Exactly forty two years ago, on the morning of February 18, 1983, Sirajjudin was returning from the market, after having left to obtain some essential elements. As he approached his people, he saw people running towards him, far from his homes and the people. Panic beaten, Sirajjudin looked for his family, and finally saw his two children covering a nearby pound. Hi, he raised the youngest son on his back, hero to his eldest son of his hand and began to run. On each side, I could hear shots. While he made his way through the exodus, his eldest son’s fingers somehow left his grip. He lost it in the stampede.
Shortly after, Sirajudin saw an Asamés man running behind him with a sickle. Tired of taking the child and unable to maintain the speed, soon the man had reached it. The man lifted his sickle in the air, and with a movement, opened the skull of his youngest son. Lifting the lifeless body, Sirajudin came to the river in some way and escaped its persecutors. Around him, the bodies splashed the earth as he could see. I would visit these heartbreaking memories to the filmmaker Auasri Krishnan for his 2015 film What the fields remember. The Nellie massacre had begun, and, in the course of six hours, on February 18, 1983, it would take through 2000 lives. All victims were Bengali Muslims.
The Nellie massacre is among the bloodiest pogroms of independent India, an exercise of cataclysmic ethnic cleaning that was perpetrated by the Asamese hegemonic communities and Tiwa minorities in the context of the intense and anti-extreme Assam). The death toll is comparable, if no higher than, the 2002 Gujarat rijarat. However, it occupies little space in the public and Indian public imagination today. Although Nellie is cushioned in the memories of the Bengali/Muslim population of Assam, it is without recognition, restitution and repair of the Assamese community.
Carrying old stories
Last year, when one of the authors (Padmini Baruah) interviewed several Bengalí-Muslore people in Assam for investigation into citizenship reduction, Nellie appeared again and again.
Zubeda Begum (name changed), a survivor of the arrest of citizenship who had to go to Yail due to a legal revocation of his citizenship, remembered Nellie as part of his childhood, “when we were growing, we all played in the Thishet, all, Weu-Muslim. Only in 1983, when we listened to Nellie, we simply could not believe it.
She acknowledged that things had changed now. “With this government, hatred is sown in people’s hearts,” he said. A Muslim activist known for his role in campaigns and movements for minority elevation told me that he had no justice for people in Nellie: “You are presenting old stories, no one has been a memory of this car, said the car.
It would be a mistake to see Nellie as an independent event, much less an aberrational event. Rather, it should be understood as a social and political metaphor that transcends a particular period or a modern assembly history. ‘Nellie’ is not a floating word: it has a certain prefix and a suffix.
What happened forty -two years ago was prevented by an impulse of decades by the dominant assembly civil society to mark and reject the cultural ‘strangers’. For example, the ‘Bongal Kheda’ movement in the 1960s claimed to establish Asamés as the official state language and retain jobs for assembled by pointing to the Bengali (mostly Hindu). KC Chakravarti, an academic, registered in 1960 how the influential Asamese sociocultural organizations such as the Assam Sahitya Sabha legitimized the ethnolinguistic agenda of the movement. The fervent linguistic nationalism, driven by socio -political rhetoric around the non -mitigated influx of Bengali Muslims to Assam after the 1971 Bangladesh liberation war ‘Secular’ intervene to give an explicitly anti-musulmanly advantage to Asamés nationalism. By the time the Assam movement turned, Bengali Muslims had the cultural enemy explicitly marked in Assam. You didn’t have to go back from there.
Nellie’s forgetfulness has allowed majority impunity
The suffix (or nellie) is equally critical for us, if we have to understand the event in its entirety. The Pogrom marked the guideline for a form of social and political script xenophobic in Assam that develops in different ways even today, Bully Bully and iteratively. Of the 1997 report of former Governor Sk Sinha de Assam entitled Report on illegal migration in Assamwhich warned of “external aggression” or “illegal immigrants”, to the decision of the Supreme Court in Sarbanda Sonowal (2005) that reversed the burden of citizenship test to “illegal immigrants” suspended, this hydra head script has many forms. Above all, it is indelible that marked the bodies of the ethnorreligious minorities of Assam for bureaucratic and physical violence.
The fading of Nellie’s memory by the dominant society has brought a sense of impunity to the State. We have seen its striking refractions in the last decade, since the Bharatiya Janata party has captured the Asamés electorate with great success through acts of violence routine against the Bengali Muslim community, such as Forced. Forced. Forced. Forced. In the last eight years, Assam has evicted about 10,000 families from their lands and homes. One of the authors (Padmini Baruah), the duration of his field work, found multiple sites where the State had razed government schools, Anganwadi centers, water storage units, stepmother and mosques. Assam’s prime minister has registered more than once to explicitly deny the social and political space to Bengali Muslims.
Nellie appears, from time to time, in the majority discourse, not as an event that guarantees the grim introspection, but as an idealized historical act that should be repeated if Assam must be “saved.”
Preserve Nellie’s memory
Recently, against all probabilities, a new harvest of young academics, writers and poets, including many of the Bengali Muslim community of Assam, have begun to revive and restore the memory of Nellie. This literary rebirth aims to remind the old and young people of Assam and the rest of the pogromo world and the policy that surrounds it.
However, it is worth asking: why should we remember Nellie every year? Is there any value to dig up old trauma? Shouldn’t we move on?
A town has the right to forget as much as they have the right to remember. Most Bengali Muslims in Assam have chosen to suppress the memory of the event. One cannot imagine the weight of the memories of community trauma and humiliation.
But what happens when the author’s community chooses to forget it?
It is this basic distinction that civil society in Assam and beyond needs to recognize. If we decide to move forward, we must necessarily ask: Who do we do it?
It is a difficult question, but here, we are going to our original point: that Nellie is not a mere historical event, but a metaphor. It is a microcosm of politics and society not only in Assam, but of all India today. That Nellie’s horror and disgust are discernible just after four decades in our mundane bureaucratic practices, social spaces and political attitudes is precisely who we must continue talking about it in a year of many words. This annual ritual is, of course, driven by a collective hope that not everyone gets lost, that we still have the time and space to avoid repetition.
[A postscript: Padmini Baruah sought to do an autoethnographic exercise – their positionality, as a child of an active participant and block level student leader in the Assam Agitation, means that they are rooted in, and have access to the rooms of, the oppressors. They asked all the members of their extended family, young and old, what they remembered about the Nellie Massacre. In the older generation, the response was muted: “We remember it happening far away.” “We obviously didn’t want violence, this was a non-violent movement.” “I don’t think that we bear the responsibility for this, this was just a mob mentality. This was not the Assam Movement.” The universal response from the Assamese millennials: “What? Never heard of it.”]
(Padmini Baruah is an assistant professor at the Faculty of National Law of the University of India, Bengaluru. Angshman Choudhury is a joint doctoral candidate in comparative Asian studies at the National University of Singapore and King’s College London. Courtesy, an independent political opinion, informed by Indira Jaising and Anand Grover.
