and education in the mother-tongue, a struggle against big national chauvinism of the bigger nationalities and against fundamentalism particularly Hindi fundamentalism.
The approach paper of the AIPRF, despite flaws, is a welcome attempt to tackle the national question in India in the light of Marxism. It correctly notes that the Soviet Union after 1917 implemented the principle of national self-determination in a principled manner. But the paper is reticent on the experience of the CPC and the People's Republic of China. The CPC supported the right of secession before 1935 but in the several constitutions promulgated after the revolution the right of secession for the nationalities of Mongolia, Tibet, Sinkiang and the Chuang was terminated. The notion of a free federation of nationalities was replaced by the idea of a unified multi-national state. Mao did not implement the Leninist-Stalinist nationality policy.
The AIPRF is inspired by the CPC and Mao. In this circumstance it may be legitimately asked: why should the Kashmiris, the Nagas, the Manipuris, the Bodos and other oppressed nationalities throughout India accept the assurances put forward by the AIPRF that they support the right of secession? Will they not be betrayed as were the Mongolians, the Tibetans, the Chuang, the nationalities of Sinkiang? The professions of the AIPRF shall only be taken seriously if they demarcate their positions from those of the CPC and Mao Zedong just as vigorously as they have distanced themselves from the positions of the CPI and CPI(M).
The papers of the three communist parties analysed below may be conveniently examined in the light of Lenin's thinking and the views of the CPC. The papers of the other international participants are not treated here as their contributions dealt only indirectly with the theoretical examination of the nationality question.
In 'The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed up' Lenin indicated the differing tactics of communists on the question of national self-determination of the oppressing and oppressed countries.
In the international education of the workers of the oppressor countries, emphasis must necessarily be laid on their advocating freedom for the oppressed countries to secede and their fighting for it. Without this there can be no internationalism. It is our right and duty to treat every Social-Democrat of an oppressor nation who fails to conduct such propaganda as a scoundrel and an imperialist (V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 22, Moscow, 1964, p. 346).
With respect to the tactics of communists of the oppressed country Lenin stated:
a Social-Democrat from a small nation must emphasise in his agitation the second word of our general formula: "Voluntary integration" of nations. (op. cit. p. 347)
Let us see how the CPC fares in the light of Lenin.
An examination of the Constitution of the Chinese Soviet Republic which was promulgated in 1931 reveals that the CPC upheld the Marxist position:
The Soviet Government in China recognise the right of self-determination of the national minorities in China, their right to complete separation from China, the formation of an independent state for each national minority. All Mongolians, Tibetans, Miao, Yao, Koreans and others living in the territory of China, shall enjoy the full right to self-determination i.e. they may either join the Chinese Soviet state or secede from it and form their own state as they prefer (ed. Bela Kun: 'The Fundamental Law of the Chinese Soviet Republic', London, 1934, p. 22).
By 1938 the CPC gave its new understanding:
'the Mongolians, the Mohammedans, the Tibetans, the Miaos, the Yiaos, the Yees, and the Fangs, etc., must have equality with the Chinese people. Under the condition of struggle against Japan they must have the right to self-determination and at the same time they should continue to unite with the Chinese people to form one nation'. (Mao Tse-tung, 'The New Stage', Chungking, n.d., p. 48)
Under the new logic the communists of the oppressing Han nation no longer advocated the freedom of secession of the minority nationalities, they stressed only self-determination (in the abstract) and equality with the Chinese nation, and demanded their unity with the Chinese people to form one nation (i.e. asked the minority nationalities to obliterate themselves in the Han Chinese nation).
The CPC continued its headlong retreat from Leninist-Stalinist nationality principles. By 1945 it simply adopted the positions of Sun Yat-sen who recognised self-determination (but not secession) of the minority nationalities. Thus we read in the first Indian edition of Mao's 'On Coalition Government':
In the Manifesto of the First National Congress of the Kuomintang (1924), Dr. Sun Yat-sen said: "The nationalism of the Kuomintang has a two fold meaning: the self-emancipation of the Chinese nation, and the equality of all races in China".
Then he said: "The Kuomintang can state with solemnity that it recognises the right of self-determination of all Chinese republics (i.e. formed with the voluntary consent of the various races) as soon as the war against imperialism and war-lords is victoriously concluded".
The Kungchantang (the CPC - ed. R.D.) is in complete accord with Dr. Sun's racial and national policy indicated above. (Mao Tse-tung, 'The Way Out of China's Civil War', Bombay, 1946, p. 66).
In 1945 the CPC argued for national self-determination (as soon as the war was concluded), rejected the policy of advocating secession for the minority nationalities, and opted for the equality of nationalities in the Chinese state.
The first Constitution of the People's Republic of China which was promulgated in 1954 represented a retreat even from its earlier acceptance of the principles of Sun Yat-sen on the national question. In Article 3 we read:
The People's Republic of China is a single multi-national state.
All the nationalities are equal. Discrimination against, or oppression of, any nationality, and acts which undermine the unity of the nationalities are prohibited..
Regional autonomy applies in areas where people of national minorities live in compact communities. National autonomous areas are inalienable parts of the People's Republic of China. ('Documents of the First Session of the First National People's Congress of the People's Republic of China', Peking, 1955, p. 136)
The 1954 Constitution as can be seen unequivocally rejected national self-determination and the right to secession, illegalised attempts to implement the right to secession, established a mere formal equality of the nationalities, and introduced 'Regional Autonomy', which for the Bolsheviks was founded on the principle of secession, as a substitute for secession itself.
Lenin, as we have seen, declared that the failure to advocate freedom of secession for the oppressed countries and to fight for it by communists of the oppressing country had the following implication: 'It is our right and duty to treat every Social-Democrat of an oppressor nation who fails to conduct such propaganda as a scoundrel and an imperialist'.
After this excursus into the history of the CPC we are in a better position to scrutinise the stances of international communist parties represented in the seminar.
In his paper entitled 'A Maoist Perspective On The National Question In The U.S. And On A World Scale', Raymond Lotta of the Revolutionary Communist Party of the USA focussed on the Black Nationality Question.
This question was important in the U.S. because the heritage of chattel slavery and continued national oppression of the Afro-Americans had stamped every aspect of U.S. society and the Black people's resistance has been a decisive struggle in the country.
The Black nation was formed under conditions of slavery and after the Civil War under the feudal system of sharecropping in the Black Belt. The Black masses were denied democratic rights under the Jim Crow system. After the two World Wars huge migrations had taken place to the northern industrial belts but this did not end the distinct Black nation as they were not integrated into the Euro-American nation. Lotta traced the history of the Black people's struggles from the civil rights movements of the 1960s to the liberation struggles of the late 1960s and early 1970s right through to the Los Angeles rebellion of 1992. The revisionist CP USA, he noted, denied the existence of the black nation. The position of the RCP USA was that it defended the right of self-determination and upheld the right to establish a separate black state while striving to carry out a unified revolutionary struggle aimed at the establishment of 'a single unified state over the largest possible territory on the basis of the equality of nations', (p. 7). A number of lacuna immediately strike the eye. The RCP USA rejects the position proposed by the Executive Committee of the Communist International in 1930 that the right of self-determination of the Black nation was the main slogan of the Communist Party in the Black Belt. It fails to distinguish between the right and duty of the Communists of the oppressor Euro-American nation in the U.S. to advocate the right to secession for the Black nation (and the Puerto Ricans) and the duty of the Communists of the oppressed Black nation to stress the 'voluntary integration' of the nations in the U.S. The Euro-American members of the RCP USA turn Lenin upside down by advocating the tactical position of the Black communists. This error is compounded by the failure of the RCP USA to call for the establishment of a voluntary federation in the USA of the various nationalities, founded on the right of secession, and in its stead to strive for the establishment of a 'single unified state'.
In a paper devoted to the national question in the Philippines Luis Jalandoni, Member of the National Council of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines, pointed out that there were a total of some forty minority nationalities in the country comprising ten million people or fifteen per cent of the population. The principal national minorities were the three million strong Moro people of Mindanao (who have been struggling for independence under the Moro National Liberation Front), the Lumads of Mindanao (two-three million) and the Igorot tribes in the Cordillera region in northern Luzon (one million). The reactionary pro-imperialist and pro-landlord governments have been seizing the ancestral lands of the minorities and passed them over to the land speculators, loggers, ranchers, mining companies and landlords. Under the Financial Technical Assistance Agreements over twenty per cent of the total land area of the country has been opened up for mining by the transnational corporations. The minority nationalities have been removed through military operations, through such 'development aggression' some two million internal refugees have been created the bulk of whom are indigenous peoples. In resistance to the depredations of imperialism a number of the minority nationalities have joined the revolutionary movement and are allied to the National Democratic Front.
While criticising the compromising stand of the Moro National Liberation Front in having signed the Tripoli Agreement in March 1977 with the Marcos government in which the MNLF agreed to accept regional autonomy in thirteen provinces, constituting sixty per cent of the Moro homeland, under the sovereignty of the reactionary state, the Communist Party of the Philippines has recognised 'their right to secede from the present reactionary state that has for so long oppressed them as a nation'. The CPP argues furthermore that 'Even when there shall be a people's democratic state in which the Moro people as a nation are in a position to enjoy regional autonomy, they shall still retain the right to secede as a safeguard against national oppression'. Once again we see an instance of the repudiation of the Leninist obligation for the Communists of the oppressing nation to advocate the right of secession. In place of conducting propaganda on these lines the CPP seeks to pre-empt the decision of the Moro nation by selling the notion of 'regional autonomy'. This policy is confirmed by the policy adopted by the First Conference of the National Democratic Front which reaffirmed the right of secession and then went ahead to negate it by stating its preference for encouraging the voluntary acceptance of 'genuine autonomy': 'Under a democratic Philippines where the equality of peoples and nationalities is guaranteed, the Bangsa Moros shall be encouraged to take the valid and viable option of a genuinely autonomous political rule'.
The views of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) on the national question in Nepal were presented by Hisila Yami, President, All-Nepal Women's Association (Revolutionary). It was argued that Nepal is a semi-colonial and semi-feudal state which is dominated by British, Japanese, German and U.S. imperialism as well as by the Indian expansionists. Indian capitalists control about eighty per cent of Nepali industry and trade. India is the dominant trade partner of Nepal, it supplies manufactures to Nepal and in turn receives primary products and cheap labour. Moreover it exploits the vast water resources of Nepal through unequal treaties. The Indian rulers engage in constant political manipulations to put their puppets in power, going to the extent of armed intervention to crush rebellion in Nepal as occurred in 1953 when the Indian army put down the peasant uprising led by Bhim Dutta Pant in Western Nepal.
Nepal is a multi-national state in which the Khas nationality dominates the state and oppresses the nationalities of the Tibetan-Burman group of languages as well as other nationalities. The Khas language belongs to the Indo-European family of languages. Other nationalities which belong to the same language group are the Newari nationality in the Katmandu Valley, the Maithili and Bhojpuri nationalities in the southern Terai region. A number of nationalities belong to the Tibeto-Burman language group: the Rai, Limbu, Lepcha, Sherpa, Sunwar in the eastern Hills; Tamang in the central Hills; the Gurung, Magar, Thakali and Chantel in the western hills; the Tharu in the western Terai and inner Terai; the Dhimal, Rajvanshi, Gangai, Meche in the eastern Terai; and the Majhi, Darai, Kumul, Raute, Raji and Dhanuwar in the inner Terai. While the Khas nationality oppresses the other nationalities no single nationality constitutes a numerical majority in Nepal.
The policy of the CPN(M) on the nationality question is determined by its interpretation of the writings of Lenin on the question. It argues that: 'the correct policy and programme of revolutionary Marxists on the national question would have to be based on the three pillars as specified by Lenin, namely: (i) complete equality of rights for all nations, (ii) the rights of nations to self-determination, and (iii) the unity of workers of all nations', (Hisila Yami, 'National Question in Nepal' pp. 2-3, citing V.I. Lenin, 'Collected Works', Vol. 20, Moscow, 1964, p. 454).
Lenin in fact does say this but he immediately precedes this with the following passage which is omitted:
the proletariat of Russia is faced with a two-fold, or rather, a two-sided task: to combat nationalism of every kind, above all, Great-Russian nationalism; to recognise, not only fully equal rights for all nations in general, but also equality of rights as regards polity, i.e., the right of nations to self-determination, to secession, (V.I. Lenin, op. cit., p. 453-54).
As can be readily understood the CPN(M) rejects the right of secession of the oppressed nationalities of Nepal and substitutes in its place a demand for 'autonomy' on the basis of a clear distortion of the teachings of Lenin.
The logic given by the CPN(M) for rejecting the right to secession for the oppressed nationalities of Nepal is that they are: 'keeping in view the low level of development of the nationalities' (Hisila Yami, op. cit., p. 10). It thus seems that the views of Lenin and Stalin require emendation. To the principle of the right of nations to secession the Communists must inscribe a rider: 'we support the right of nations to secession except when the nationalities are at a low level of development'. The CPN(M) viewpoint is a throwback to the view projected in the period of the Second International. Stalin pointed out that its leaders 'hesitated to put white and black, "civilised" and "uncivilised" on the same plane' (J. Stalin, 'Works', Vol. 6, Moscow, 1953, p. 143). Leninism transformed this understanding, Stalin continued, 'Now we can say that this duplicity and half-heartedness in dealing with the national question has been brought to an end. Leninism laid bare this crying incongruity, broke down the wall between whites and blacks, between Europeans and Asiatics, between the "civilised" and "uncivilised" slaves of imperialism, and thus linked the national question with the question of the colonies' (Ibid., pp. 143-44).
The international seminar on the nationality question reveals in a transparent form that the views of the AIPRF on the nationality question, in common with several revolutionary organisations in India, stand far in advance of the perspectives of the general run of parties which share the ideological perceptions of the AIPRF in other parts of the globe.
http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv2n1/aiprf.htm
Survey: American Jews Favor Obama Over McCain by Wide Margin
By Mohamed Elshinnawi
Washington
30 October 2008

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With the November 4th U.S. presidential election just days away, a recent national survey shows large proportions of American Jewish voters favoring Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama over his Republican rival, Senator John McCain. VOA's Mohamed Elshinnawi has details.

US Democratic presidential candidate Illinois Senator Barack Obama helps make phone calls with volunteers at his campaign office in Brighton, Colorado, 26 Oct 2008

One of the most striking findings in the American Jewish Committee's annual opinion poll - a phone survey conducted in late September with one thousand American Jews - is that support for Obama is not higher than it is.
"Senator Obama has 57 percent of the Jewish vote, and Senator McCain has 30 percent, and there's a 13 percent undecided, so the undecided number is a little bit higher than what we'd expect at this stage of the campaign," says Kenneth Bandler, director of communications at the nonpartisan American Jewish Committee.
"Senator Obama getting only 57 percent, it's a bit lower than one would expect from the Jewish electorate at this stage of the campaign," Bandler says. "[Democratic] Senator [John] Kerry in 2004 at the same stage had 69 percent of the Jewish vote, and then he ended up with 76 percent."
Bandler says Obama could end up gaining more Jewish votes from undecided voters, but he notes that's a group also being actively courted by McCain.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain speaks at a campaign rally at Zanesville High School in Zanesville, Ohio, 26 Oct 2008
The American Jewish Committee's phone survey makes it clear that Jews in the United States are a diverse population in terms of their political views and how they define their faith. Eight percent of the survey participants identified themselves as Orthodox Jews, 28 percent as Conservatives and 30 percent as Reformed Jews. Another 31 percent said they are just Jewish.
In terms of major political party affiliations, 56 percent of American Jews call themselves Democrats, 17 percent Republicans and 25 percent independents.
Bandler says he believes this year's Jewish vote will be crucial in deciding contests in so-called swing states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and especially Florida, where support for both candidates is fairly strong:
"Jewish voters account for as much as 5 percent of the total vote in Florida," he says. "So that's one of the reasons both candidates, McCain and Obama, have been spending so much time in Florida to court the Jewish vote, but also to court the Cuban-American vote. Those are critically important in Florida, and other ethnic groups there."
The survey also questioned American Jews' support for the two candidates' vice-presidential running mates.

Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin speaks during a rally in Ohio, 29 Sep 2008
"We found that 73 percent of the voters approve of Obama's selection of Senator Joe Biden as his running mate," Bandler says. "On the other hand, of Jews identified as Republicans, 37 percent approved of John McCain's selection of [Alaska] Governor [Sarah] Palin."
Bandler says the new survey also sheds some light on the issues that influence American Jewish voting patterns. It's a widely held view, for example, that American Jews typically vote for the presidential candidate who shows the deepest commitment to the security of Israel. Indeed, 29 percent of the survey respondents said they feel close - and 38 percent felt fairly close - to the state of Israel. But Bandler notes that only 3 percent described Israel's security as the top issue in this presidential election.
"[Among] the issues of preference for what they would most like the candidates for president to be discussing, the top issues are the economy and then health care, and it's clear they're the two leading issues in the race for the White House," Bandler says. "And then the war in Iraq and the energy security issue - energy independence - was also at the top of the list."
Significant majorities of Jewish voters also expressed more confidence in Democrats than in Republicans to make the right decisions on these issues. And while, like most other Americans, they are still uncertain about how to solve the current economic and financial crisis, American Jews say they trust Democrats more than Republicans - 62 to 28 percent - to find a way to fix the mess.
http://www.voanews.com/english/AmericanLife/2008-10-29-voa18.cfm


WORLD BANK’S NEW POVERTY ESTIMATES
Economic & Political Weekly EPW OCTOBER 25, 2008 31
http://www.epw.in/epw/user/viewAbstract.jsp
A Global Perspective on
Poverty in India
Martin Ravallion
In 2005, one in three of the
people in the world who
consumed less than $ 1.25 a day
(at 2005 purchasing power parity)
lived in India – more than any
other country. They accounted for
about 40 per cent of India’s
population. Twenty-five years
earlier, 60 per cent of India’s
population lived below the same
real line. While this is clear
progress, India’s long-term pace
of poverty reduction by this
measure is no more than average
for the developing world,
excluding China.
This article first discusses the
methodology underlying the
World Bank’s recent revised
estimates of global poverty and
then analyses the Indian numbers.
When discussing absolute poverty
in the world as a whole, there
is a case for using a common
standard for all countries. It would clearly
be questionable to conclude that an Indian
living above India’s poverty line, but
below (say) Brazil’s, is not poor in a global
context, when we count someone at the
same standard of living in Brazil as poor.
Such international comparisons are never
going to be easy as there are inevitably
some confounding contextual factors,
such as differences in poor peoples’ access
to non-market goods and perceptions of
relative deprivation in relatively well-off
countries. But it is of interest to see what
the best available data tell us about the
extent of absolute poverty in the world as a
whole when assessed by a common standard
in terms of command over commodities.
And it is hardly surprising that individual
countries, including India, are interested in
seeing how they are faring in the evolving
global picture of absolute poverty.
An ongoing research project at the
World Bank has tried to offer such a global
account of the extent of absolute poverty
and to track how the picture evolves over
time. The effort has been going on for
almost 20 years, starting with a background
paper [Ravallion et al 1991] done for the
1990 World Development Report [World
Bank 1990]. The latest estimates are reported
in Chen and Ravallion (2008a).
This article summarises the findings and
discusses how India fares in this global
picture of poverty. The article first explains
how we measure global poverty; the box
summarises the key steps, which are
explained in the text of the article. The article
then turns to the implications for India.
Prices for Measuring Poverty
Given a poverty line that accords with
perceptions of what constitutes “poverty”
in a given country, a guiding principle for
poverty measurement within that country
(comparing different regions say) has
been that two people with the same real
consumption level should be treated the
same way no matter where they live. The
real value of the absolute poverty line
should be the same in different places.
The World Bank’s global poverty measures
apply the same principle to the world
as a whole. Thus, along with household
surveys, a key input to measuring global
poverty is data on prices. Only then can
we say whether one can buy more with
(say) 5 yuan per day in China than Rs 10
per day in India. The exchange rates that
equate purchasing power over commodities
(both internationally traded and nontraded)
are called purchasing power parity
rates, or PPPs. The rationale for using a
PPP rather than the market exchange rate
stems from what is called the Balassa-
Samuelson effect in international economics.
This recognises that market exchange
rates, which tend to equate purchasing
power in terms of internationally traded
goods, are deceptive for measuring real
incomes in developing countries, given
that some commodities are not traded;
this includes services but also many goods,
including some food staples. Furthermore,
there is a systematic effect, stemming from
the fact that low real wages in developing
countries entail that labour-intensive nontraded
goods tend to be relatively cheap.
Market exchange rates can greatly underestimate
real income in poor countries.
The Balassa-Samuelson effect provided
the motivation for the International Comparison
Program (ICP), which collects
prices from a large sample of outlets in
each country in each “benchmark year”.
The results of the new 2005 ICP were
released this year [World Bank 2008a, b],
superseding the 1993 ICP, which was the
previous benchmark year used for global
poverty measurement.
The aggregate poverty count will not in
general be independent of the reference
year, even if the underlying data are the
same; this is a widely acknowledged feature
of international comparisons, whether
poverty or national output. However, this
is a moot point given that the data have
changed so much from one ICP round to
These are the views of the author and need not
reflect those of the World Bank or any affiliated
organisation. Gaurav Datt, Dominique van de
Walle and Tara Vishwanath provided helpful
comments on an earlier version of this article.
Martin Ravallion (mravallion@worldbank.org)
is at the Research Department of the World
Bank, Washington.
WORLD BANK’S NEW POVERTY ESTIMATES
OCTOBER 25, 2008 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 32
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WORLD BANK’S NEW POVERTY ESTIMATES
Economic & Political Weekly EPW OCTOBER 25, 2008 33
another. Given these changes, it makes
sense that global poverty measurement
has followed the common practice in other
international comparisons of only doing
the PPP conversion at one date, and using
existing national price data for inter-
temporal comparisons (see box).
The most important change in the
present context is that the 2005 ICP did a
much better job in collecting prices [Heston
and Summers 2008; World Bank 2008b].
Doing reliable price surveys is difficult,
particularly in poor countries where many
goods are not traded internationally. Far
more detailed product descriptions in the
2005 ICP helped to identify comparable
goods, so that we do not make the mistake
of judging people to be better off simply
because they consume lower quality (and
hence cheaper) goods. (An independent
evaluation of ICP rounds prior to 2005 had
been critical of their price surveys for lack
of sufficiently clear product descriptions; see
United Nations 1998.) This new ICP round
is the best data we have had for assessing
how the cost of living varies across countries.
The new price surveys for 2005 reveal
that price levels are higher than we thought
in many developing countries, including
India. The implied upward revisions to the
PPPs tend to be larger in poorer countries,
as one would expect given the likely biases
in past price ICP surveys (whereby it is
poorer countries where the quality bias
noted above is likely to be greater).
This is the first time in 20 years that
India has participated in the ICP, so a fairly
sizeable revision was possible, and may
not be too surprising.1 India’s 1993 consumption
PPP was Rs 7.0 per $ 1, while the
2005 PPP is Rs 16, and the price level index
(ratio of PPP to market exchange rate) went
from 23 per cent to 40 per cent. If one updated
India’s 1993 PPP for inflation in India
and the US one would have obtained a
2005 PPP of Rs 11 rather than Rs 16.
The 2005 ICP is a major improvement in
our knowledge about how the cost of living
varies across countries. Nonetheless,
the new PPPs still have some limitations.
There is a problem of “urban bias” in the
ICP price surveys for some counties, including
in India where rural areas were
under-represented in the ICP price surveys
when used for poverty measurement. I
return to this point below. As was argued
in Ravallion et al (1991), a further concern
is that the weights attached to different
commodities in the conventional PPP
rate may not be appropriate for the poor.
Deaton and Dupriez (2008) have estimated
“PPPs for the poor” for a subset of countries
with the required data; the preliminary
results do not suggest that the implied reweighting
has much impact on the consumption
PPP.2 Another limitation is that
the PPP is a national average. Just as the
cost of living tends to be lower in poorer
countries, one expects it to be lower in
poorer regions within one country, especially
in rural areas. Ravallion et al
(2007) have allowed for urban-rural cost
of living differences facing the poor, and
provided an urban-rural breakdown of
our prior global poverty measures using
the 1993 PPP. We plan to update these
estimates in future work.
‘Dollar a Day’ Revisited
The main international poverty line we
had used in our recent estimates of the
global poverty measures was $ 1.08 per day
($ 32.74 per month) at 1993 PPP. Simply
updating this line for inflation in the US
gives a new line of $ 1.45 per day. However,
that calculation ignores the fact that the
new PPPs imply that the USD values of the
national poverty lines in the poorest
countries have also fallen. An international
line of $ 1.45 in 2005 prices is well above
the average lines found in the poorest
countries [Ravallion et al 2008].
We need to go back to the drawing
board to find a new international poverty
line based on the 2005 ICP data – a line
that is consistent with the original idea of
measuring poverty in the world as a whole
by standards that are typical of the poorest
countries in the world.
With colleagues at the World Bank, I
have applied the new PPPs to a new data
set on national poverty lines across 75
developing countries [Ravallion et al 2008].
Each of these national lines attains stipulated
food energy requirements, which are
similar across countries, with allowances
for what is deemed to be essential non-food
spending in each country. The sources are
World Bank’s Poverty Assessments at country
level and (for low-income countries) the
governments’ Poverty Reduction Strategy
Papers. Naturally, each national line accords
with the prevailing concept of “poverty”
in each country; the lines tend to be more
generous in richer countries, although this
positive economic gradient only emerges
when national consumption is above about
$ 2 per person per day in 2005 prices.
From these data we have recalibrated
the old “$ 1 a day” poverty line, first proposed
20 years ago for quantifying the extent
of “extreme poverty” in the world by
the standards of what “poverty” means in
the poorest countries [Ravallion et al 1991].
Our new international poverty line for
2005 is $ 1.25, which is the average line for
the poorest 15 countries – those consuming
less than $ 2 per day [Ravallion et al
2008]. This is not higher in real terms than
our old $ 1 a day line; indeed, as noted
above, the new line has lower real value in
the US because the new PPPs reduce the
international $ value of the national
poverty lines in the poorest countries.
The present discussion will focus on the
$ 1.25 line.3 However, it is of interest to
compare the estimates using this line with
those for exactly $ 1.00 per day at 2005
PPP, which (as will be explained) is very
close to India’s official poverty line when
converted to PPP $’s.
Revised Estimates
We follow common practice in letting the
national data override the ICP data for
inter-temporal comparisons; this is the
most reasonable position to take given the
changes in methodology between different
Calculating the World Bank’s Global Poverty Measures
· National poverty lines for a reference group of countries are converted to a common currency using the
purchasing power parity (PPP) rate for consumption. Taking an average of these lines gives the international line.
· The international poverty line is converted to local currencies in the benchmark year (2005) using the same PPPs
and then converted to the prices prevailing at the time of the relevant household survey using the best available
CPI for that country.
· Then the poverty rate is calculated from that survey by standard methods.
· Interpolation/extrapolation methods are used to line up the survey-based estimates with these reference years,
including 2005.
· Population weighted aggregate measures are then formed by region and globally.
WORLD BANK’S NEW POVERTY ESTIMATES
OCTOBER 25, 2008 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 34
ICP rounds [World Bank 2008b]. Thus the
PPP conversion is only done once for a given
country, and all estimates are revised
(back to 1981) consistently with the data
for that country. So the PPPs serve the role
of locating the residents of each country in
the “global” distribution, but we do not mix
the new PPPs with those from previous
ICP rounds.
Having converted the international
poverty line at PPP to local currency in 2005
we convert it to the prices prevailing at each
survey date using the country-specific
official consumer price index (CPI). We then
apply this poverty line to the survey data;
the latest estimates use 670 household
surveys for 116 countries. Interpolation
methods are used to “line-up” the surveybased
estimates at the common “reference
years” including 2005 (calendar year).
For the world as a whole, we estimate
that about 1.4 billion people – one quarter
of the population of the developing
world – lived below $ 1.25 a day in 2005
[Chen and Ravallion 2008a]. While that
is far more poverty than our past work
suggested – see for example, Chen and
Ravallion (2004) – we find that the developing
world is making progress against
extreme poverty.
Tracking trends over time is not easy,
given that survey data availability and
(probably) data quality tend to deteriorate
as one goes further back in time. Using the
best available consumer price indices and
household surveys, we estimate that in
1981, 52 per cent of the population, 1.9 billion,
lived below $ 1.25. Data are poor for
some regions (such as Africa and eastern
Europe and central Asia) for the 1980s.
Focusing on 1990 as the base date, we find
that 42 per cent lived below $ 1.25 per day,
1.8 billion people.
The trend over time is similar to past
estimates. The trend rate of decline in the
percentage living below $1.25 a day is
almost exactly one percentage point per
year (strictly it is 0.98 percentage points
using a regression on time, with a standard
error of 0.06 per cent) – up from about
0.8 percentage points per year using our
old estimates [Chen and Ravallion 2008a].
The trend is virtually identical if one starts
the series in 1990.
An important yardstick for assessing the
developing world’s performance against
poverty has been provided by the first
Millennium Development Goal (MDG1),
which is to halve the 1990 incidence of extreme
poverty by 2015. Simply projecting
the trend measured by Chen and Ravallion
(2008a) forward, the estimated proportion
of the population living below $ 1.25 a
day in 2015 is 16.9 per cent (standard error
of 1.5 per cent). Given that the 1990 poverty
rate was 41.7 per cent, the developing
world as a whole appears to be on track to
achieving MDG1. However, the developing
world outside China is not on track for
reaching the goal, which will require a
higher rate of progress [Chen and Ravallion
2008a]. And, given the lags in survey
data availability, these calculations do not
allow for the effect of the higher food and
fuel prices since 2005, which have probably
set back progress by a few years at least.
So far the discussion has focused on the
“headcount index”, given by the proportion
of the population of living in households
with consumption (or income) per
capita below the poverty line. This is the
most popular measure in practice, but it is
known to have a number of conceptual
problems, including the fact that if a poor
person becomes poorer then the index
does not change. A better measure from
this point of view is the “poverty gap (PG)
index” defined as the mean distance below
the poverty line as a proportion of the
line where the mean is taken over the
whole population, counting the non-poor
as having zero poverty gaps.
The PG index for the developing world
as a whole 2005 is 7.7 per cent for the
$ 1.25 line [Chen and Ravallion 2008b]. To
put this in perspective, world (including in
the Organisation for Economic Cooperation
and Development countries) GDP per capita
in 2005 at 2005 PPP was $ 24.58 per day,
implying that the global aggregate
poverty gap was 0.33 per cent of global
GDP using the $ 1.25 line.4 This can be interpreted
as the minimum cost of eliminating
poverty using transfers, though the
actual cost could be very much higher,
given incentive effects and administrative
costs of targeting. By contrast, the cost of
providing a “basic income” of $ 1.25 in the
developing world – by transferring this
sum to every person, whether poor or not
– would be 4.3 per cent of world GDP. The
mean consumption of the world’s poor by
the $ 1.25 line in 2005 was $ 0.87, which is
about one-thirtieth of global GDP per capita.
Similarly to the headcount index, we find
a continual reduction in the global PG
index over time, from 21.7 per cent in 1981
to 14.2 per cent in 1990, then falling to 7.7
per cent in 2005.
A Global Perspective
on Poverty in India
India has a long tradition of rigorously
measuring absolute consumption poverty,
based on the National Sample Surveys
(NSS) that started in the 1950s, under the
leadership of the distinguished statistician
P C Mahalanobis.5 That tradition has been
inward looking, in that the aim has been to
measure poverty by standards that most
Indians would accept as relevant to what
“poverty” means in India. That is entirely
appropriate. And when discussing policies
for reducing poverty in India, one should use
poverty measures deemed relevant to India.
The use of household surveys, such as
the NSS, in measuring poverty has been
widespread, but it has been questioned by
some observers. It has been claimed by
Bhalla (2002) that the NSS underestimates
consumption levels, leading to an overestimation
of the level of poverty in India
and underestimation of the pace of poverty
reduction. The main reason given is the
large and rising gap between the measure
of aggregate household consumption implied
by the NSS and the estimate of private
consumption that can be derived
from India’s National Accounts Statistics
(NAS).6 The gap is unusually large for India.
The NSS data suggest a consumption aggregate
that is not much more than half of
the household consumption component of
the NAS. Furthermore, the divergence has
tended to rise over time, with lower growth
rates implied by the NSS [Deaton 2005].
We do not know what role NSS survey
methods have played in this divergence
from NAS consumption. National Sample
Survey Organisation’s (NSSO) survey
methods appear to have changed rather
little over many decades. That is probably
good news for comparability reasons, although
it does raise questions about
whether their methods are in accord with
international best practice. This is something
that should be reviewed in the future,
in the light of international experience.
WORLD BANK’S NEW POVERTY ESTIMATES
Economic & Political Weekly EPW OCTOBER 25, 2008 35
However, the gap in the consumption
aggregates from these two sources does not
imply that the NSS overestimates poverty.
Some of the gap is due to errors in NAS
consumption, which is determined residually
in India, after subtracting other components
of domestic absorption from output
at the commodity level. There are also
differences in the definition of consumption,
and there are things included in NAS
consumption that one would not use in
measuring household living standards.7
Some degree of under-reporting of consumption
by respondents, or selective
compliance with the NSS’ randomised assignments,
is likely (as in any survey), although
it is expected that this is more of a
problem for estimating the levels of living
of the rich than of the poor.8 While we
cannot rule out the possibility that such
problems lead us to overestimate poverty
in India – and an external review of the
procedures used by the NSS, in the light of
international best practice, is called for in
my view – it is hard to justify the practice
used by some analysts of replacing the
mean from the NSS by consumption per
capita from the NAS, while assuming that
inequality is correctly measured by the NSS.
India’s official poverty lines are set by
the Planning Commission, updating for
inflation a long-standing poverty line, going
back to a task force charged with the
job of setting a poverty line in the late
1970s using the 1973-74 NSS round as the
reference [Government of India 1979].9
The poverty line has been essentially unchanged
in real terms for 35 years. In
2005, India’s official poverty line was
about Rs 18 and Rs 12 per person per day
in urban and rural areas respectively.10
Naturally, when discussing poverty in
any one country one should use the
concept of poverty deemed most relevant
to prevailing standards of living in that
country. It would be fair to ask whether
India’s official poverty line for 1973-74 is
still relevant today, given the changes that
have occurred in levels of living, activity
levels and consumption patterns over the
last 35 years. But that is not at issue here.
How does India’s official poverty line
compare to our international line of $ 1.25
per day at PPP? We must first find the rupee
equivalents for both urban and rural areas
of the international line. For this purpose
Chen and Ravallion (2008a) assumed that
the ratio of India’s official urban poverty
line to the rural line of 1.51 is also valid for
the international line; in other words, the
relative cost of living between urban and
rural areas is assumed to be the same. Given
this ratio and the 2005 consumption PPP for
India of Rs 15.60 from World Bank (2008a),
and taking account of the sample design of
India’s ICP, one can back out unique rupee
poverty lines for urban and rural areas corresponding
to any given international line.11
On doing so one finds that the rupee values
of the international line of $ 1.25 at PPP are
Rs 21.53 and Rs 14.24 per day for urban and
rural areas respectively.12 Using the implied
PPPs for urban and rural India of Rs 17.24
and Rs 11.40 respectively, India’s official
line has a value of almost exactly $ 1.00 per
day, well below our international line.13
India’s line is also lower than what one
would predict given the current level of
India’s mean consumption.14
Indian Trends
How does India fare in our global picture of
extreme poverty? Using the NSS for 2004-05,
we estimate that 42 per cent of the population
lived below $ 1.25 a day in 2005 (in 2005
prices); 24 per cent lived below $ 1.00 per
day. Twenty-five years earlier,
the proportion living
below $ 1.25 was 60 per cent
(with 42 per cent living below
$ 1.00). This is clearly
progress, though not enough
to reduce the number of
people living below $ 1.25,
which rose from 421 to 456
million. By contrast, using
instead the $ 1 line the
number of poor fell, from 296 to 267 million.
India’s poverty gap index fell from 20
per cent in 1981 to 11 per cent in 2005. The
mean consumption of those living below
$ 1.25 a day rose from $ 0.84 per day to
$ 0.93 per day over the same period. Noting
that India’s GDP per capita at PPP was $ 5.83
per day in 2005 [World Bank 2008a], the
aggregate poverty gap represents 2.3 per
cent of India’s GDP.
Our calculations point to an important
but often neglected fact: a large and growing
number of people in India live just
above the country’s official poverty line.
Indeed, over this 25-year period, the
number living in the meagre 25 cent interval
of $ 1.00 to $1.25 has risen from 124 million
to 189 million. The poverty rate rises from
24.3 per cent to 41.6 per cent over this interval,
representing an elasticity of 2.8.15
Clearly then we should not be too comforted
by the fact that the number of people
living below India’s official poverty
line has fallen by some 30 million over this
period. It would not take much of a shock
to push them, and many more people,
back below that line.
Figure 1 shows how India has fared over
time in terms of both these poverty lines;
the graph also gives the series for our old
international line of $ 1.08 per day at 1993
PPP. I give results for each of the “reference
years” for the global poverty measures;
these do not coincide with NSS survey
rounds and an interpolation method is
used, as outlined by Chen and Ravallion
(2008a).16 Using the $ 1.25 line, the trend
rate of poverty reduction (using a regression
on time) is 0.72 percentage points per
year (with a standard error of 0.04 per
cent); using the $ 1.00 line the trend is
about the same, namely, 0.71 percentage
points per year (s.e.=0.04 per cent). The
proportionate rate of reduction is clearly
higher for the lower line.
India’s overall rate of poverty reduction
is lower than average for the developing
world. (Recall that the overall trend is 1
percentage point per year.) Figure 2 (p 36)
plots the estimates over time. The country’s
share of the total number of people
living below $ 1.25 a day rose from 22 per
cent in 1981 to 33 per cent in 2005. However,
China is largely responsible for this fact.17
If we look at the developing world outside
China, the proportion living below $ 1.25
a day has fallen from 40 per cent to 29
per cent over 1981-2005, which is about
the same proportionate rate of decline
(about 30 per cent) as India (Figure 2).
Figure 1: Alternative Measures of Poverty in India (1981-2005 )
Headcount index (% below poverty line)
70
60
40
20 | | | | | |
1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005
Old international line
($ 1.08 at 1993 at prices using 1993 ppp)
New international line
($ 1.25/day 2005 ppp)
$1.00/day 2005 prices and ppp
(close to India’s official line for 2004/05)
WORLD BANK’S NEW POVERTY ESTIMATES
OCTOBER 25, 2008 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 36
Indeed, India’s share of poverty in the
developing world outside China has fallen,
but only slightly, from 39 per cent in 1981
to 38 per cent in 2005. The fall occurred
in the 1980s; the proportion was also
38 per cent in 1990. Looking across the
rest of the developing world, many countries
have clearly not had India’s success
against poverty. But many have done
better too.
Judged by the $ 1.25 line, the trend rate
of poverty reduction seen in India over
1981-2005 is not sufficient to achieve MDG1;
the projected poverty rate for 2015 is 34
per cent, while the target is 26 per cent
(half the 1990 rate of 51 per cent). When
one uses the $ 1.00 line (close to India’s of-
ficial line at PPP), the MDG1 will be reached,
though just barely; the projected $ 1.00 a
day poverty rate for 2015 is 16 per cent, while
the target is 17 per cent. However, the likely
impacts on India’s poor of the recent rise in
food and fuel prices make it unlikely in my
view that India will reach the first MDG
even using the official poverty line.
Slow Progress
The potential for economic growth to reduce
India’s poverty rate is evident from
the research results discussed above, comparing
the country’s poverty measures for
the $ 1.00 line (close to India’s official line,
at 2005 PPP) with the new international
poverty line of $ 1.25 a day at 2005 PPP.
Recall that a large share – 17 per cent! – of
India’s population is found in this narrow
$ 0.25 a day interval. The other side of the
coin to the implied vulnerability of India’s
“near poor” to a downturn (as discussed
above) is that any growth process that
raises all levels of living by the same proportion
will have a sizeable impact on the
poverty count. A 20 per cent increase in
mean household consumption without any
change in inequality would be equivalent
in its effect on India’s $ 1.25 a day poverty
rate to lowering the poverty line from $
1.25 to $ 1.00. Such a “distribution neutral”
growth process would reduce India’s
$ 1.25 a day poverty rate dramatically,
from 42 per cent to 24 per cent.
Realising that potential is another
matter. The overall response of India’s
poverty measures to growth in GDP per
capita has clearly fallen
short of this potential.18 An
important factor is that (as
noted above) growth in
mean consumption as measured
by the NSS has been
lower than either GDP
growth or growth in mean
consumption as measured
by the NAS. The sources of
this divergence are not yet
well understood. There are
two competing interpretations that can be
offered based on what we know. On the
one hand, it is possible that India’s pace of
poverty reduction is being underestimated
using the NSS; on the other hand, it is no less
likely that the extent of inequality and its
increase over time has been underestimated,
thus reducing the impact of GDP
growth on poverty in India.
There appears to be wide (though not
universal) agreement that growth in GDP
per capita is necessary for sustained poverty
reduction; the main differences lie
in how much impact is expected from
economic growth (depending, in part, on
how one interprets the gap between NSS
and NAS consumption). There is even more
debate on the role played by inequality.
The data do not suggest that India is a
high inequality country. For example, based
on the same NSS data used for measuring
poverty, the poorest 20 per cent account for
about 8 per cent of total household consumption;
in high inequality countries such
as Brazil or South Africa, the poorest 20 per
cent account for 4 per cent or less of total
consumption [World Bank 2007]. (Indeed,
if India had been a high inequality country,
we would not have expected to find that
much potential for growth in mean consumption
to reduce poverty.)19
Nonetheless, the extent of inequality
and how it evolves during the growth
process, matter to India’s progress against
poverty. Inequality is relevant in two (conceptually
distinct) respects.20 First, the way
inequality evolves in a growing economy
naturally determines how much the poor
share (absolutely) in the benefits of that
growth. If the bulk of the growth is found
in places and/or sectors of the economy
where the poor are not concentrated, then
poverty will not fall much. There is evidence
that the (geographic and sectoral) pattern of
growth in India has not been particularly
“pro-poor”, which is putting upward
pressure on inequality in India.21
Second, high inequalities in certain dimensions
can undermine the growth
process itself, and (hence) retard progress
against poverty. Specific sorts of inequality
in India entail that poor people lack the
opportunities others enjoy for taking
advantage of new economic opportunities,
including those unleashed by marketoriented
reforms.22 Unequal access to
the advantages of good schooling is an
important example; there is evidence
that such inequalities greatly attenuate
the poverty-reducing impact of growth in
India’s non-farm economy.23 This can be
reinforced by inequalities in access to
credit for financing productive investment
opportunities. The geography of economic
Figure 2: Poverty in India Compared to the Rest of the Developing World
Headcount index (% below $1.25 a day at 2005 PPP)
| | | | | |
1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005
70
60
40
20
Developing world
as a whole
Developing
world less China
India
Institute for Social and Economic Change (ISEC)
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With reference to the above advertisement inviting applications
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WORLD BANK’S NEW POVERTY ESTIMATES
Economic & Political Weekly EPW OCTOBER 25, 2008 37
activity and public spending can also
make it harder for people in disadvantaged
locations to escape poverty. The
relative disadvantages facing certain social
groups, such as defined by caste and
gender, can also come at a cost to India’s
long-term growth and (hence) progress
against absolute poverty.
Redressing these often deep-rooted inequalities,
while maintaining the economic
growth that is needed for sustained poverty
reduction, is the long-standing challenge
facing all developing countries, including
India. However, while specific trade-offs
will be inevitable at all levels of policymaking,
effectively reducing the inequalities
of opportunity found within India will
almost certainly do more to promote
aggregate growth than to reduce it.
Notes
1 An even larger adjustment was required for China,
which had not officially participated in the ICP
before 2005 [World Bank 2008b]. On the implications
for global poverty measures for China see
Chen and Ravallion (2008b).
2 The Asian Development Bank (2008) has taken a
further step of implementing special price surveys
for Asian countries to collect prices on explicitly
lower qualities of selected items than those identified
in the standard ICP. Using lower quality goods essentially
entails lowering the reference standard
of living used to define the poverty line.
3 Chen and Ravallion (2008a) present results for a
line of $ 2 per day (the median poverty line amongst
developing countries) and $ 2.50 a day (the median
amongst all except the poorest 15 countries).
4 This assumes that nobody lives below our international
poverty line in the OECD countries.
5 The National Sample Surveys provide data on the
consumption expenditures, including imputed
values for consumption in kind, notably from own
farm products, of large random samples of Indian
households.
6 Ninan (2008) claims that there is an inconsistency
between the World Bank’s estimates of poverty
in India (as reported in Chen and Ravallion
2008a) and the World Bank’s estimates of the
shares of consumption held by India’s poor (as reported
in, for example, World Bank 2007). However,
the inconsistency is in Ninan’s calculations, not
the World Bank’s estimates. He compares the poor’s
share of household consumption as estimated from
the National Sample Surveys (NSS) with a version
of the same share but using instead the private consumption
component of India’s national accounts.
Ninan is wrong to infer that there is any inconsistency
between the World Bank’s estimates from the
two sources: both are based on NSS consumption
and they are perfectly consistent.
7 For further discussion of the differences between
the two data sources see Ravallion (2000, 2003)
and Deaton (2005).
8 Korinek et al (2006) examine the implications of
selective compliance for measures of poverty and
inequality. They find that correcting for selective
compliance in the Current Population Survey for
the US leads to a higher inequality measure but
has little effect on measures of poverty.
9 The task force estimated the poverty lines for
1973-74 to be Rs 49.09 and Rs 56.64 for rural and
urban areas respectively. These were the expenditure
levels at which average food energy requirements
were met, which were determined to be
2,400 and 2,100 calories per person per day for
rural and urban areas respectively. (In 2004-05
prices the corresponding lines were Rs 538.6 and
Rs 356.3 per month after adjusting for inflation,
using separate indices for urban and rural areas.)
10 More precisely, India’s official poverty lines for
2004-05 were Rs 538.6 and Rs 356.3 per month.
11 The weights on urban and rural process in India’s
ICP can be derived from the sampling information
available from the ICP. For food, clothing and
footwear, 72 per cent of the 717 sampled price outlets
for India’s ICP were in urban areas and only
28 per cent were rural, while for other goods the
outlets were solely urban. The ICP took simple averages
of these prices. It is assumed that goods
other than food, clothing and footwear had the
same prices in rural and urban areas. Then the
implicit urban and rural international poverty
lines for India consistent with the 2005 ICP have
weights of 0.72 and 0.28 respectively.
12 These are the solutions to two equations: ZU/
ZR=1.51 and 0.72ZU+0.28ZR=15.60×1.25 where
ZU and ZR are the urban and rural international
poverty lines in rupees respectively.
13 Recall that India’s official poverty lines for 2004-05
were Rs 17.71 and Rs 11.71 per day for urban and rural
areas (Rs 538.6 and Rs 356.3 per month). Using our
urban and rural PPPs for 2005 given above these
represent $ 1.03 per day [Chen and Ravallion 2008].
14 For India the national poverty line of $ 1.03 per
day is one-third below the value of $ 1.63 per day
that we predict based on India’s NAS consumption
per capita, based on the cross-country relationship
in Ravallion et al (2008).
15 A 71 per cent proportionate increase in the poverty
rate is associated with a 25 per cent increase in
the poverty line.
16 We decided to drop that NSS survey round for
1999-2000 given the well-known comparability
problem with other rounds (as discussed in Datt
and Ravallion 2002, and Deaton and Drèze 2002)
and the fact that we now have a new survey for
2004-05 that is comparable to the previous round
of 1993-94. We also decided to only use the
5-yearly rounds of the NSS, which have larger
samples and more detailed and more comparable
consumption modules.
17 Chen and Ravallion (2008a) estimate that the
$ 1.25 a day poverty rate in China fell from 84 per
cent to 16 per cent over the period 1981-2005. Yet
again, the gold medal must go to China (and in a far
more important game than any Olympic event).
18 For further discussion see Datt and Ravallion
(1996, 2002) and Ravallion and Datt (1996).
19 If the poor start off with a very small share of the
pie, then they will tend to gain less from a bigger
pie. For recent evidence on how much high inequality
limits the potential for growth to reduce
poverty see Ravallion (2007).
20 For further elaboration of these points see Ravallion
(2007).
21 See Datt and Ravallion (2002) and Deaton and
Drèze (2002).
22 See World Bank (2006) for a full discussion of
how inequalities of opportunity impinge on economic
development.
23 See Datt and Ravallion (2002) and Ravallion and
Datt (2002).
References
Asian Development Bank (2008): Comparing Poverty
across Countries: The Role of Purchasing Power
Parities, Asian Development Bank, Manila.
Bhalla, Surjit (2002): Imagine There’s No Country:
Poverty, Inequality and Growth in the Era of Globalisation,
Institute for International Economics,
Washington DC.
Chen, Shaohua and Martin Ravallion (2004): ‘How
Have the World’s Poorest Fared Since the Early
1980s?’, World Bank Research Observer, 19/2: 141-70.
– (2008a): ‘The Developing World Is Poorer Than
We Thought, but No Less Successful in the Fight
against Poverty’, Policy Research Working Paper
4703, World Bank, Washington DC (http://econ.
worldbank.org/docsearch).
– (2008b): ‘China Is Poorer Than We Thought, But
No Less Successful in the Fight against Poverty’ in
Sudhir Anand, Paul Segal and Joseph Stiglitz (eds),
Debates on the Measurement of Poverty, Oxford
University Press.
Datt, Gaurav and Martin Ravallion (1996): ‘India’s
Checkered History in the Fight against Poverty:
Are There Lessons for the Future?’, Economic &
Political Weekly, 31: 2479-86.
– (2002): ‘Has India’s Post-Reform Economic
Growth Left the Poor Behind’, Journal of Economic
Perspectives, 16(3), 89-108.
Deaton, Angus (2005): ‘Measuring Poverty in a Growing
World (or Measuring Growth in a Poor World)’,
Review of Economics and Statistics, 87: 353-78.
Deaton, Angus and Jean Drèze (2002): ‘Poverty and
Inequality in India: A Re-Examination’, Economic
& Political Weekly, September 7: 3729-48.
Deaton, Angus and Olivier Dupriez (2008): ‘Poverty PPPs
Around the World: An Update and Progress Report’,
mimeo, Development Data Group, World Bank.
Government of India (1979): Report of the Task Force
on Projections of Minimum Needs and Effective
Consumption, Planning Commission, New Delhi.
Heston, Alan and Robert Summers (2008): ‘Interview
with Alan Heston and Robert Summers’, ICP
Bulletin, 5(1): 3-6.
Korinek, Anton, Johan Mistiaen and Martin Ravallion
(2006): ‘Survey Nonresponse and the Distribution of
Income’, Journal of Economic Inequality, 4(2): 33-55.
Ninan, T N (2008): ‘Questionable Numbers’, Business
Standard, September 8.
Ravallion, Martin (2000): ‘Should Poverty Measures
Be Anchored to the National Accounts?’ Economic &
Political Weekly, 34(35 and 36), August 26: 3245-52.
– (2003): ‘Measuring Aggregate Economic Welfare
in Developing Countries: How Well Do National
Accounts and Surveys Agree?’, Review of Economics
and Statistics, 85: 645-52.
– (2007): ‘Inequality Is Bad for the Poor’ in John
Micklewright and Steven Jenkins (eds), Inequality
and Poverty ReExamined,
Oxford University
Press, Oxford.
Ravallion, Martin, Shaohua Chen and Prem Sangraula
(2007): ‘New Evidence on the Urbanisation of
Global Poverty’, Population and Development
Review, 33(4): 667-702.
– (2008): ‘Dollar a Day Revisited’, Policy Research
Working Paper 4620, World Bank (http://econ.
worldbank.org/docsearch).
Ravallion, Martin and Gaurav Datt (1996): ‘How Important
to India’s Poor Is the Sectoral Composition
of Economic Growth?’, World Bank Economic
Review, 10: 1-26.
– (2002): ‘Why Has Economic Growth Been More
Pro-Poor in Some States of India than Others?’,
Journal of Development Economics, 68, 381-400.
Ravallion, Martin, Gaurav Datt and Dominique van
de Walle (1991): ‘Quantifying Absolute Poverty in
the Developing World’, Review of Income and
Wealth, 37: 345-61.
United Nations (1998): Evaluation of the International
Comparison Programme (‘Ryten Report’) (http://
siteresources.worldbank.org/ICPINT/Resources/
UNSC30_ICP1_1999.pdf ).
World Bank (1990): World Development Report: Poverty,
Oxford University Press, New York.
– (2006): World Development Report: Equity and
Development, Oxford University Press, New York.
– (2007): World Development Indicators, World
Bank, Washington DC.
– (2008a): Global Purchasing Power Parities and
Real Expenditures, 2005 International Comparison
Program, World Bank, Washington DC (www.
worldbank.org/data/icp).
– (2008b): Comparisons of New 2005 PPPs with
Previous Estimates (Revised Appendix G to World
Bank 2008a), World Bank, Washington DC (www.
worldbank.org/data/icp).
[© by the International Bank for Reconstruction and
Deve lopment/The World Bank, Washington DC, United
States.]

National Questions: Trajectories & Predicaments

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Assamese Nationality Question
By SAJAL NAG
http://www.manipurresearchforum.org/assam_national_sajal_arch4.htm

A misinformed idea of nation making subdues smaller linguistic communities by a so-called majority community. Assamese nationalist assertion is driven by its desire to break the Bengalee domination of its language and culture. But overridden by the anti-Bengalee movement and the politics of dominance underneath, the smaller communities which formed parts of the composite Assamese identity have today got alienated and parted ways.


Until very recently the making of an Indian was seen as a unilinear, mono-dimensional process manifesting itself in the Indian national movement. The sole objective of the national movement was to rally all the Indians together to combat British colonialism and establish itself as a ‘nation’. (1) The only diversion in this process came from the separatist attitude of the Muslims who played into the ‘divide and rule’ manoeuvres of the colonial administrators and brought about the partition of the country.
One of the foremost challenges to this historiography came when Indian national movement was refused to be seen as a ‘hallowed and blemish-less’ movement. It was pointed out that Indian national movement failed to channelise the currents of national and the social discontents into one single anti-colonial, anti-feudal revolution—a lapse which was described as ‘tragic’.(2) This movement also failed to ensure ‘perfect mobilisation’ (3) which happened due to its bourgeois character.(4) This radical historiography also pointed out that there has been a tendency of the ‘elitist’ historiography to concentrate on the Gandhian uprisings as ‘abnormal outgrowth’ peripheral to the study of the development of Indian nationhood.(5) These critics depicted that it was a distortion of the reality. The Congress-led movement and the popular upsurges in various parts of the country were coeval processes. In fact, often, at opportune times, the Congress leadership attempted to seize control of the latter so as to curb the outburst of any undesirable militancy. The third challenge disputed the theory that the achievement of Indian freedom was solely the work of the Indian National Congress. It brought to light vast new materials to show that the British attempted to retain the ‘jewel of the crown’ until the last-moment (6) but it was the immense panic created by the widespread revolt throughout the country that prompted the war-devastated Britain to make a hasty withdrawal from India.(7) The fourth dimension of the Indian nation making process was discovered by another group of historians who rejected the notion that India was already a nation. It brought into light the fact that colonial India experienced two streams of coeval processes as far as its nationality question was concerned. One was based on its pan-Indian identity and the other on its regional linguistic-cultural identity. While the former stimulated fight against the colonial rule, the latter at the same time worked towards self-assertion.(8)

This school rejected the pre-conceived one-nation-one-national movement theory and formulated that considering the diverse and multiple linguistic, cultural and even racial communities that India consisted of, who are all advancing towards a nation like entity, India can be described as a multi-nationality and multi-ethnic country.(9) India is, therefore, a country which contained a number of nationalities, both nascent and consolidated, who are at various historical stages of development. None of these, however, theoretically speaking, yet by themselves form a nation. Together they form the Indian nation-in-the-making.(10) The nationalist aspirations of self-rule of these entities are either satisfied or neutralised by the federal structure of the union. The period of Indian freedom struggle coincided with the period of awakening of these nationalities. These awakenings manifested themselves in the form of agitations and movements for recognition to their respective vernaculars, formation of unilingual provinces and separation from the dominant nationalities. These movements based on regional identities have been variously termed as ‘little nationalism’,(11) ‘regionalism’,(12) ‘sub-nationalism’ (13) and even full-fledged ‘nationalism’ (14). In general, historically speaking these movements flowed under the shadow of the anti-colonial movement during the colonial period and did not oppose the interest of the latter. In fact, these were not isolated movements but an integral part of the nation-making process itself. But, after independence, these movements occurred with more frequency and intensity as recognition to regional identities and regional autonomy was a promised nationalist agenda. It, therefore, often had to fight against the post-colonial state itself as it went back on its promises and failed to recognise the urgency of reorganisation of the colonial policy.(15) These struggles and the response to it by the colonial state thus form an important chapter of the history of modern India. Unfortunately, the text books of modern Indian history do not include these processes. Although, the resurgence of radical schools of Indian historiography in recent times has forced the entry of peasants, workers, tribals and dalits into the textbooks of modern Indian history(16) which so far were ‘elitist’ and ‘politics’ oriented, ethnic and nationality movements still remain excluded. But the developments that post-colonial India have experienced have made it amply clear that without the inclusion of these streams any understanding of the making of Indian nation would be in-adequate.

In India, the nationality formation process hastened with the advent of British capitalism in colonial form. The new mode of production required a homogeneous market, unified political territory and a common language. The British, therefore, administratively unified the country. In the process, among the groups which first came into contact with the British, the language of the major group was designated the official language of the area indirectly recognising the group as the major nationality. This resulted in suppression of small nationalities whose language was not developed or who were yet to come into contact with the British. Their linguistic-cultural claims were brushed aside. The big nationalities flourished while the small ones remained subdued. The big nationalities spread their social and economic domination(17) by controlling the employment sector owing to the head start they had in the new education system. To assert their nationality status the small groups had to break the domination of the big groups and reinstate their own language and culture in their rightful place. In this nationality formation process, language played a crucial role. It became a rallying point and a symbol of crusade. In Assam, Bengali was introduced as the official language overlooking the claims of the Assamese. The Assamese strongly resented this. The situation was aggravated by the dominance of Bengalees in the employment sector and suppression of Assamese culture. Complaints were voiced in Orrissa also about the unequal status of Oriya vis-à-vis the Bangali language. The situation here was similar to that of Assam. The Oriyas lamented that ‘the Bengalees assert that Oriya is merely a dialect of Bengali and has no claim to be considered as an independent language (though) at a period when Oriya was already a fixed and settled language, Bengali did not even exist.’(18) To this were added other issues which further strained the relationship between the two groups. ‘The new education system was dominated by the Bengalees. There was a movement in progress to replace Oriya by Bengali in administration and education.(19) The movement for the separation of Bihar from Bengal was Bihar’s first effort to ‘assert its own regional identity’.(20) Bihar was tagged to Bengal during pre-British times. This slowed its political and economic development. The emergence of British power sealed Bihar’s fate for another century. On the one hand, the official language of Bihar—‘Hindi’—was not the mother-tongue of any major population group.(21) While on the other, Bihar had to grow under the cultural shadow of Bengal. Bengalees were also the preponderant group in education and jobs. Thus, the agitation for separation of Bihar from Bengal was essentially an anti Bengalee movement.(22) In Madras presidency, the Telegus outnumbered the Tamils but because the Tamils were educationally advanced, they dominated Government service which was then the most important employment sector. This incited jealousy between the two communities.(23) Such conflicts between communities in India, though are often violent and a source of destabilization, were signs of development of nationalities.(24)




FORMATION OF THE ASSAMESE NATIONALITY:

The pre-colonial Assamese were settled in a clearly demarcated geographical territory. The Indo-Aryan Assamese language emerged as the lingua franca for group residing within the boundary including the ruling Ahoms who gave up their language in favour of Assamese. There was corresponding development in literature and culture also. While state intervention helped institutionalise folk culture, the rise of the bhakti movement enriched literature. As a result it became easier to distinguish the Assamese as a separate entity. State control of the production process brought about uniformity in the economic life of the people. The geography of the state and royal policies bred insularity, and consequently dislike for outsiders. A greater Assamese community was emerging on the basis of common language, territory, economic life and mental outlook.(25) The community, however, was not stable because the members of the community, represented distinguishable cultural types; it was not unilingual in spite of Assamese being the lingua franca because the Indo-Mongoloid groups retained their languages for conversation; and the concept of a motherland did not extend beyond the local geographical unit and operated only during external attacks. Inner contradictions surfaced owing to the advancement of a feudal mode of production resulting in the Moamaria peasant uprising in religious garb followed by a fratricidal war of succession. In the internecine power struggle the Ahom royalty threw open the insular society and sought British and Burmese help. The Burmese entered and devastated the structure followed by the British who stayed on to annex the province.

The advent of British rule disrupted the social formation. To render it responsive to the requirements of British capitalism, the existing structure of Assam was transformed by force. The ownership of the means of production was changed and the self-sufficiency of the economy was destroyed. Production for satisfaction of needs was replaced by production for trade. A new revenue system along with its superstructure was introduced. An extensive administrative set up along with a new judicial system made their appearance. The new means of subsistence and functioning changed the value system. The cumulative result was the gradual impoverishment of Assamese peasants, the disappearance of the medieval gentry and the emergence of modern social classes.

A number of Bengalee functionaries entered Assam along with the British. They were the functionaries through whom the changes were effected. A new geographical territory was imposed on the Assamese by attaching them to Bengal. The British rule halted the centuries old process of amalgamation and homogenisation in Assam.

When, in the interest of tea plantations and trade, the British separated Assam from Bengal and created a separate Assam Chief Commissionerate, Bengali was introduced as the official language of Assam. This was a setback for the Assamese. Missionaries preaching Christianity through the medium of the local tongue were also affected. Together they started an agitation to compel change in the policy. The government retaliated by saying that Assamese could not be the medium of instruction since it was a mere Bengali patois. The Assamese middle class and Missionaries made serious efforts to disprove the theory. The British, meanwhile, were supported by prominent Bengalees. However, Assamese was finally declared the official language.

While the subjugation of Assamese was viewed as an attack on the Assamese nationality, the employment of Bengalees was considered to be an attack on the economic rights of the Assamese. In a situation where the traditional means of subsistence were fast disappearing, avenues open to the Assamese were the white collar jobs. However, they lost these jobs to competing Bengalees who had better access to modern education and were often preferred by the British. Economic frustration gave birth to ethnic ideas and resentment.

Ethnic polarisation also permeated the social relations between the two groups. Being the functionaries of the British, the Bengalees identified themselves with the ruling class. Their cultural advancement bred ethnocentrism which led them to flaunt their advancement. Bengali cultural activities, therefore, flourished in the Brahmaputra Valley. In contrast Assamese culture was subdued. Attracted by the advancement of the Bengalees a section of the Assamese delinked themselves from the Assamese community and adopted Bengali culture and openly stated that they were proud of doing so. This resulted in partial acculturation. The societal bi-culturalism hampered the development of the Assamese nationality.

The most serious threat to the Assamese came from the increase in the numerical strength of the Bengalees through continuous immigration. Immigration was not confined to job-seeking Bengalees only. It comprised the land-seeking farm settlers also. The massive immigration continued unabated despite protests from the Assamese because the economy needed these immigrants. From a small immigrant community, the Bengalees became a dominating force. The enlargement of their sphere of influence enabled the Bengalees to lay claim to the resources of the province hitherto considered the exclusive preserve of the Assamese. The Bengalees also demanded and won a share in local self-government and state politics. They challenged the Assamese by demanding that some schools should have Bengali as the medium of instruction. Since they were numerically strong, the government acceded to their demand. The establishment of Bengali (medium of instruction) schools in the Brahmaputra Valley was another setback to the aspirations of the Assamese nationality.

To counter the Bengalee dominance the Assamese had to accomplish a number of arduous tasks. One was to curb the growth of Bengalee population. Since immigration was partially government sponsored, their appeals and protests fell on deaf ears. The immigrants, who happened to be Bengalees, along with the Bengalees of Surma Valley were already in a position to be declared as the majority community of the province. Since the existence of the Assamese nationality now depended on the reduction of the number of the Bengalees in the province it was sought to be achieved by transferring Sylhet to Bengal and assimilating the immigrant Bengalee farm settlers.

Meanwhile, the continuing settlement of Bengalee Muslim immigrants destroyed the homogeneity of Assamese society. The immigrants with an alien religion, different languages, social attitudes and behavioural patterns were regarded as pollutants by the Assamese rural folk who valued their ethnic, linguistic and religious affiliations. The prosperity of the immigrant peasants fuelled the Assamese-Bengalee peasant conflict.



The middle class leadership of Assam taking note of the threats and challenges faced by the Assamese nationality and the ethnic conflict, it was involved in responding to the situation. They established Assamese literature by contributing copiously to it and unearthing its past glory. They also successfully demolished the theory that Assamese was a dialect of the Bengali language and affirmed its separate identity. Through a process of meticulous politicisation and socialisation they channelled the fears and aspirations of the emerging Assamese nationality into a social movement.

The movement for the development of the Assamese nationality attracted participation of all classes of the society. Reduction of the numerical strength of the Bengalee was taken up as the most urgent task by the Assamese at the social level. They joined the Bengalees of Sylhet in their demand that Sylhet be transferred back to Bengal. The Assamese now forced the government to stop further immigration and evict the existing immigrants. The unrestricted immigration also increased the percentage of the Muslim population in Assam since a large number of the immigrant Bengalees were Muslims. This led the Muslim League to demand that Assam be transferred to the proposed state of Pakistan. The Grouping plan of the Cabinet Mission which bracketed Assam with Bengal was a simultaneous threat. While the former proposal meant that the Assamese would lose their identity in the proposed Islamic State of Pakistan, the latter proposal meant that they would be absorbed in Bengal. Both were considered equally perilous for the survival of the Assamese nationality which found itself cornered both on linguistic and religious grounds. To fight these threats the entire Assamese society fought as unified group. Eventually, the Assamese leadership succeeded in thwarting the Grouping plan. Soon, Sylhet too was transferred to Pakistan.

The Assamese-Bengalee ethnic conflict, thus, was an integral part of the process of the development of the Assamese nationality. By the fourth decade of the twentieth century the Indo-Mongoloid groups like the Bodos and Ahoms who hitherto formed a part of the Assamese nationality also began to show signs of secession which the Assamese leadership failed to perceive. With its new found chauvinism, the Assamese nationality not only ignored the grievances of such groups, it even brushed aside their cultural aspirations.
Again though the numerical strength of the Bengalees had reduced after the transfer of Sylhet to Pakistan, a few lakhs of Bengalee Hindus entered Assam as refugees in successive waves. They added to the existing Bengalee population. But the potential source of danger was the immigrants who declared themselves as Assamese in the Census Reports without actually going through the assimilation process. In a political structure where ‘numbers’ could make or break a nationality; this turn out to become a major issue of concern. The perpetual fear that the Assamese faced then onwards was that at any time these immigrants might resume calling themselves Bengalees thereby tilting the balance again in favour of the Bengalees
.
The rise and development of the ethnic conflict in Assam had Assamese nationality formation as its backdrop, either of these was not an isolated process. In fact, the ethnic conflict and Assamese nationality formation were inextricable parts of the same process—of the development of Assamese nationality.



POST INDEPENDENCE CRISIS:

After independence ethno-nationality issues began to surface endemically. The outbreak of a strong and violent ethnic conflict after 1947 was perhaps nowhere as prominent as in Assam. The ethnic conflict in Assam had its making during the colonial period. In that period there was no violent clash between the Bengalees and the Assamese. The Assamese wanted to remove the Bengalees from their social unit. The transfer of Sylhet to Pakistan and eviction of immigrants substantially reduced the Bengalee and Muslim population in the Assam Valley. This reduced the threat to the political aspirations of the Assamese. However, the preponderant Bengali culture in the valley worried the Assamese. The influx of refugees from then Pakistan again increased the Bengalee population of Assam. The tension surfaced again. Soon after independence an open clash broke out in 1948 between the two communities. In major towns of Assam valley, Bengalees were assaulted on the streets and Bengali signboards were pulled down. The assaulters were drawn from the student community. The social base of the movement was becoming wider and its manifestation more violent.

1948 also ushered in a new phase in the movement. So far the Assamese had viewed expulsion of the Bengalees as a means of reducing the threat to their aspirations. They now found that a thorough Assamesisation of the province would reduce the fear of Bengali acculturation. The pulling down of Bengali signboards and the demand to use Assamese on signboards was one device. The violent outburst that took place in 1954, 1955 and 1960 were a continuation of the 1948 phase. While in 1954 and 1955, the Assamesistation efforts were more extensive, in 1960 a bolder step was taken. Assamese was sought to be introduced as the official language of Assam. The political leaders of the province also supported the demand and the government took necessary steps to implement it. The Bengalees mainly in the Cachar Valley and the hill tribes offered massive resistance to the move. Violent disturbances took place in various parts of the state in protest against the forcible imposition of the Assamese language. Loot, arson, assaults, injuries and deaths(26) were followed by the hill peoples’ demand for separation from Assam.

The move to impose Assamese proved to be both a disaster and a reve-lation for the Assamese. It showed that the time was not yet ripe for such an attempt and that the Assamese were not the undisputed dominant community in Assam. The resistance offered by the Bengalees showed that they were also a force to reckon within Assam. It also revealed that the Assamese did not have an economic foothold in their own state. The Marwari trading community virtually controlled the economy. Hence, in 1968, a movement was launched against the Marwaris wherein they were asked to quit Assam.

The 1970 and 1972 outbursts were pre-and post-census (1971) attempts at Assamesisation. In 1970, it was an attempt to terrorise Bengalees to declare Assamese as their mother-tongue in the census. In 1972, it was a reaction to the increase in the Bengalee population. It was suspected that many refugees who entered Assam in the wake of the Bangladesh War (1971) stayed back illegally and registered themselves as regular Indian citizens in the Census which further increased the Bengalee population.

The Assamese achieved no significant success in these movements. Hence, in 1979-80, the anti-foreign national movements were launched. It was a renewed attempt to reduce the numerical strength of Bengalees in Assam. It grew into a social upheaval and continued for an incredibly long duration. It unleashed a reign of terror, violence and genocide of a magnitude unknown in Assam. It initiated a constitutional crisis. The professed demand was detection and deportation of illegal Bengalee foreign nationals resident in the state. However, the events in the movements showed that it was really an attempt by the Assamese to expel Bengalees from Assam to retain Assamese hegemony in the state and realise their political aspirations. The development and recognition of Assamese as a full-fledged nationality was sought to be achieved by reducing the numerical strength of Bengalees in Assam. But the move proved disastrous as it not only failed to detect and deport the so called foreign nationals, it alienated other groups of the composite Assamese nationality. The major secessionist movement was launched by the Bodos—the largest tribal community of the Brahmaputra valley. They declared themselves as a full fledged nationality, demanded complete autonomy by dividing Assam ‘fifty-fifty’ and launched a violent movement for self rule. The arrogance and chauvinism of the caste Hindu Assamese also led the Ahoms to break away from the parent community and search an alternate identity. They were followed by the Tiwas, Karbis, Dimasas, and so on, all of whom demanded self rule outside the Assamese hegemony. The grant of autonomous councils has temporarily calmed some of these tribes while other still have launched violent insurgency to achieve their objective.



NOTES & REFERENCES:

1. This has been the general perspective of the historiographical school categorised as ‘nationalist’.

2. Sumit Sarkar, Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House), 1973, pp. 512–16.

3. Gyanendra Pandey, The Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh: A Study in Imperfect Mobilisation, (Delhi: Oxford University Press), 1978.

4. Rajni Palme Dutt, India Today, (London), 1947; A.R. Desai, Social Background of Indian Nationalism, (Bombay: Popular Prakashan), (1947) 1966.

5. Gyanendra Pandey, op.cit., p. 217. An entire school of historiography subsequently emerged which launched a crusade against the elitist historiography and highlighted this aspect of Indian national movement. See the series entitled Subaltern Studies (New Delhi: Oxford University Press) edited by Ranajit Guha.

6. Partha Sarathi Gupta, ‘Imperial Strategy and the transfer of power 1939–51’, in Amit Kumar Gupta (ed.), Myth and Reality: The Struggle for Freedom in India 1945–47, (New Delhi: Manohar), 1987.

7. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–1947, (New Delhi: Macmillan), 1983, pp. 414–46. Also the articles in Amit Kumar Gupta (ed.), op.cit.



8. Amalendu Guha, ‘Indian National Question: A Conceptual Framework’, in Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 17, Special Number, July 31, 1982, pp. 2–12. Also see his ‘Great Nationalism, Little Nationalism and Problem of National Integration: A tentative View’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 14, Annual, February 1979, pp. 355–458. Also see his ‘Nationalism: Pan-Indian and Regional in Historical Perspective’, Presidential Address, Modern India Section, Indian History Congress, 44th Session, Burdwan, 1983. See, Sudhir Chandra, ‘Regional Consciousness in 19th Century India: A Preliminary Note’, Economic and Political Weekly, August 17, 1982, pp. 1282–86. See, K. Narayana Rao and G. Dasaradha, The Emergence of Andhra Pradesh, (Bombay), 1973. See, Nivedita Mohanti, Oriya Nationalism, (New Delhi: Manohar), 1982. See, Sajal Nag, Roots of Ethnic Conflict: Nationality Question in North East India, (New Delhi: Manohar), 1990. See, N. Ram, ‘Dravida Movement in Pre-Independence Phase’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 14, No. 78, February 1979, pp. 377–402.

9. Irfan Habib, ‘Emergence of Nationalities’, in TDSS, Nationality Question in India, Pune, 1987, pp. 17–25. Also see, Amalendu Guha, op.cit. See, Sajal Nag, op.cit.
10 Amalendu Guha, ‘Indian National Question, etc.’, op.cit.

10. Amalendu Guha, ‘Indian National Question, etc.’, op.cit.

11. —, ‘Great Nationalism, etc.’, op.cit.

12. —, ‘Nationalism: ‘Pan-Indian, etc.’, op.cit. See, Sudhir Chandra, op.cit. Also see, Akhtar Majeed (ed.), Regionalism: Developmental Tension in India, (New Delhi: Cosmo), 1984. See, Paul Wallace (ed.), Region and Nation in India, (New Delhi: Oxford and IBH), 1985. See, G. Hargopal, ‘Dimension of Regionalism, Nationality Question in Andhra Pradesh’, in TDSS, op. cit., pp. 360–90. See, M. Mishra, Politics of Regionalism in India with special Reference to Punjab, (New Delhi: Deep and Deep), 1988.

13. K.L. Sharma, ‘Jharkhand Movement: The Questions of Identity and Sub-Nationality’, Social Action, Vol. 40, No. 4, October–December, 1990, pp. 370–81.


14. Ghanshyam Shah and K.M. Munshi, ‘Gujarat and Indian Nationalism’, paper presented in a seminar on Nationalism: Problems and Challenges, organised by K.M. Munshi Centenary Committee and Government of Gujrat, Centre for Social Studies, Surat (henceforth CSS). Also see, Surjit Hans, ‘Punjabi Nationalism’, ibid. Also see articles by Udayan Mishra on the Nagas, V. Anai Muthu on the Tamils, Shankar Guha Niyogi on Chattisgarh, in Andhra Pradesh Radical Students Union, Nationality Question in India, (Hyderabad), 1982. Prof. Javed Alam called the anti-colonial movement for independence in India as a supra-nationality nationalism and the various national movement of the people belonging to different national groups remained subsumed under it, north withstanding the demand for Pakistan. See his ‘Class, Political and Natonal Dimesions of State Autonomy Movements in India’ in TDSS, op.cit.

15. Sajal Nag, ‘Multiplication of Nations? Political Economy of Sub-nationalism in India’, Economic and Political Weekly, July 17-24, 1993, pp. 1521–32.

16. Sumit Sarkar, op. cit.

17. Anil Seal, Emergence of Indian Nationalism: Competition and Collaboration in the 19th Century, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1968, pp. 345–46.

18. John Beams, A Comparative Grammar of Modern Aryan Languages of India, (New Delhi), 1966, pp. 117–19.

19. B.I. Kluyev, op.cit.; also Mayadran Manisha, cited in V. Nagendra (ed.), Indian Literature, (Agra), 1959, p. 464.

20. Shaibal Gupta, op.cit.

21. Paul R. Brass, Language, Religion and Politics in Northern India, (Delhi), 1974, p. 69.

22. Shaibal Gupta, op.cit.

23. Hilbert Slater, Southern India: Its Political and Economic Problem, (London), 1936, p. 312.

24. Jyotirindra Dasgupta, op.cit., pp.1–30 and pp. 225–70.

25. See, Sajal Nag, Roots of Ethnic Conflict: Nationality Questions in North East India, (New Delhi: Manohar), 1990, for formation of Assamese nationality.

26. For a detailed account of the 1960 disturbances see H.C. Barua, A Glimpse of Assam Disturbances, (Gauhati), 1961. Also see, Assam Sahitya Sabha, Assam’s State Language, (Jorhat), 1960. See, K.C. Barua, Assam: Her People and Language, (Shillong), 1960. See, Narayan Choudhury, Asamer Bhasha Danga (in Bengali), (Calcutta), 1963. See, Amitabh Choudhury, Mukher Bhasha Buker Rudhir (in Bengali), (Calcutta), 1961.

Cops work on Ulfa 709 unit & leader
A STAFF REPORTER

Guwahati, Oct. 24: Police have established direct links with Ulfa’s 709 battalion leader Hira Sarania and are now hopeful of bringing overground the last potent fighting arm of the outfit.

A highly placed police officer in Lower Assam said the elusive Sarania had not committed himself but not rejected the idea either. “He has not snapped communication with us, which itself raises a lot of hope,” a police officer said.

He said a “sergeant major” of Ulfa, Bhaskar Rajbongshi, who surrendered in Guwahati a couple of months back, was acting as a go between the police and the battalion commander.

After his surrender, Rajbongshi got in touch with Sarania to persuade him to follow the path of the leaders of the 28 battalion.

Security forces said after the declaration of ceasefire by the Alpha and Charlie companies of the 28 battalion, if they could crack the 709 battalion, then the outfit could be completely neutralised militarily.

“The 28 and 709 are the two main fighting battalions of the outfit not only in terms of striking power, but from a strategic point of view too. The 28 battalion gives the outfit access to Myanmar, while the 709 battalion uses Bhutan and Nepal,” the officer said.

Given the health condition of Sarania and mood of other important functionaries of the battalion, it would be just a matter of time before the 7 09 battalion too joined the peace process, the official said.

Sarania has been accused of masterminding most of the violence in Lower Assam and bomb blasts in Guwahati.

Peaceniks of the 28 battalion are also trying to persuade the cadres of the 709 battalion to come overground.

Ulfa accusation: Ulfa today accused a senior pro-talks leader of 28 battalion, Jiten Dutta, of killing many innocent people while he was in the outfit, to malign its image.

“A teacher was killed in front of his students and many others, including the niece of the outfit’s commander-in-chief Paresh Barua, were killed on charges of being spies by Jiten Dutta in league with Indian security forces to malign Ulfa,” Ulfa spokesperson Anjan Borthakur said in a statement.

Supporting the protest over the killing of five youths at Kakopathar, Borthakur said they were killed by Dutta when he was in Ulfa.

This was done without the knowledge of the outfit’s top leadership, he added.

The protests in Kakopathar against Ulfa over the killings were also instigated by Dutta, the Ulfa spokesperson said.

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1081025/jsp/northeast/story_10018367.jsp

Q&A: What hopes for peace in Assam?

Assam has been plagued by violence since the 1970s

Indian security forces have been fighting separatist rebels in the state of Assam for decades. Who is behind the violence and what are the prospects for peace? BBC News looks at the background to one of India's longest-running insurgencies.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Why is there so much violence in Assam?

Much of the recent trouble in Assam has been blamed by the authorities on the United Liberation Front of Assam (Ulfa), formed in 1979 to fight for the state's independence. It has carried out a series of campaigns, including targeting oil and gas pipelines, transport and telecommunication facilities and security patrols.

At least 10,000 people have died since 1979. There are other less powerful insurgent groups in Assam but they have mostly reached negotiated agreements with the authorities.

What are the chances of bringing Ulfa to the negotiating table?

Negotiations with the Ulfa broke down in late 2006 after running for about a year. The BBC's Subir Bhaumik says the chances of re-starting the talks are slim.

Is Ulfa united?

Some members of the separatist group - including one of its elite strike battalions - have laid down their arms and are in active discussions with the government. But two battalions allegedly led by the central Ulfa leadership from secret hideouts in neighbouring Bangladesh remain committed to an armed struggle.

What is the strategy of the Indian government?

The government has tried to split the Ulfa - hence its deal with members of the so-called 28th battalion. But members of two other Ulfa battalions - the 27th and 109th - did not reach a deal which prompted the army to intensify its operations against them. The Indian government says that they too must shun violence and agree to direct negotiations if they are also to be brought into the peace process.

What is the strategy of Ulfa?

Ulfa says that the army must stop military operations and release members of its top leadership from military custody before it enters negotiations. Military analysts say that with its support base dwindling, the Ulfa has resorted to "urban terrorism" as the only way to strike back.

What will happen now?

Some experts fear that Assam is now entering another dark period - bomb explosions followed by military clampdowns - which have over the years seriously inhibited economic growth in a state which is only connected to the rest of India by a narrow but strategically important strip of land known as the "chicken neck".

There are also fears for Hindi and Bengali-speaking settlers in the state, who have been attacked in recent years. Authorities blame the attacks on Ulfa rebels.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7699314.stm

Sikkim assembly to bring resolution for Gorkhaland

Gangtok, Oct 27: The ruling Sikkim Democratic Front (SDF) would bring a resolution in Sikkim assembly to support the demand for separate Gorkhaland, Senior SDF leader and Chief Minister Pawan Kumar Chamling's political advisor B B Gooroong said in a press conference on Monday.

Gorkha Janamukti Morcha (GJM) president Bimal Gurung had appealed for a resolution in Sikkim legislature to support their demand for Gorkhaland.

On the sensitive issue of Gorkhaland state, Gooroong, a former Chief Minister himself in 1980s, reiterated his party's moral support for the statehood demand.

"SDF president Chamling is doing necessary spadework for the cause and he will also speak on the issue at an opportune time," Gooroong said.

The SDF leadership would decide when such a resolution should be adopted by the state legislature, he said.

On the demand made by a new political outfit – Sikkim National Peoples' Party (SNPP) - that the Himalayan state be reverted back to the associate state as the central government had failed to protect the distinct identity of Sikkim, the former Chief Minister ruled out a revisit of the issue.
Sikkim's merger with India 33 years ago was the will of the people of the state and the same can not be reconsidered under whatever situation, Gooroong said.
Local residents of Sikkim felt as much proud to be Indians as the people of any part of the country, the octogenarian leader said.
He also warned the new outfit's leadership against pursuing divisive and disruptive politics and said the law of the land may catch them soon if they persist with their divisive agenda.

http://www.zeenews.com/articles.asp?aid=479257&sid=REG
« Gorkha Janmukti Morcha to launch its own Police Force“GJM ready for talks in New Delhi” Roshan Giri »A nation wide newer states movement is the only way out
Posted by barunroy on June 20, 2008
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It is high time that the Darjeeling MP make his personal stance on the issue of Gorkhaland clear… Whether he is personally in favour of Gorkhaland or whether following his party stance he is also against the formation of Gorkhaland? He can no longer wade through the water knee deep and say I am both in land and water writes Barun Roy

The West Bengal Pradesh Congress Committee has decided to launch an awareness campaign on Gorkhaland. “At the first instance, I was overwhelmed when I heard that the Pradesh Congress Committee was going to launch an awareness campaign on Gorkhaland,” a local Congress leader said jubilantly as he sat before me sipping a hot cup of tea. “At last, our party had done the right thing, a statewide if not a nation wide deliberation on Gorkhaland was needed. Let everyone come forward and discuss on everything concerning Gorkhaland. I was excited and elevated. But when PCC President Priya Ranjan Das Munshi told me that instead we were to make the people aware of our party’s negative stance on Gorkhaland, I was left disappointed and disillusioned. Who made the decision? Why had Priya Ranjan Das Mushi to come out in the open saying Congress is not in favour of Gorkhaland. We do not want the formation of Gorkhaland. We do not want the division of Bengal. It all seems crap to me”.

Certainly, the veteran Hill Congress Leader’s sentiments are equivocal to the dissention running deep in the Hills and the Plains. In fact, the very organization of the Congress Party in the Darjeeling District is fraught with ambiguity. The Darjeeling District Congress Committee is divided into Hills and Plains division. While Darjeeling is the headquarters of the District, the decision of the Darjeeling District Congress Committee (Plains) headed by Shankar Malakar is final. Hill Leaders like Chabi Rai and Nakul Chettri are disowned at a whim. A party insider says, “There is always an inherent tension between the Plains and Hills Congress Party men. The Hill leaders most of the time find their words subdued in the remarks of Plains Congressmen whenever a meeting is held in Siliguri. It is rarely that important meetings are held in Darjeeling.”

The Pradesh Congress Committee President Priya Ranjan Das Munshi and the Darjeeling District Congress Committee (Plains) President, Shankar Malakar’s assertion that Nakul Chettri and Chabi Rai are ‘self purported Hill leaders misrepresenting the Congress Party” is unfortunate. A leader like Priya Ranjan Das Munshi disowning his own grass root level leaders and cadres is not just uncalled for but down right preposterous. However, the Union Minister and the Siliguri based Sankar Malakar’s statement and stance on their own party leaders and cadres in the hills is much subdued compared to the Darjeeling Congress MPs assertion that both Nakul Chettri and Chabi Rai were attending the ‘All Party Meeting’ called by Gorkha Janmukti Morcha ‘as observers’ as it was important for the Congress Party to know what was happening in the Hills. The same Congress MP had on the 17 of June said, “Being a representative of the hill Congress, Nakul Chettri, has every right to ‘take part’ in the political congregation in Darjeeling at this critical hour.” I wonder what made the leader change his stance today. As a leader of the Darjeeling District Congress Committee (Hills) will he come to the aid of the Hills leaders or will he quote and misquote himself ultimately confusing himself and a whole lot of others in the whole issue. It is high time that the Darjeeling MP make his personal stance on the issue of Gorkhaland clear… Whether he is personally in favour of Gorkhaland or whether following his party stance he is also against the formation of Gorkhaland? He can no longer wade through the water knee deep and say I am both in land and water.

Why is Congress so worried over its stance on Gorkhaland?

The Congress has strangely enough outdone the Communist Party of India Marxist in making their stance known to the people vis-à-vis Gorkhaland. The Communist Party of India Marxists has thus far restrained themselves from launching an Anti-Gorkhaland Awareness Campaign relying on a dialogue with the ‘Hill People’. The Congress Stance on letting Bengal know that they are against the formation of Gorkhaland and the division of Bengal is aimed at Bengal sans Darjeeling District. The Congress party be it at New Delhi or at Kolkata knows that it cannot risk alienating the majority of Bengal by being in favour of Gorkhaland. Priya Ranjan Das Munshi hopes that with his stance known it will help theoretically help him regain power in the state and at the same time do well in the Lok Sabha elections. A deeper prodding of the Trinamul Congress leadership would also lead to similar conclusions that the national and the regional parties will not come out openly in favour of Gorkhaland. But at least they would not come out as openly and as hastily against Gorkhaland either as Congress has done. No matter what the Congress leadership’s vision both at the AICC and the PCC level; Priya Ranjan Das Munshi’s eagerness to disown the aspirations and dreams of the people Darjeeling Hills and Dooars Terai would be a massive self inflicted injury in a long term. This is also indicative to the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha, Communist Party of the Revolutionary Marxists, All India Gorkha League and Bharatiya Gorkha Parisangha and indeed to all those demanding for a separate statehood in India – Gorkhaland, Telangana or Greater Cooch Behar cannot be achieved merely by sending delegations to the State and the Central Governments. A nation wide newer states campaign must be worked out if the national parties like Congress and BJP are to be made to believe that carving newer states is in their interest. Until this is done, the national parties like Congress and BJP whose primary interest lies only in the formation of a Government at the Centre will not be sympathetic to the formation of newer states. All they are ever interested are in the number of MPs.
http://beacononline.wordpress.com/2008/06/20/a-nation-wide-newer-states-movement-is-the-only-way-out/
Gorkhaland movement gathers momentum
The Gorkhaland movement in the north-eastern Darjeeling district of Indian state of West Bengal is in full bloom again, reminding residents of this hilly terrain of the bloody struggle for a separate Gorkha state within the Indian union that reached its peak some two decades back only to be brutally crushed by Indian paramilitary troops.


Normal life in Darjeeling and the surrounding places including Siliguri, which has a large number of Nepali speaking residents has been crippled by the indefinite strike called by the Gorkha Janamukti Morcha (GJM) in the area demanding "separate statehood within India' since Monday.
"The bandh has been extended to highlight our demand for a separate state comprising Darjeeling hills and areas contiguous to it," GJM president Bimal Gurung was quoted as saying by Indian dailies.
"Tourists in the hills should leave by tonight. In case they cannot, we shall provide them a helpline to do so by Tuesday," he said.
The bandh would be observed in the Terai and Dooars regions of north Bengal from Tuesday, the report said.
Gurung said that Monday's total bandh was in protest against the attack on GJM supporters by those belonging to organisations backed by the Communist Party of India(Marxist) in the Bagdogra area near Siliguri.
Reports coming out from Darjeeling have it that the indefinite strike has badly affected transportation in the district, while educational institutions, factories, businesses also remained closed.
GJM's general secretary Roshan Giri said that they have plans to stage hunger strike in various places in Siliguri to protest against the attack. Siliguri has seen maximum number of skirmishes between Nepali speakers who symphathize with the movement and Bengali speaking political cadres who are against Darjeeling separating from West Bengal to form a separate Gorkhaland state.
Siliguri has, apart from Nepali speakers, a large number of Bengali people who view the Gorkhaland movement as a conspiracy to "disintegrate" West Bengal.
Gorkha leaders including those of GJM had earlier rejected talks offer from West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, saying that the main issue of a separate state was not on the agenda.
As the Gorkhas in Darjeeling hills and neighbouring areas intensify for a separate Gorkha state, Bhattacharjee, in a letter to GJM chief Bimal Gurung, had invited him and his colleagues "to discuss measures needed to restore normalcy and speed up development work" in the Darjeeling hills.
However, GJM leaders argue that the demand for Gorkhaland is a political issue and the offer to discuss development of the Darjeeling hills was irrelevant, calling for a tripartite talks with the Centre and GJM representatives with the agenda for talks being solely Gorkhaland.
The state government, however, remains adamant on its stance, saying that it is ready for talks on issues other than the demand for a separate state of Gorkhaland. Reports also say the ruling communist party has used its party cadres to suppress the Gorkhaland movement.
The state government has kept paramilitary forces on high alert for possible deployment to crush the movement of Gorkhas for separate state. nepalnews.com ag June 17 08
http://www.nepalnews.com.np/archive/2008/jun/jun17/news07.php
Monday, June 23, 2008
In Support of Gorkhaland
(Courtesy: Siddhartha Thapa)
The Gorkhaland agitation and the demand for a separate state to Indian Nepalis is a sign of things that will further test the unity between the Congress and Indian communists in the days ahead.
The growing instability in Northern Bengal has the potential to foment further political instability across India; while other agitating groups across India may draw inspirations from Gorkha Janamukti Morcha (GJM)'s recent success to put enormous pressure on New Delhi, to acquiesce to their demand of a separate state.
This new development in Northern Bengal is bound to pinch the policy-makers in New Delhi and Calcutta. Theoritically, the GJM leaders have the moral high ground to press for a separate state; this is mainly because each state in India has been geographically divided along cultural and linguistic lines.
Therefore, GJM's demand for a separate state is morally and politically a just cause. Gorkhalis of Northeast and West Bengal states have been largely neglected and secluded as state governments have reduced the Indian Nepalis to second class citizens. In fact, Nepalis living for generations in Northeast and North Bengal have been denied the social, political and economic rights. They have been given unofficially a minority status.
The continued neglect of Indian Nepalis has created this feeling of 'un-Indianess' in the hearts and minds of the people living in Northeast and Darjeeling. And in the recent past, New Delhi has done very little to demonstrate seriousness over the deteriorating situation in Gorkhaland, primarily because the coalition partner continues to blackmail the Congress to retain its dictatorial autonomy in Bengal; while it hypocritically maintains a stronghold over policy matters in New Delhi.
Take for instance, the CPI-M stance on the Civilian Nuclear Deal with the United States. Had the deal gone through, the Civilian Nuclear Agreement would have put India in a globally advantageous position as its need for energy would have been largely resolved with the aim of propelling the development of the Indian economy at a greater pace.
The demand for Gorkhaland, therefore, is genuine and the Indian Nepalis must be given a separate state. Besides, North Bengal does not belong to Calcutta. It was a part of Nepal until 1816. Nepal ceded the territory to British India. Since then, Nepalis have been living as Indian nationals. They cannot be treated as Nepali nationals now.
Subash Ghising no longer holds ground in Darjeeling as he has betrayed the Indian Gorkhas by compromising with the Stalin regime which continues to rule North Bengal ruthlessly. Now Ghising has been replaced by new leaders who are politically committed to the Indian Nepalis cause --- that is a state within the Indian Union. These leaders epitomize a sense of hope that envisions an end to the Stalin rule in North Bengal.
However, even if a compromise is reached with the Marxist government due to New Delhi's insistence, the possibility of a long-term solution is impossible without New Delhi agreeing for a complete statehood.
Likewise, the growing popularity for the demand of Gorkhaland may lead to a state of mental trepidation for the Marxist and to others who doubt the allegiance of the Gorkhalis. Contrary to this thought, the Gorkhalis in India may share cultural similarities with their own kind in Nepal, but it stops right there. Gorkhalis too could argue in a similar vein questioning loyalties of other ethnic groups within India, but that would neither solve their problems nor would they garner support for their cause.
There are approximately 15 million Gorkhalis living in India and they by and large, have contributed to the economic development of India. In fact, Nepalis of Indian origin have defended India rather than Indians themselves. Had the Gorkha Rifles not been there during the partition that triggered communal violence between Hindus and Muslim, more Indians and Pakistanis would have died. Has any Indian realized and mentioned the role of the Gorkha Rifles in any book or write up?
India recruits Gorkhalis for their elite Gorkha battalions and these people have fought for India giving up their lives in pride. The recent triumph of Prashant Tamang in the Indian Idol show elucidates the achievement of an Indian above everything else and what he did was equally symbolic, he sang in Hindi, the national language of India.
Some manipulative sleuths within the ranks of CPI-M may try selling propaganda that the GJM movement has been the handwork of Nepal. However, such claims are too fanciful to be true. The truth of the matter is the UPA government must end the policy of ethnic hypocrisy and provide justice to the Indian Gorkhas.
Closed door negotiations and secret political parleys have already begun with the aim of finding a solution to Gorkhaland. But this has started on the wrong-foot. In a recently concluded all-party meeting in Calcutta, the Stalin regime chose to ignore GJM. A political confrontation of great magnitude seems unavoidable between the CPI-M and the GJM. Many Gorkhalis will lose their lives, but come what may Gorkhalis should not move an inch away from their demands. If India has fought a battle in Sri Lanka to ensure rightful dignity for the Tamils, why can't it guarantee equality to Indians at home?
An all party meeting must be convened in New Delhi and a solution must be sought at the earliest before the world begins to look at the deteriorating situation that will eventually unfold in Northern Bengal with great shock. After all, Nandigram massacre has shown the ruthless involvement of the CPI-M. Should the GJM remain adamant, the CPI-M will not hesitate to use brute force against the Gorkhalis. There is still time to resolve the issue of Gorkhaland in an amicable manner. But if the CPI-M continues to demonstrate a policy of ignorance and bullishness, things will only get worse causing great shame to India. Killing an Indian for a solution that ultimately benefits India would seem too tragic.
Posted by NepaliPerspectives at 4:39 AM
Labels: National Identity
6 comments:
Anonymous said...
Hear, hear and we can put down these troubles to the blatant, deplorable and inexcusable inactivity on Nepal's Ambassador in Delhi. He should simply emulate what his counterpart in Kathmandu is already doing so much of and so well. We also need to blame the international departments of Nepali political parties for the way in which these little local Indian difficulties are evolving - why aren’t they over there following the fine example of Yechuri bhai? Beware – we as Nepaulis simply cannot hide behind principles like non-interference, respect for sovereignty, etc, when our beloved neighbour’s house could conceivably be engulfed by a horrible fire. By the way what’s become of UNMIN and OHCHR? Given the great job they have done in Nepaul, why are they being so coy about opportunities across the border?
http://nepaliperspectives.blogspot.com/2008/06/in-support-of-gorkhaland.html

RSS-BJP-VHP attempt to make Orissa a Hindutva Laboratory
Written by Bhalchandra Shadangi
Wednesday, 17 September 2008
Communal Violence in Kandhamal District
On 23rd August around 8.p.m Laxmanananda, the leading figure of Hindutva brigade in Orissa along with his four associates was shot dead by a group of unidentified gunmen at his Jalespeta Ashram in Kandhamal District. He was a member of VHP’s Kendriya Margadarsaka Mandali and widely known for his anti-Christian activities in Kandhamal.
Soon after his murder the Govt. officials declared that they are suspecting the role of Maoists behind this killing. But the Sangh leaders instead of waiting for an enquiry immediately alleged that Christian community was behind the killing of Laxmanananda. In a pre-planned manner this anti Christian propaganda was carried out. Even the local media particularly the Oriya T.V channels propagated the same rumour repeatedly. On the same night itself the RSS activists started violent protest in several areas. On 24th also as part of their ongoing protest several vehicles were burnt, churches were ransacked. In some places houses and other properties of Christian community were targeted. On 25th August the VHP called Orissa Bandh against the killing. In the name of observing the Bandh Sangh goons carried out large scale violence against Christian community and common people throughout the state. Beside Kandhamal, in districts like Gajapati, Ganjam, Rayagada, Koraput, Sundargarh, Jajpur, Baragarh, Churches, houses and educational institutions of minority community were either completely burnt or ransacked and looted by Hindutva mob. Several incidents of murder and rape were also reported in different places. Even a Hindu tribal lady teacher of an orphanage run by missionaries in Baragarh district was burnt alive along with the orphanage and its caretaker. While the naked dance of death and destruction by these communal forces was going on through out the state, the police and administration, under the instruction of the state Govt., remained mute spectators to these inhuman crimes against innocent people. Even despite curfew the administration allowed the 200 km dead body procession of Laxmanananda in the district knowing well that it will incite communal violence. While Bandh was going on and the administration had imposed curfew in the area, the VHP leader Pravin Tagodia who is well known for his provocative speeches was allowed to enter Kandhamal in the name of attending the last rites of Laxmanananda. During his visit he openly called in presence of Govt. officials for revenge against Christians. Throughout his visit he was allowed to instigate the Sangh activists with his aggressive anti minority speeches, which aggravated the situation very badly.
The RSS-VHP-BJP onslaught against minorities which started on 23rd night is still continuing. Christians, Dalits, Adivasis even lower caste Hindus, no one spared from their violence. Due to large scale violence and burning of houses thousands of poor people of Christian minority and dalit Hindu community have to flee their villages and many of them are taking shelter in the relief camps opened by the administration in nearby towns. As per the official disclosure in Kandhamal district alone 22 people were killed and 25 thousand were rendered homeless in the ongoing violence. Even many people are still missing till today. So the actual figure will be much more if we add the figures of other districts.
Why this onslaught by Sangh parivar ?
The communal attack by Sangh parivar on minority community in Orissa was not spontaneous rather it was a pre-planned one. This is also not the first instance of violence unleashed by them. In Dec.2007 also there was large scale violence unleashed against Christian community on the plea of an attack on Laxmanananda, but it was confined only within Kandhamal district. But this time the communal violence spread across the state. The anti-Christian propaganda and rumours by the Hindutva forces and even in the local media and the simultaneous attacks on churches throughout the state can been seen in this context. Though Christian community constitutes only 2% of the state’s population, there was a continuous campaign against them by Sangh outfits for several years. For the last two decades Sangh Parivar has increased its activities in the tribal pockets of southern and western districts. The electoral success of BJP in these areas are the indication of this development. To win over the majority tribal people to their fold they are continuously carrying out anti-Christian propaganda among them. In Kandhamal district out of total population 52% are tribals, 17% are dalits and others are upper caste Hindus. The tribals of Kandhamal mainly belong to Kui tribe and they are the original inhabitants of the district. They have a history of militant struggles against British rulers in the 1st half of 19th century. The dalits are mainly Pana by caste and were brought by British rulers from neighbouring Ganjam and Nayagarh districts many decades back for clearing forests. Later on most of them converted to Christianity. The other residents of Kandhamal are caste Hindus who mainly came from costal districts of Orissa for doing Govt. jobs and agency business in the last five decades. These people now control the economic activities of the district. Almost all the shops and business establishments in the towns of Kandhamal are owned by these caste Hindus. Since the dalit people came from plains and with the help of missionaries they got some education, they are cleverer than the tribals. But due to non-availability of agricultural land, they have been dependent on the tribal people for their existence from the beginning. They mainly act as middlemen between tribals and the caste Hindu traders or sahukars based in towns. In this process while the sahukars siphon the major share of the profit, the dalit middleman gets a negligible share. So like majority tribals most of these dalits are poor and oppressed. In Kandhamal nearly 20% of the tribals and majority of the dalits are Christians. Not like caste Hindus who stay in towns, these dalits generally stay in tribal villages and speak the tribal language Kui as their own language. So there exists a good relation among them from the beginning. After the entry of Sangh Parivar the caste Hindu business community associated with it for their own security and class interest. Now these caste Hindu business community are the backbone of RSS and its main financer. All the trader associations in market places of the district are controlled by Sangh. The community for their own class interest tried to play the contradiction existing among the two downtrodden communities Kui and Pan of Kandhamal. They tried to Hinduise some tribals who are not Hindus but nature worshipers from the beginning. Through its different organizations like Vanabasi Kalyan Ashram RSS was able to Hinduise a sizeable section of these tribals. Laxmanananda came to Kandhamal four decades ago sent by the RSS and carried out his campaign i.e Hinduisation of tribals and anti-Christian propaganda nearly for four decades ago. All these years he aggressively campaigned against Christians who are mainly dalits. With the financial help of local business community he well played the contradiction between Kui tribals and Pans to safeguard the interest of caste Hindu Sahukars. Like Christian missionaries he established Ashram schools in Chakapada and Jalespeta for tribal students and polluted their minds with communal hatred. As an aggressive communal speaker he was instrumental in many communal riots in the past. So he was not a Sadhu as portrayed by VHP and the media, but a firebrand leader of the hate campaign carried out by Sangh Parivar and sponsored by local traders.
Naveen Pattnaik Govt. is harbouring communal forces

The present dispensation of BJD- BJP of the state came to power with the help of Sangh Parivar. Since the minority vote is very small (2% Christians and 1.5% Muslims) so they are insignificant for the electoral race. Due to this vote bank politics the lives and livelihood of thousands of minority people does not matter for Naveen Pattnaik Govt. It gave a free hand to the communal elements from 24th onwards. While communal leader Tagodia was allowed to enter Kandhamal despite curfew no opposition party leader including minister of state for Home was not allowed to visit Kandhamal. The 25th Aug. Bandh called by VHP was a govt. sponsored one. On 24th Sept. itself Govt. declared holiday for schools and colleges in the state and instructed the police for restraint and not to use force against the Sangh activists.
Role of Congress
Congress party has always been encouraging the communal forces. Here also as the main opposition party instead of opposing the communal forces straight, it highlighted the law and order issue for which Laxmanananda was killed. Even the union home minister in his visit to the riot hit areas did not utter a word against Sangh outfits. There were reports that in many places Congress workers were actively involved in anti minority riots along with RSS people.
Maoist’s action gave an upperhand to Sangh
Five days after the killing of Laxmanananda and the subsequent violence unleashed by RSS, the CPI (Maoist) party leader Azad gave an interview to a local newspaper and owned the murder. They said since he was responsible for spreading religious hatred among the people, we punished him. But since Maoist did not carry out any propaganda about Laxmanananda earlier and even immediately after the incident and they did not come out confidently about it, the Sangh Parivar could mislead the people that it is not the Maoists but the missionaries who are behind the killing. Maoists’ action instead of suppressing the communal forces gave them an opportunity to carry out large scale attacks on the minority people. Maoists after carrying out this action remained mute spectators while thousands of innocent people were attacked by Sangh Parivar goons. Due to their isolated action Sangh Parivar was able to communalize the whole atmosphere of Orissa and made the RSS as a gainer in this process. Even the minority community became defensive and demanded the hanging of the killers of Laxmanananda through public meetings and rallies. Their action made the 82 year old Laxamananda a martyr for his cause and more popular than before. Even some contradictory statements came from Maoists which made their position confusing.
Role of CPI(ML)-New Democracy
Soon after the communal violence started we were among the first to condemn it. Since it occurred in some of our area, our cadres tried to resist the communal forces from the beginning. In Raikia block’s Gundhani village our activists along with common people militantly resisted the attempt of RSS goons and pushed them back thrice. In T. Govindpur panchayat of Ganjam district when the communal mob suddenly attacked our villages on 24th Aug, our people fled due to unpreparedness. But due to our effort on the next day our comrades along with other nearby villagers organized themselves and gathered at one place with their traditional weapons. Seeing their preparedness RSS people did not dare to attack again. After this incident we lodged 5 FIRs against culprits. Initially the local police was not receiving the FIRs but when we threatened to gherao the police station they had to register them. In certain places where we are a small force and our people were unable to resist the communal elements physically, there we pressurized the local police and administration for deployment of forces to prevent communal attacks. In areas bordering Kandhamal due to our strong presence and vigilance communal forces did not dare to attack. Due to heavy violence in Kandhamal many people particularly from minority community fled their homes in large numbers to neighbouring Ganjam district. We made arrangements to send them to the nearest relief camps opened by the govt. Our people in many areas offered food and shelter to the distressed people also in Indragada panchayt of Raikia block. As a precaution our youth activists in Sorada, Dharakote and Daringbadi blocks gave regular patrolling around the villages with traditional weapons.
We took initiative for united action with other parties and also organized programmes on our own. We organized a protest march of more than one thousand people at Parlakhemundi on Sept 1st and demanded time bound judicial enquiry and immediate arrest of activists of Sangh parivar for their role in communal violence. Due to our efforts we could have joint programme at Berhampur by uniting other parties against communal violence. We had decided not to allow the proposed Asthi Kalash Jatra of VHP in our organisational area. But the Govt. had to ban it under pressure from different quarters.
CPI(ML)-New Democracy organized a demonstration at the Parliament Street in New Delhi on September 2, 2008 against the communal mayhem unleashed by VHP-RSS-BJP criminal gangs against Christians in Orissa. Holding placards and raising slogans, “Punish the VHP-RSS-BJP criminal gangs in Orissa” and “Naveen Patnaik, Protect citizens or resign”, activists marched with an effigy of Orissa Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik Govt. before burning this effigy. Working class activists, students, youth and intellectuals participated.
The demonstrators were addressed by Com. Aparna (Secretary, Delhi Committee of the Party), Com. Poonam (General Secretary, Pragatisheel Mahila Sangathan, Dr. Mrigank, Convener of Naujawan Bharat Sabha, noted intellectuals Dr. Manoranjan Mohanty, Ex. Prefessor, Polticial Science, Delhi University, Pankaj Singh, noted Hindi poet, Dr. Bhabani Disit (Jan Hastakshep), Dr. Manjeet (Kashipur Solidarity Group), Maneshwar (Manipur Students Association), Dr. N.K. Bhattacharya and John Dayal of All India Catholic Union.

Kashmir : Peoples Upsurge for Azadi bursts out due to policies of Central and State's Govts.
Written by CPI(ML)ND
Tuesday, 30 September 2008
Speaking from the Red Fort on 15th August 2008, Manmohan Singh talked about the need to provide better arrangements for pilgrims to Amarnath; praising the role of Kashmiris in providing such arrangements upto now, he called it an example of the secular traditions of India, and he opposed 'divisive' politics. However he failed to tell the country why Chief Minister of J&K Gulam Nabi Azad chose to violate the landownership laws of J&K and join hands with the already transferred Governor Sinha to transfer land of Kashmir. He also failed to utter ever a word of sympathy (leave alone express regret) for the around 40 Kashmiris killed by armed forces' bullets over the previous four days or the over 200 injured by them, or for the families of the dead and injured.
Who is responsible for the current turmoil in J&K ?

To understand the current situation in J&K it is necessary to briefly recapitulate its history. After the defeat of the Sikh Kingdom in 1846, the pro-British colonialism Dogra King of Jammu, Gulab Singh, bought Kashmir Valley from the British for 75 Lakh Rupees and established the state of J&K in the form existing till 1947. It the state he ruled over, all three parts - Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir - were present. During the communal division of the country by British rulers along with Congress and Muslim League in 1947, King Hari Singh associated this state with India in 1947, on certain conditions, By that time the State was divided 60 : 40, with one part under control of India and secured for it by the Army, and the other under Pak control. At that time there was a sharp antimonarchy struggle on in the state in the leadership of National Conference. Hari Singh became the first President of that part of the state which was with India and Shiekh Abdullah (leader of National Conference) its first Prime Minister. Hari Singh's decision to accede to India was not acceptable to all sections of the state which came to India, but due to Sheikh Abdullah's endorsement, people's opinion was divided.
At that time states of Junagarh and Hyderabad also had to decide their future. In Junagarh (predominantly Hindu subjects with a Muslim ruler) the GOI ascertained 'peoples will'. Regarding J&K both India and Pakistan's Govts signed an agreement at UN to conduct a referendum in J&K to decide the future of the state. The shortcoming of this agreement remains that no option of an independent J&K state was included.

However, leave alone conducting a referendum, India' ruling classes concentrated on consolidating their hold over the state while alienating the Kashmiris who are predominantly Muslims. The conditions accepted at the time of accession have been either violated, modified in 1974, or under mined. India's rule over the Kashmir Valley has been primarily through armed forces. Repressive Laws like Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), Disturbed areas act and other repressive laws have been continually operative in the area, giving the armed forces unbridled powers, Democratic rights have been continually and cruelly suppressed; political rights thrown to the winds. Elections held from time to time have been a farce in the valley. Instead of any attempt to win the confidence of the people of J&K conduct of India's ruling classes has inexorably strengthened their conviction that peace, freedom from repression by armed forces, and unity of Kashmiri people can only be achieved by freedom from India.

There has been a long standing communal opinion in India's ruling classes that this state should be divided into three parts, and the Kashmiris (i.e. Muslims) be allowed to separate out along with as little as possible of the upper part of the Valley. Jammu and Ladakh along with as much of the lower part of the Valley of possible should be retained in India. In its main contours this was the understanding of Sardar Patel; when LK Advani talks about the 'unfinished task' of the 1947 communal division viz a viz Kashmir, it is this understanding he reveals. This is the understanding which Sharma of the Amarnath Sangharsh Samiti has stated in so many words. India's rulers covet the land of Kashmiris and don't care a hoot about its people. Thus they rant about J&K being an 'unalienable part of India' and about unity and integrity' in reference to an area which even India's Govt. has acknowledged before UN as a disputed area. Not only this. Over the years the ruling classes of India have systematically worked to create communal divisions in the state. While there is no need to repeat this long history here in details, it has to be kept in mind to understand the present events.



It is a reality that when Kashmiris study in other parts of India, go there to trade or to work, they are looked upon with suspicion, troubled by the police for no reason, and they live with fear, and this situation is worsening. As is the situation in the rest of the India, there are no jobs for the youth in J&K and inadequate educational opportunities including for higher education.


Jammu Struggle - Blockade of Kashmir


Even as Governor Vohra revoked the demand of the Amarnath Board for land transfer thereby rendering infructuous the transfer and so laying to rest the dispute raised by the trio of Gen. Sinha - Gulam Nabi Azad - Mufti, a movement was launched in Jammu by three congress MLAs of Jammu, Congress MPs and activists of RSS and BJP, This was run under the banner of Amarnath Yatra Sangharsh Samiti. Its leader, Sharma, as also BJP leader Rajnath Singh had announced in July 2008 itself that economic blockade of Kashmir Valley would be carried out and the Kashmiris would be taught a lesson. Trucks coming from Kashmir were stoned, they were stopped and their drivers beaten up, trucks going to Kashmir were stopped enroute not only in Jammu but also in Punjab on the GT Road in the areas of BJP MLAs (the GT Road is the sole road link between Delhi and Jammu). Agitators themselves claimed that in 40 days 10,000 demonstrations were held with many being around the Banihal Pass which is the straight route between Jammu and Kashmir. Thus the easy way to open the blockade was to send army escorts with convoys of trucks and for army patrols for the Pass. This neither the Congress not the BJP wanted (Hindu, 13th Aug. 2008). The intention of the agitators becomes crystal clear also from the fact that they dug up the railway line being laid to link Kashmir with the rest of the country.



The role of the Congress in Jammu agitation is clear along with the active role of the VHP. There is no need to repeat mention of the role of Cong. CM of the state, Gulam Nabi Azad. Apart from this, leaving aside two local Congress leaders, the rest of the Congress leadership in Jammu was in the leadership of the agitation. This included ex Dupty CM of the state Mangat Ram Sharma, Gulchain Singh Charak, R.S. Chib, Shyam Lal Gupta, Manohar Lal and Lal Singh. A report in Hindu (23rd Aug. 2008) establishes that the main Congress leaders of Jammu went to Delhi to demand from the party leadership (they met Sonia Gandhi also) that it support the Sangharsh Samiti.



Two old men committed suicide in Jammu in support of the 'reaction agitation' and there were nine reported deaths in police firings (including deaths of Kashmiris in mixed districts). 10,000 people who were arrested in Jammu on different days of the agitation (quite a few on the charge of attacking police) were all given bail; later of course, as part of the settlement with the agitation, it has been decided to compensate all those who suffered any loss in the agitation. So it was a fight paid for by the Govt. However these 'democratic' methods were not applicable to the Valley. Rather the Hurriyat leaders were put under house arrest for the Muzaffarabad Chalo Call, though Amarnath Sangharsh Samiti leaders roamed free in Jammu to implement economic blockade. Three of the six districts of Jammu have a mixed population - in all three there was anti Muslim violence. On 13th Aug. 2008, when Muslims in Kishtwar came out to protest against the killing of Hurriyat leader Sheikh Aziz, two of them were killed in army firing. On the same day 'shoot at sight' orders were issued for this area. No communal incident of any kind took place during the entire period in the Valley where the Amarnath Yatris were present in huge numbers; the Hurriyat leaders went and met the Yatris, explained the purpose of their agitation to them, ensured that shops were kept open for the Yatris during bandh calls, organized 'langars' for them and accorded them the status of Guests. The national English dailies gave no space to these activities of the Hurriyat leaders.


There was an Economic Blockade of Kashmir


After the 'Muzaffarabad Chalo' call was given, the Govt. of India, the BJP and the Amarnath Sangharsh Samiti have repeatedly claimed that the people of the Valley were purposely lying that an economic blockade was on and Hurriyat was using this false propaganda to instigate the people. Reports claimed that apples ripened at the end of Aug, then how could they be already under threat of rotting (as the Traders Association of Kashmir was fearing) etc. Basically, after threatening a blockade the perpetrators denied the existence of one, and the Union Govt. stood by their denial.



To effect an economic blockade it is not necessary to stop every single truck or beat every single driver - if such incidents start occurring, how many traders will risk their goods anywhere in the country? The Home Minister of India took an all party delegation of parliamentary parties to Jammu, and then he proceeded to Srinagar. Here representatives of the Apple Traders Association of Kashmir and of the Kashmir Chamber of Commerce waited for over two hours after his arrival to meet him. They, however, could not meet the minister. Later, the Home minister announced that there was no economic blockade in place, and if fruits could not leave the Valley they would be purchased by the CRPF and distributed to the Valley's children. If the fruit rotted, the Govt. would give compensation. Along with he advised chemists in the Valley to requisition their needs directly from suppliers in Delhi. Do all these riders not substantiate on economic blockade. Not only this, on 18th Aug, leader of the Amarnath Sangharsh Samiti, Sharma, reiterated that such a blockade would be enforced that the world would come to know of it. Probably because he is a Hindu he is not labeled as a 'separatist' or a 'terrorist' by the communal Govt. of India or the media.



On 21st Aug' 08, the Economic Times made public a secret report of the Central Govt. which substantiated that an economic blockade of the Valley was on. According to the figures quoted, the number of loaded trucks moving in and out of the Valley in July 2008 was 28% less than in the same period in 2007. In the first 18 days of August, in comparison to 2007, trucks coming the Kashmir decreased 49%, while 64% less loaded trucks left the valley in the period compared to the same period last year.



The economic blockade started in spurts from 22nd June 2008 after the announcement of the same by BJP state President Ashok Khajuria. Loaded trucks going to Delhi with fruits were looted at Kathua and Samba. Two drivers, both residents of the Valley, were greviously injured in attacks and were admitted to Govt. Hospitals in Delhi, where eventually one (Shri Mohd Latif Vani) died at the AIIMS. On 17th Aug. 2008, driver Basheer Ahmad Shala was attacked at Kathua using petrol bombs and trishuls. He had to be hospitalized.



Usually 1000 trucks go towareds Srinagar per day during summers and around 400 per day come form Srinagar. In 2007, 4216 laden trucks came out of Kashmir in the first ten days of August; this year the figure was nearly 884 trucks for the same period.



Thi situation in Kashmir Valley is that it anyway gets habitually snowed into isolation for long periods in winter, so people there have a basic storage of foodstuffs. It is vegetables and medicines, especially supplies for the hospitals which were at this time getting hundreds of bullet and bone injuries, that were acutely compromised.


Amarnath Yatra Board
Why was the Amarnath Yatra Board set up in the first place? For over 160 years the Govt. of J&K has been making the arrangements for the annual yatra. The task now includes registration of pilgrims in different states, distributing quotas among the states, deciding the duration of the yatra, making arrangements for pilgrims' stay and food. The army, which is present all over Kashmir, is also involved in security arrangements. The Govt.'s clarification is that a committee was instituted in 1996 which suggested the setting up of the Board. Why was the committee formed? There were landslides in Amarnath area in which 200 yatris were stuck for several days in mountains. The Govt. of India set up the committee which on the one hand setup the Board and on the other recorded that it was because of local Kashmiri people that only such a small number of Yatris faced serious problems. The local people sheltered the pilgrims and rescuing them, helped them to return using alternative routes through the mountains etc. May be reason behind proposing a Board even then was because the committee imagined that the Amarnath Board could stop natural calamities.



Its second aspect is slowly becoming clearer. Till 1947, 'J&K Govt' implied the Dogra King. After this J&K Govt. - where is fact the entire senior administration and bureaucracy is non Kasnmiri since long - is gradually being looked on as the Govt. belonging to a particular religion. If this was not so, what did Sharma of the Amarnath Sangharsh Samiti mean when he stated (Hindu, 18 Aug 2008) that the Tourism Dept of J&K Govt had no right to look after the 'Hindu' Yatra?



The Governor of the State is the president of the Amarnath Board. According to writer David Devdas (HT, 17th Aug 08) the Ex Governor Sinha increased the duration of the Yatra this year from fifteen days to two months. The members of the Board, who are nominated by the Governor, are all non Kashmiris, This year all the material needed for the yatris was purchased by the Board from outside, whereas every year these purchases were made from local Kashmiri traders and these traders where dependent on this income for their annual needs. The Amarnath cave had been found by a Kashmiri shepheard. Traditionally, 1/3 of all offerings at the cave were made over to his family. This year the Board is said to have put a stop to this practise.



On the one hand the propaganda is that Hurriyat is lying to the people - land is being transferred only for a period of two months to build temporary residences (this work anyway was being done every year by the J&K Govt). On the other hand the BJP leaders have raised the clear cut demand that we want facilities like those given for Haj Yatra. For the Haj Yatra permanent structures exist in major cities of India - then is it very difficult to understand actually how 'temporary' a holding of the land is being aimed at.


High Court Order- Giving Grist to Communal Propaganda


Acting on an individual‘s petition before it in 2005, the J&K High Court passed an order on the issue of the Board against which the state government has gone in appeal (pending). BJP leaders demanded that this order be implemented (as events show the final agreement with the Amarnath Sangarsh Samiti-ASS more than meets this demand). According to the order the government has to turn over the land under discussion (this includes forest land) to the Board. The Board will make residential facilities, facilities for generating electricity, pucca drainage system etc. The Board will handle registration of pilgrims instead of J&K Government, quotas to states, decide for how many days the Yatra will continue. It will also be authorized to get ‘air-conditioning’ for the ‘lingam’ (made of ice) which of course means that it will never need to melt! Neither the government nor the court can question the Board for any action done by it with good intentions (Economic Times, 13th Aug 2008) –this clause sounds almost out of AFSPA !


Role of Media


It is necessary to seriously assess the role of India’s media in spreading communal poison and lies. This media carried pictures of broken trucks stranded on the highways, later this very same media propagated the Central Government’s position of ‘no economic blockade exists’ as the sole truth, without presenting its own investigation or explaining anew what it has itself maintained earlier.



On the day the people of Kashmir poured out onto the streets to attend the ‘janaza’ (funeral procession) of Hurriyat leader Sheikh Aziz and others killed in firing by armed forces and police, curfew was clamped on all 10 districts of Kashmir. Despite the killing of 15 people by police and army, fifty thousand reached the Idgah in Kashmir. However the next day the pictures carried by the major English dailies was of an armed policeman being stoned by some people, a photograph of this sort of repression the people of Kashmir are facing.



An article by Editor Vir Sanghvi in Hindustan Times on August clearly states that Kashmir be allowed to leave India because the Government of India has to sink crores of rupees in it and the people of that state ‘do not refuse to take these crores’ but still want to leave India.



In this, no issue has been raised of the democratic aspiration s of the people of Kashmir or the denial of the rights promised to them. Vir Sanghvi also does not specify whether these crores are used to sustain army repression or are ‘sunk’ for people’s welfare. Why is there no electricity in every village in Kashmir, why are there no jobs other than in police for the youth, why is there inadequate provision for education, especially for higher education? Vir Sanghvi further writes that after the cessation of crores of rupees from India, Kashmir will not be able to survive for ‘even 15 minutes’. It would have been better if Sanghvi had clearly informed readers whether or not Kashmir earns anything for India through tourism, through export of fruits and saffron grown here etc? He is only interested in making Dogra King Gulab Singh seem a fool for buying a white elephant from the colonialists for 75 lakh rupees!



In a similar vein a columnist argued in Hindustan Times (18th Aug) that if Banihal was blockaded why did the traders not opt for a route through Manali? Do the people of the area not have the right to expect that the government of India will ensure lifting of the blockade? Will the ruling classes of India- themselves great worshippers of liberalization, members of WTO, implementers of globalization, votaries of ‘free trade’ –only shoot at Kashmiris asking for the right to trade, if not via Jammu route, then at least to trade within entire Kashmir via Muzaffarabad.


People’s Upsurge in Kashmir Valley


Home Minister Shiv Raj Patil went to Kashmir, but as mentioned earlier, did not meet the traders’ representative delegation. After this rebuke, the Kashmir Fruit Growers Association, Kashmir Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Traders Association and Hurriyat gave a call for Muzaffarabad Chalo for 11th Aug ’08.



On 11th Aug ’08, thousands of people from different parts of the valley assembled a Sopore (also known as the apple town) and with fruit laden trucks began a march to Uri. The slogan of ‘azadi’ was on the lips of all. The administration had set up several road blocks, stopped traffic in several areas, but over two and a half lakh people set off towards Barahmullah. Police and armed forces fired on the protestors in several parts of Kashmir, including Kamarwari in Srinagar, Baramullah, Sangarama etc. At least 250 people were injured to various degrees in the police firings. The police and army fired on the main procession going towards Baramullah at Chelan (16 km before Baramullah) in which senior Hurriyat leader Sheikh Abdul Aziz, who was leading the rally, was killed. A total of five people were killed in the firings but the determined and unarmed people did not disperse but marched on till Chelan where the Hurriyat leader was shot at and killed (Chelan is the first gate of Uri which is close to the border).



On 12th Aug i.e. the next day, the entire valley (all 10 districts) was put under curfew for the first time in 13 years so that people could not emerge to participate in the funeral procession of Sheikh Aziz. Thousands violated the curfew, 15 people were killed in firing by armed forces in various parts of Kashmir and 200 were injured simply because they insisted on going to participate in the funeral march of their leader! Roads were closed or blocked by the administration. Among those shot dead by the armed forces was a journalist belonging to and reporting for a local television channel. Despite all this 50,000 people reached the Srinagar Idgah, pulled out the Hurriyat leaders from house arrest and took out a funeral procession under their leadership. On the night of 13th Aug ’08 in Safakadal area of Srinagar, people came out in the dead of night to protest against CRPF forcibly entering their homes. In a similar manner, on 15th Aug, in the Habakadal area of Srinagar people protested demanding the removal of CRPF from their area. 21 people were injured by armed forces firing on these people. The episode on the 13 Aug was so reprehensible that the administration was forced to remove Mr. Jain IG of CRPF, out of the Valley and also cancel the proposal to accord him a distinction in the 15th Aug list of honors! With all this, the Valley also raised a slogan alongside those of Azadi of ‘is the blood of Kashmiri’s cheap?' The Amarnath Samiti raised the demand that ‘they’ should be allowed to leave if ‘they’ want to go. But many intellectuals in the country soberly commented that at least the Govt of India could not hold ISI of Pakistan responsible for the events.



On 15th Aug 2008, CRPF hoisted the tri colour at Srinagar’s Lal Chowk and then took it down themselves-the forces are well aware of the anger they have generated and the aspirations of the people. Later a gathering of 20000 put up green flags at the same spot. On 16th Aug over 5 lakh people gathered at Pampore for a meeting on the martyrdom of Sheikh Aziz. Interestingly here, following the talks between the administration and the Hurriyat, there were no armed forces and police present and the gathering was unarmed and totally peaceful. In the same way on 18th Aug 5 lakh people gathered at Srinagar to give a memorandum to the UN office there. As no army or police was there, there was no violence. Over a 1000 memoranda from various organizations were submitted. If the ruling classes of India still cannot hear the voice of the Kashmiris, it is because they choose to be deaf. The call for ‘azadi’ includes the sentiment that the whole of Kashmir should be united, but it is a rejection of India which is synonymous with repression and violence. The Valley remained decked in black and green flags through the days of the agitation.


The All Party Committee of the Government


Showing great ‘initiative’ the government of India sent an all Party Committee to J&K. In Jammu the Sangharsh Samiti demanded the removal of all ‘Kashmiris’ from the team (who are the separatists!?) and thus PDP, National Conference and some local leaders of the Congress were removed from it. This is astonishing, because members of these parties have been PM/CM of J&K! Equally important and not surprisingly, the parliamentary ‘Left’ parties CPI and CPM did not leave the team to protest this discrimination. It is also important that this all party team stated that the decision to annul the land transfer by the Azad government was wrong. According to some newspapers (Indian Express 13th Aug) the all party committee was one in saying that the High Court orders should be implemented! This committee did not proceed to the Valley.



In the Kashmir Valley the Governor called a separate all Party meet attended by electoral parties. In order to keep themselves relevant in the predominant sentiment in the Valley, the National Conference and the PDP – who ‘win’ elections with the support of the army’s guns – opposed the repression by the police, CRPF and army and demanded opening of the Muzaffarabad road. They demanded withdrawal of AFSPA and Disturbed Areas Act. These demands are all demands raised by a section of the Hurriyat earlier.


The issue of Land Transfer


According to the laws of J&K no land of Kashmiris can be owned by non Kashmiris. The Hindu communal opinion has long been that Sec 370 in which special rights of J&K are protected should be done away with all together. The logic is that since the Indian part of J&K has been with the country for a ‘long time’ there is no more need for such provisions! Thus denying justice and honoring of commitment for a ‘long time’ does away with the right to that justice! Actually the issue of land is highly emotive and is linked to the issue of preserving the Kashmiri identity and of retaining the Kashmiri character of that .



An important issue in this context is the status of Kashmiri Pandits. Mr. Pradeep Magazine, himself a Kashmiri Pandit and a well known sports writer has labeled his people, ‘the most pampered refugees’ in an article in a leading newspaper. There is no known incident of the killing of any Kashmiri Pandit in the Valley by local people in the years preceding their leaving the valley, though a section of this community states they ‘were threatened’. The role of Jagmohan in arranging for their leaving the valley cannot be contested, and the real extent of his involvement has always been an issue of interest. The point is that the movement in the valley is known to have issued a list of the houses of the pundits and prohibited the local people from in any way entering, damaging or occupying the same. Many prominent members of that community have written that their empty homes have been occupied by security forces.



The rulers of India must be forced by democratize movements in India to institute charges against Mufti-Sinha-Azad trio for transfer of land against the laws of the State. When the government itself has no “objections” to trade on the Muzaffarabad route, it should the open the same from its side allowing the testing of its opinion that Pakistan and not India’s government is dilly-dallying over this. It is also the responsibility of the government to bring to book those responsible for the criminal act of blockading the Banihal pass and/or instigating that it should be done.



The assemblies at Pampore and Srinagar have substantiated the charge of people of the valley that the armed forces and police are responsible for violence and indiscipline, not the masses. Thus all armed forces should be withdrawn from civilian areas in Kashmir, all black laws should be revoked and all democratic rights restored. The current situation in Kashmir is that an angry populace is out on the streets in massive numbers, is opposing widespread repression and demanding azadi. Youth in the age group of 15-30 years and women are said to constitute the overwhelming number of protestors. Both sections of Hurriyat, JKLF, etc. have come together in a joint struggle committee. In this there are many sections who want independence for the State and also those who want a relation with Pakistan. They all want freedom from India and unity of the two parts of the Valley. Demanding restoring of democratic rights, immediately stopping rule through military of the valley, the democratic forces of India should agitate for the democratic aspirations of the Kashmiris to be honoured including the right to self-determination of the people of J&K. This is the only position which is just and in accordance with historical truths.



Indian ruling classes and their apologists are extremely touchy about this central democratic demand. They use the phrase of ‘unity and integrity of India’ as something fixed in time and space, forever before and hereafter, and then they use it as a weapon to flay those who speak of the democratic aspirations of the people of Jammu and Kashmir as seditious. In a five-thousand year old civilization at what point and who fixes the cut-off point for “unity and integrity”? This sub-continent was anyway torn into two by the ruling classes of India and Pakistan under the patronage of British colonialists in 1947. Apart from this, India is a multinational country, and unity of people can only exist where there is equality of nations.







Palash Biswas



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