Assam problems fester since Indira Gandhi had “no plan” in 1983

By John Elliott from Riding the Elephant blog

Indira Gandhi told me during a Financial Times interview in February 1983 that her government would wait until the situation in Assam cooled down before taking the next step to resolve a crisis in which some 3,000 people had just been killed. There had been controversial state assembly elections in the state and the government had sent in 75,000 troops to control the violence.

The Indian prime minister said that she had “no plan as such” to resolve the crisis. The problems of illegal immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh dated back to Indian partition in 1947 “and we can’t just wish that away”. Bangladesh should, she added, take back migrants who had entered India when their country was being created (out of Pakistan) in a 1971 war. Beyond that, she said blandly, her Government would wait. (FT February 25, 1983).
Now nearly 30 years later, the problems of Assam and other north–eastern states remain, and it seems that the Indian government is still waiting until the situation cools down.
But the world is now different, as has been demonstrated in the past few weeks with what is probably been one of the biggest sudden mass migrations since the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947.
Tens of thousands of Assamese and other workers and students from north–eastern India have fled home from Bangalore and other cities in the south of the country because they feared mass attacks in retaliation for communal violence in the north-east. There have been some individual attacks, but the panic has been spread by reports and pictures faking anti-Muslim atrocities in Assam and nearby states that have been carried by mobile phone text messages and other social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.
There are many lessons to be learned from these events, not least the way that social media can be used to stir up trouble in international as well as local conflicts. India has banned mass text messages for two weeks, closed 250 web pages, and said that many of the false messages were reported by organisations such as Google and Facebook to have originated in Pakistan (which perhaps inevitably Pakistan has rejected).
There are also lessons about how increased labour mobility means that communities need to absorb newcomers, as well as about older problems such as the treatment of both ethnic and religious minorities (in this case north-east India’s Muslims) and migrants from neighbouring countries (such as those from Bangladesh). Sadly, political parties often prefer to make capital out of minorities, as happened today in Mumbai where part of the chauvinistic Shiv Sena political movement staged a massive demonstration in the city.
But perhaps the biggest new lesson for India is that the seven north-eastern states – often known as the seven sisters – can no longer be treated Indira Gandhi-style as a distant delayable problem. Ever since independence in 1947, the Indian government has regarded armed insurgencies and other uprisings and illegal immigration issues in states such as Assam, Nagaland and Manipur as events that have virtually no impact on the rest of India, located as they are far away on the other side of Bangladesh.
Now the north-east has indeed come to Delhi, in a political sense. It has also come as a social and economic phenomena with a vast influx of mostly young, energetic and friendly people who have come to the capital and the southern cities for work, or as students.
“The staff come from the north-east”, is a remark frequently heard about a restaurant. This is not said in a derogatory way, but as a slightly dismissive description of a people who, looking more Chinese than most Indians, are indeed regarded as internal migrants from a distant part of the country and not as part of the mainstream, even though they have become an important part of these cities’ economies. Yet when Mary Kom, a woman boxer from Manipur, won a bronze medal in the Olympic Games, India celebrated with a fervour that could not have been greater if she had come from Mumbai or Delhi.
Next February, it will be 30 years since Indira Gandhi said she was waiting – in an FT interview with Alain Cass, then the Asia editor, and with me (I had just been appointed south Asia correspondent and moved to Delhi a few months later).
Whatever steps have or have not been taken since then, the basic problems clearly remain. But the world is now different, as we have seen in the past few weeks, so surely the waiting game is over.

For a longer version of this article, go to John Elliott’s Riding the Elephant blog – http://wp.me/pieST-1LF