Anxiety, Violence and the Postcolonial State: Understanding the “Anti-Bangladeshi” Rage in Assam, India
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Anxiety, Violence and the Postcolonial State: Understanding the “Anti-Bangladeshi” Rage in Assam, India Rafiul AHMED* Abstract Key Words Fear, insecurity and anxiety seem to be the Cartographic anxiety, border, census, enduring sources of genocidal impulses against D-voter, Bengali-speaking Muslims, Assam the Bengali-speaking Muslim minorities Movement, AASU. of contemporary Assam, India. This paper explores how the tripartite matrix of the border, census and citizenship categories has become Introduction indispensable in inscribing fear and anxiety in contemporary Assam’s body politic. Using insights Fear, insecurity and anxiety seem to from postcolonial states’ practices, the paper shows how the state suffers from a persistent neurosis, be the enduring sources of genocidal characterised by an “incompleteness-anxiety”, impulses against minorities across the and how attempts have been made to resolve globe. Contemporary Assam- one of this sense of crisis by mobilising the majority to the major states in India’s Northeast align its Assamese identity in the direction of an region- has witnessed widespread imagined purified “national whole”. Further, the paper elaborates upon the implications of these violence and killings over the last few anxieties with reference to Indo-Bangladeshi decades. Identity and population politics relations, in which Assam figures prominently based on notions of ethnic, religious both as a prime border state and as a place that is and linguistic markers have mobilised integral to the region’s riparian borderlands as a whole. Moving away from the official discourses of specific equations of belonging, contemporary Indo-Bangladeshi relations, which equations charted on the matrix of the are guided largely by postcolonial cartographic border fence, census numbers and the anxiety, the paper points towards the creative new category of D-voters, which was possibilities of exploring the “relational registers” invented to identify citizens perceived to within the region’s shared civilisational resources as an alternative, in which Assam can act as a be of doubtful citizenship, all of which bridge between India and Bangladesh. have come to embody a specific form of genocidal violence in contemporary Assam. At the centre of this political * Assistant Professor at the Department of storm is the Bengali-speaking Muslim Geography in Sikkim University, Sikkim, community- a minority community India. whose long history in Assam is part of the 55 PERCEPTIONS, Spring 2014, Volume XIX, Number 1, pp. 55-70. Rafiul Ahmed larger story of migration and settlement profile. Stories and images of so-called from neighbouring Bengali-speaking Bangladeshi migrants in the state are also regions dating back to the plantation ubiquitous in the local Assamese press. economies and labour practices of the Migration from Bangladesh is framed as British Raj.1 Although this clash had Assam’s “most fatal malady”, a “plague” previously been based along ethnic and and a “ticking bomb”. Migrants are linguistic markers involving Assamese referred to as “infiltrators”, “encroachers” 3 and Bengali-speaking people, the state and “invaders”. This representation has increasingly deployed religion- of Bangladeshi migrants as a horde based rhetoric of Hindu-Muslim unlawfully occupying scarce cultivable land represents them as a threat to the communalism to characterise such cultural identity, economic wellbeing tensions in recent times. and national security of Axomia. This characterisation of Assam has drawn The rhetoric of erecting widespread attention to the Northeast “barbed” fencing and sealing-off region in India while creating the the border has become a stable impression that the state is hovering at marker of Assam’s regional the edge of perpetual insecurities. politics. Speaking of violence and ethnocide in the age of globalisation, Appadurai The widespread rage against Bengali- has raised a fundamental question: why do minorities across the globe appear to speaking Muslims has influenced the be so threatening despite the fact that they dominant image of this community: an are so few in numbers and are powerless?4 “enemy alien”, posing an existential threat One has to ask the same question in to Assamese people, land and security.2 the context of Assam, where the much- The slogan “Bangladeshi go back” has vilified Bengali-speaking Muslims largely echoed repeatedly in the popular media, constitute a peasant community that is which has represented Bengali Muslims fairly underrepresented in government as “foreigners” and “illegal” migrants. A jobs, higher bureaucracy, the army and day in Assam does not pass without the politics in general. To be precise then, it daily newspapers covering demands for becomes important to ask: how are the the creation of a barbed-wire fence along multiple layers of fear and anxiety of the the Assam-Bangladesh border and the majority manufactured and reproduced to use of spurious statistics as evidence of an construct the perceived threat? To explore unabated Bengali Muslim migration that this question, this paper uses postcolonial is threatening the state’s demographic theory that examines the nature of 56 Anxiety, Violence and the Postcolonial State modern states and their practices. In this regional politics in Assam given that the regard, Sankaran Krishna’s formulation state, in India’s Northeast, is located in of the postcolonial state’s “cartographic a geopolitically volatile zone where there anxiety” in relation to its body politics are a number of contested international is a useful analytical tool.5 Taking the boundaries with China, Burma and broader meaning of the term, this paper Bangladesh. Accessible only through explores how the tripartite matrix of the narrow “chicken-neck” area via the the border, the census and citizenship neighbouring West Bengal state, the categories has become indispensable in Bangladesh borderlands in the Indian inscribing fear and anxiety in Assam’s Northeast span territorially to form a contemporary body politic. Further, the triangular corner in Assam to down paper elaborates upon the implications along the slopes of the Jaintia Hills and of these anxieties in reference to Indo- Garo Hills in the state of Meghalaya and Bangladeshi relations, in which Assam further down through an elongated strip figures prominently both as a prime in the state of Tripura. border state and as a place that is integral to the region’s riparian borderlands as a whole. It has become part of a constituency building political (Re)Romancing the “Border” ritual on the part of the parties in government to pay physical Every time Nazir Rahman Bhuiyan, a visits to the border area and villager in Bangladesh, walks on foot from comment upon its progress. one part of his own house to another, he crosses an international border, the recently fenced boundary between A major portion of the Assam- India and Bangladesh. A spokesman for Bangladesh border is formed by the the Indian Ministry of External Affairs river Brahmaptura which flows along said that the rationale for the fence is the border of the Dhubri district. The the same that compelled the United peculiarity of this part of the borderland States and Israel to build fences between is its porous nature as the landscape Mexico and the West Bank respectively: gets punctured by the Brahmaputra to prevent illegal migration and terrorist River and its myriad chars (riverine infiltration.6 This “fencing” rhetoric has islands), which gets dried up during the not only preoccupied official discourses winter months and thereby creating a about borders at the national level, but perforated land bridge. This very nature it has also got deeply entrenched within of the border defies the cookie-cutter 57 Rafiul Ahmed image of a closely bounded national Congress-led Assam government, for geography. Despite the porous nature of instance, launched a campaign to deport this landscape, the popular rhetoric of migrants who had settled in the state since the Assam-Bangladesh border often gets January 1951. He, along with his party, carried away by the forces of “imaginative advocated extensive operations to clear geographies”-the notion that a landscape up the border area of migrants in order to can be easily “sealed off”. The rhetoric of better deal with what was then described erecting “barbed” fencing and sealing-off as Pakistani infiltration. Although the the border has become a stable marker of Assamese politicians were not able to Assam’s regional politics. The intention persuade the central government in New to physically preserve the sanctity of the Delhi to embark upon specific actions border, which is seen as being synonymous against the threat of migration from with building barbed fencing, reflects an East Pakistan, they did however manage irresistible obsession with the idea of an to acquire a sanction for 180 additional “alien” infiltration embodied by shadowy police watch posts and to erect a barbed- “foreign hands” that aim to destabilise wire fence in selected places along the the region and, by the extension, the Assam-East Pakistan border.8 nation. To begin with, what came to be the border between India and East In postcolonial Assam, Muslim Pakistan (present Bangladesh) post-1947 minorities with cross-border owed little to modern concepts of spatial family ties and lineages are seen rationality. The partition of the eastern as an existential threat to the territories was marked along the hastily border and national security. and ignorantly drawn Radcliffe Line, and political pressures played no small The rhetoric of fencing the border 7 part. In fact, the partition process or resurfaced with new vigour in Assam’s the drawing of the border is in a sense an politics in the wake of state-wide anti- operation which seemed to be concluded foreigner agitation spearheaded by the in August 1947 was a matter open for All Assam Students Union (AASU) in contestation in days to come. the late 1970s. The movement mobilised The idea of erecting a barbed-wire fence around the articulation of an Axomia along the Assam-Bangladesh border is identity against the “Others”, who not a new phenomenon.