Day of the Demons

 

 

Assam has suddenly lost the moral highground that it always claimed in its case against security force atrocities perpetuated during anti-insurgency operations in the trouble-torn state—that the state’s culture respected women who had been targeted during security operations. Splashed across newspapers and television on November 25, were pictures that Guwahati wouldn’t—at least shouldn’t—forget in a long time to come: of helpless Adivasi women being thrashed by blood-thirsty mobs of deranged men, of a brutalised Adivasi woman running for her life, stripped and stark naked, of bodies of battered men and women strewn across the streets of Beltola, barely a few kilometres from Dispur, the state’s seat of power. The situation did not require definition: Assam could do to others, in broad daylight, what others, they said, did to them.

With Adivasi leaders from Jharkhand flowing into the state the violence at Guwahati’s Beltola has become the spark that can now ignite a movement rarely seen before among the Adivasis, nearly a million of whom have been engaged in the state’s tea estates for generations. Within 48 hours of the violence, the rhetoric of the state government quite expectedly changed: from “the Adivasis attacked the locals first”, to State minister Himanta Biswa Sarma later announcing that “The state will recommend to the Centre the inclusion of the state’s Adivasis in the country’s list of Scheduled Tribes." This despite the state’s opposition to granting such status ever since the demand was first considered, by the Lokur Committee, way back in the 1960s, as Home MinisterShivraj Patil pointed out.

As expected, even members of the Congress were willing to speak out against the government’s apathy. “We blame the administration for what happened to the rallyists that day but who handles the administration? It’s the government,” said Bhagirath Karan, chairman of the APCC Tea Cell. Astonishingly, two Union ministers, Jairam Ramesh and Kamal Nath, both of whom were present in Guwahati during the violence didn’t bother to visit the injured.

Quick to visit Guwahati, however, were a number of Jharkhand leaders including Shibu Soren, Arjun Munda and Babulal Marandi. Soon after the violence at Guwahati, students’ organisations in Jharkhand threatened an economic blockade saying they would stop the flow of coal and iron ore to the rest of the country unless their people in Assam were recognised as a Scheduled Tribe community. “No one saw women treated like this even in the 40 year long agitation in Jharkhand,” said Soren.