Assam movement
The Assam Movement ( Assamese অসম আন্দোলন , English Assam Movement ) was an ethnic-nationalist mass movement in the Indian state of Assam from 1979 to 1985. The movement was mainly supported by Assamese students and was directed against the immigration of Bengali from neighboring Bangladesh to Assam and the associated, felt foreign infiltration. In the course of the movement there were massive disruptions of public order in Assam and violent riots, which in particular in 1983, in the context of the controversial parliamentary election in Assam, killed thousands. The movement took its outer end with the conclusion of the so-called Assam Agreement (Assam accord) 1985 between the leaders of the Assam Movement and the Indian government under Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi .
Historical background
Assam in British colonial times
In 1826, after the First Anglo-Burmese War , what is now Assam came under the control of the British East India Company . Before the war, Assam had lived a relatively isolated existence from the rest of India for centuries due to its geographical remoteness. In contrast to the rest of India, it had never come under the rule of Muslim rulers or was never part of the Mughal empire . The Assamese , who spoke an Indo-European language and were predominantly Hindus, settled in the river valleys of the Brahmaputra and its tributaries , while the sparsely populated mountain regions were populated by Tibetan-Burmese tribal peoples who mostly adhered to animistic religions. After the British came to power, the country's ethnic makeup began to change. Many Bengali Hindus came to the country with the British administrators. In Bengal, the East India Company had started a century earlier to build up a local administrative elite. Bengali (which is closely related to Assamese) became the official administrative language of Assam from 1836 to 1873. Many British and Bengali alike saw Assamese as a kind of minor dialect of Bengali. The Marwari ("residents of Marwar ") came as traders and monopolized major parts of the trade in Assam. In addition, from the second half of the 19th century, many workers were recruited for the emerging tea plantations - many of them Adivasi from the area of the Chota-Nagpur plateau in today's Bihar and Jharkhand . The native Assamese had little motivation to work on the plantations as wage laborers, as they operated subsistence farming on their own land. According to the 1891 census, around a quarter of the residents of the Brahmaputra Valley were estimated to be migrants from outside Assam. The greatest wave of immigration took place in the 20th century when Muslim Bengali immigrated in large numbers from densely populated Bengal to Assam, clearing large areas of forest there and making them usable for agriculture.
| decade | Assam | India |
|---|---|---|
| 1901-11 | 16.8 | 5.7 |
| 1911-21 | 20.2 | −0.3 |
| 1921-31 | 20.1 | 11.0 |
| 1931-41 | 20.5 | 14.2 |
| 1941-51 | 20.1 | 13.3 |
| 1951-61 | 35.0 | 21.6 |
| 1961-71 | 35.2 | 24.8 |
| 1971-81 | 36.3 | 24.7 |
From 1912 the province of Assam was permanently established, which included the populous, predominantly Bengali-Muslim district of Sylhet (about today's division Sylhet ). When parliamentary elections were first held in the 1930s and 1940s (with very limited voting rights), the Muslim Bengali won a majority in the provincial parliament of Assam and used their position to encourage further Muslim immigration from Bengal. Viceroy Lord Wavell noted after a visit to Assam on November 22, 1942: “The main problem is the efforts of the Muslim ministers to promote immigration to previously undeveloped land - on the grounds that this increases food production. What really matters to them, however, is the increase in the number of Muslims. ”When India was partitioned in 1947, the Muslims advocated annexing Assam to East Pakistan . This was not achieved, but the Sylhet district came to East Pakistan after a referendum.
Development in independent India until 1979
| year | Assamese | Bengali |
|---|---|---|
| 1951 | 56.7% | 16.5% |
| 1961 | 62.4% | 18.0% |
| 1971 | 61.0% | 19.7% |
In 1950 the former British-Indian province of Assam became the state of Assam. In the new state, the ethnic Assamese formed the majority and provided the government. These governments pursued a policy of promoting the Assamese language in administration, schools and universities. Assamese was made the official language of the state in 1960. Although this policy met with isolated opposition, the Muslim Bengali living in Assam adapted to the circumstances and in many cases even supported this policy, which was also directed essentially against Bengali Hindus in Assam. In view of the ethnic and religious cleansing that had taken place after the partition of India, many Muslims feared for a long time that they might be deported to neighboring Muslim East Pakistan, and they tried hard not to attract attention in the majority society of Assam. For example, in 1972 there were public disputes as to whether Bengali should be used as a language in addition to Assamese and English for exams at Gauhati University . In the dispute, Assamese Hindus and Bengali Hindus faced each other, while the Bengali Muslims supported the position of the Assamese Hindus.
The official statistics showed that Assam was the part of India with the fastest growing population since the beginning of the 20th century. The reason for this population increase was a positive immigration balance. Even after the partition of India, immigration from East Bengal, now East Pakistan, did not ebb. In the years after the partition, mainly Hindu refugees who saw themselves discriminated against by the Muslim majority in East Pakistan poured into the country. However, increasing numbers of Muslim Bengali migrated across the green border. In the censuses, migrants often named Assam as their country of birth and, in some cases, Assamese as their mother tongue, as they feared deportation as illegal migrants. The information on religious affiliation, however, was mostly truthful. From these censuses it became clear that the Muslim proportion of the population was rapidly increasing and it could be estimated that around 221,000 Muslims had immigrated between 1951 and 1961. By 1971 there were 424,000. In the run-up to and during the Bangladesh war , millions of refugees poured into India from East Pakistan (from 1971 Bangladesh). The exact number of migrants to Assam could only be estimated. The population of Assam rose from 14.6 million to 19.9 million (+ 36.3%) between 1971 and 1981. If the population had grown in line with the rest of India (+ 24.7%) there would have been a population increase of 3.6 instead of 5.3 million. On the basis of various statistical surveys it could be concluded that in the decade from 1971 to 1981 about 1.8 million people immigrated to Assam. It was not possible to determine exactly where these immigrants came from, but it seemed reasonable to assume that the majority of these were illegal migrants from Bangladesh. In view of the mass immigration of the autochthonous Assamese and tribal peoples, there was growing concern that the Muslim Bengali immigrants in particular, when they were sufficiently numerous, instead of mostly Assamese as before, would in future use Bengali as their mother tongue and that the Assamese would soon be a minority in their own language Would become land.
1977 to 1979
An essential point that had kept the Bengali Muslims on the side of the Assamese Hindus in the first decades after independence was the integrative power of the Congress Party . The Congress Party was seen by the Muslims and also by the Bengali Hindus in Assam as a supra-regional party that protected the interests of the minorities. After the heavy electoral defeat of the Congress Party under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the all-India parliamentary elections in 1977 , the Congress was split in 1978 into a wing that continued to support Indira Gandhi ( Congress (I) ) and a parliamentary group that was initially led by D. Devaraj Urs stand ( Congress (U) ). The Janata Party (JNP), newly founded in 1977 through the merger of various opposition groups, established itself as a new force in the Indian political landscape . The Janata Party not only won the 1977 all-India election, after which it established the Indian central government, but was also successful in the 1978 election to the Parliament of Assam, in which it won 53 of the 126 constituencies. Indira Gandhi's Congress (I) won 8 and the Congress (U) 26 seats. The gains made by the communists were clear. The CPM , which had never won a constituency in Assam before, won 11 this time. 34 Muslims sat in the newly elected 126-member parliament - more than ever before. Chief Minister, ie head of government of Assam, was Golap Borbora (JNP), who led a coalition of JNP and communists ( CPM ). After the breakup of this coalition, a new government of JNP and Congress (U) was formed in September 1979 under Chief Minister Jogendra Nath Hazarika (JNP).
Start of the movement in 1979
The external trigger for the start of the Assam movement was a by-election in the Lok Sabha - constituency 8-Mangaldoi in Assam. The previous mandate holder Hiralal Patowary of the Janata Party had died on March 28, 1979 in New Delhi, so that a by-election had to be held in his constituency. In preparation for the by-election, the electoral register was checked more closely. In previous years, employees of the Indian electoral authorities had repeatedly expressed the assumption that the electoral registers in Assam were imprecise. In 1977 the Chief Electoral Officer of Assam declared that "the influx of a very large number of people from abroad causes more problems, since these people induce the census authorities by false information to put their names in the electoral register". In 1978 the Chief Election Commissioner of India stated :
“I would like to refer to the alarming situation in some states, especially in the northeast region , where there are worrying reports that a large number of foreigners have been entered on the electoral roll [...] Another worrying fact in this regard is that of political parties Demand that the names of these migrants, who are not Indian nationals, be entered on the electoral register without questioning and checking their nationality. This is serious business. "
The review of the electoral register in constituency 8-Mangaldoi revealed that 36,000 voters were indeed illegally registered. Of these, 26,000 were non-Indian nationals. This corresponded to about 5% of the registered voters in this constituency, which was not a very large proportion, but could be decisive in the often narrow majorities in the elections carried out according to relative majority voting. It was obvious that the situation in the other constituencies of Assam was similar.
| Country | Population (estimated 1979, in millions) |
Per capita income (Rs) |
Reading ability (in%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Assam | 19.2 | 852 | 19.3 |
| Manipur | 1.4 | 755 | 32.8 |
| Meghalaya | 1.3 | 761 | 29.4 |
| Nagaland | 0.7 | 949 | 27.4 |
| Tripura | 2.0 | 825 | 31.0 |
| Arunachal Pradesh | 0.5 | 838 | 11.3 |
| Mizoram | 0.4 | 790 | 53.7 |
| India as a whole | 646 | 1278 | 29.5 |
|
below average average above average |
|||
Due to the collapse of the Janata government in Delhi, early elections for the Lok Sabha were scheduled for 1980. The All Assam Students Union (AASU, সদৌ অসম ছাত্ৰ সন্থা), which claimed to represent a large part of the student body and students of Assam, called in association with other Assamese organizations such as Asom Jatiyotabadi Dal (AJD, 'Nationalist Assam's party '), Purbanchaliya Lok Parishad (PLP,' People's Council of the Eastern Region '), and the Asom Sahitya Sabha (ASS, অসম সাহিত্য সভা,' Assam's Literary Society ') review the electoral register before the 1980 election. On August 26, 1979, various organizations, including the AASU, ASS, AJD and PLP, joined forces to form the All Asom Gana Sangram Parishad (AAGSP, 'Committee for the Struggle of the People of Assam'). This date can be seen as the external beginning of the Assam movement. The declared aim of the AAGSP was the identification of all illegal "foreigners", their removal from the electoral register and the expulsion of all persons who had immigrated illegally to Assam since 1961. The ongoing economic and social backwardness of the entire Indian Northeast was also discussed. The per capita income in Assam was 852 rupees in 1979 , compared to Rs 1278 the Indian average. The average reading ability in Assam was 19.3% (total India: 29.5%), infrastructure, agriculture and industry were significantly underdeveloped compared to the Indian national average. The situation was similar in the 6 states of Northeast India , which are adjacent to Assam . A third of all Indian oil production and most of Indian tea production came from Assam. The Indian central government has been charged with exploiting the natural riches of Assam without returning an adequate equivalent. Parts of the movement radicalized in the course of the process and the AJD and PLP finally demanded the secession of all of Assam with the neighboring small states from the rest of India.
Two million people from all over Assam took part in the initially largely peaceful movement of passive resistance and civil disobedience ( Satyagraha ) in November 1979. The roads and infrastructure facilities, as well as the oil transport, were blocked by the demonstrators. Large parts of the administrative bureaucracy in Assam sympathized with the aims of the movement and did not offer any substantial resistance. The agitation was rejected by Congress (I) , Congress (U) and the two communist parties ( CPI and CPM) with the argument that the agitation was also directed against migrants from other parts of India and refugees who had a right in Assam to live. However, electoral considerations were also involved, as these four parties saw migrants as their potential voters. The communist parties, which traditionally had a strong voter base in the states of West Bengal and Tripura, were largely perceived by many Assamese as purely Bengali parties.
AAGSP and AASU demanded that the legal status of all persons who came to Assam from abroad after 1951 should be checked. Individuals who came to Assam between 1951 and 1961 should be given a right to stay after an individual review. People who immigrated to Assam from abroad between 1961 and 1971 were to be declared stateless and distributed to the rest of India, while those who came after 1971 were all to be deported to Bangladesh. All organizations of the Assam movement denied that the movement was specifically directed against Muslims. However, soon after the agitation began, communalist clashes between Hindus and Muslims broke out.
On December 12, 1979, the Indian government suspended the Assamese government under Chief Minister Hazarika after only 94 days in office and placed the state under the direct control of the central government ( president's rule ). This was the first such event in the history of Assam.
1980 to 1985
The agitation reached such proportions that the Indian electoral commission canceled the election in 12 of the 14 Lok Sabha constituencies of Assam, so that in Assam in the all- Indian parliamentary election in 1980 only 1-Karimganj and 2-Silchar were elected. This was the first time in the history of independent India that an election could not be held in one part of the country due to disturbance of public order. As a counter-reaction to the AASU and AAGSP agitation, students and pupils from the minorities (especially Bengali) organized and founded the All Assam Minority Students Union (AAMSU, " All Assamese Minority Students Union ") in May 1980 . By September 1980, the AAMSU had developed into a major political force that was included in the negotiations between the government and AASU. The central demand of the AAMSU was the granting of citizenship to all immigrants who had come to Assam before 1971.
Since under the provisions of the Constitution president's rule was only allowed for a maximum of one year are made, a new government led by the Muslim was in December 1980 Congress (I) -Abgeordneten Anwara Taimur formed which was supported by the CPI. However, the government only lasted 205 days, after which president's rule was reinstated . An attempt to re-form a government in January 1982 under the local Congress (I) leader Keshav Chandra Gogoi was only successful for 2 months. During this time the Assam Movement's actions continued unchanged. The public order of Assam and the economy of Assam were severely disrupted. The Indian government sent police and army units to maintain law and order. With the continued unwillingness to compromise on the part of the Indian government, the movement, which had been fairly peaceful until then, became increasingly violent.
The parliamentary elections in Assam in 1983
The Indian government, under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, re-elected in 1980, announced in February 1982 that elections to the Parliament of Assam would be held in January 1983. This seemed a constitutional necessity as the maximum five-year term of the Assamese parliament ended in March 1983. However, the electoral registers have not been checked. The government did not keep its promises, which it had made many times in previous years. AASU and AAGSP then called for an election boycott.
The elections were held on different days on the basis of the 1979 electoral register: on February 14, 1983, there were 62 constituencies, on February 17 in 37 and on February 20 and 21, 1983 in 16 and 11 respectively an Indira Gandhi's Congress Party and, on the other hand, a six-party coalition - including Congress (S) , CPM, CPI - and other smaller parties. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Janata Party and Lok Dal , on the other hand, supported the election boycott.
Large map: voter turnout in percent by constituency, small map: party membership of the constituency
winners (ICS = Congress Party, ICS = Indian Congress (Socialist), CPM = Communists (Marxists), PTC = Plains Tribals Council of Assam , IND = Independent); for constituency names and numbers, see the list of constituencies in India
Despite the massive police and military presence, the election was marked by extreme violence. On February 18, 1983, while the elections were still in progress, members of the Tiwa tribe along with some ethnic Assamese attacked the village of Nellie and neighboring settlements in the central Assamese district of Naogaon . The attackers were armed with spears, cutting weapons, clubs and firearms. According to later official investigations, 1,383 people - men, women and children - were killed in a slaughter lasting several hours. Unofficial sources gave even higher numbers. The attacked were Bengali Muslims whose ancestors immigrated from the Maimansingh region in what is now Bangladesh in the 1930s .
There were also violent ethnic clashes in other places in Assam, even if the number of victims was nowhere near as high as in Nellie. In Gohpur there were armed clashes between Bodos and Assamese, in other places there was violence between Bodos and Bengal, or conflicts between Muslims and Hindus.
In 13 of the 126 constituencies it was not possible to vote at all due to the circumstances, in three constituencies the election could not be carried out in an orderly manner and in constituency 76-Biswanath the congress party candidate was murdered. In 17 constituencies there was no election because no candidate against the Congress Party was put forward, and in four other constituencies the opposition candidates were prevented by the agitators from submitting their election documents in time, so that the Congress Party candidates won the constituency without an election. Ultimately, an election took place in only 105 of 126 constituencies. In these 105 constituencies, the average turnout was 32.7%, lower than in any previous election in Assam. In the constituencies with a large Bengali population, voter turnout was high in some cases, as well as in some of the constituencies of the Bodo tribal population. In contrast, it was very low in most constituencies with an ethnic Assamese majority.
1983 to 1985
After the election, Hiteshwar Saikia (Congress Party) became the new Chief Minister. Strikes and boycotts continued after the election, but with reduced activity. From mid-1984 onwards, negotiations intensified again between the government and the leaders of the movement. After Indira Gandhi was assassinated on October 31, 1984 by her Sikh bodyguards, her son Rajiv Gandhi became the new Prime Minister of India. There were new elections in which the state of Assam did not participate again. With Rajiv Gandhi as prime minister, a fresh start was also possible. Direct negotiations between his government and the leaders of the Assam movement finally led to the signing of the so-called Assam Agreement on August 15, 1985. In this, the Indian government made extensive concessions and the leaders of the Assam movement agreed to end the resistance actions. After the conclusion of the agreement, the parliament of Assam was dissolved on August 18, 1985 and new elections were announced for the parliament of Assam and for the 14 Assamese Lok Sabha constituencies. The AASU founded a new party, Asom Gana Parishad , which was able to win the majority of the constituencies for the state parliament and for the Lok Sabha in the election on December 16, 1985 and then formed the government in Assam.
See also
Web links
- Gabriele Venzky: Massacre in Assam: The fear of foreigners - Why the elections became a bloody tragedy , ZEIT ONLINE , February 25, 1983
Individual evidence
- ^ Chandan Kumar Sharma: The immigration issue in Assam and conflicts around it . In: Asian Ethnicity . tape 13 , no. 3 , 2012, ISSN 1469-2953 , p. 287–309 , doi : 10.1080 / 14631369.2012.676235 (English).
- ↑ a b c d e f g h Myron Weiner: The Political Demography of Assam's Anti-Immigrant Movement . In: Population and Development Review . tape 9 , no. 2 , June 1983, p. 279-292 , JSTOR : 1973053 (English).
- ^ Chandan Kumar Sharma: The immigration issue in Assam and conflicts around it . In: Asian Ethnicity . tape 13 , no. 3 , 2012, ISSN 1469-2953 , p. 287–309 , doi : 10.1080 / 14631369.2012.676235 (English).
- ↑ Shree Deka: All Assam students union and its impact on the politics of Assam since 1979 . April 30, 2004, p. 92 (English, handle.net - dissertation, Gauhati University).
- ^ Dinesh Kotwal: Insurgency in Assam: The demographic dimensions . In: Strategic Analysis . tape 25 , no. 2 , ISSN 1754-0054 , p. 313-324 , doi : 10.1080 / 09700160108458958 (English).
- ↑ THE ASSAM OFFICIAL LANGUAGE ACT, 1960. The North East Portal (originally published in The Assam Gazette Extraordinary dated 19 December 1960), accessed on 11 March 2017 (English).
- ↑ a b c Election Results - Full Statistical Reports. Indian Election Commission, accessed on March 11, 2017 (English, election results of all Indian elections to the Lok Sabha and the parliaments of the states since independence).
- ^ A b Prabhu Chawla: Assam and the North-East: The danger of secession . In: India Today . February 29, 1980 (English, prabhuchawla.com [PDF] quoted in Weiner, p. 288).
- ↑ a b P.S. Reddi: Electoral Rolls with special reference to Assam . In: The Indian Journal of Political Science . tape 42 , no. 1 . Indian Political Science Association, 1981, pp. 27–37 , JSTOR : 41855074 (English, in the original text: I would like to refer to the alarming situation in some states specially in North-Eastern region wherefrom disturbing reports are coming regarding large scale inclusion of foreign nationals in the electoral rolls [...] Another disturbing factor in this regard is the demand made by political parties for the inclusion in the electoral rolls the names of such migrants who are not Indian citizens without even questioning and properly determining their citizenship status. This is a serious state of affairs. ).
- ↑ a b Prabhu Chawla: Economy: The Sick Sisters . In: India Today . February 29, 1980 (English, prabhuchawla.com [PDF]).
- ^ A b V. Venkata Rao: Government and Politics in North East India . In: The Indian Journal of Political Science . tape 48 , no. 4 , December 1987, pp. 458-486 , JSTOR : 41855331 (English).
- ↑ Bitasta Das: Unraveling ethnic tensions colonialism, post colonialism and the question of identity in Assam . January 19, 2015 (English, handle.net - Dissertation Manipal University Bangalore).
- ^ Arun Shourie , Assam elections: Can democracy survive them? (English, intoday.in - reprint, original article published in: India Today , May 31, 1983, p. 57).
- ↑ Keya Dasgupta, Amalendu Guha: 1983 Assembly Poll in Assam: An Analysis of Its Background and Implications . In: Economic and Political Weekly . tape 20 , no. 19 , May 11, 1983, ISSN 2349-8846 , pp. 843-853 (English).
- ↑ On this day: February 20: 1983: Hundreds die in Assam poll violence. BBC News, accessed April 8, 2017 .
- ↑ Sanjib Baruah: Immigration, Ethnic Conflict, and Political Turmoil - Assam, 1979-1985 . In: Asian Survey . tape 26 , no. 11 . University of California Press, Nov. 1986, pp. 1184-1206 , JSTOR : 2644315 (English).