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| Thursday, 11 December 2003 |
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Armed Conflicts - 2003 (Part-4) : Indo-Assam dispute (Exploring the origin and history of the ongoing armed conflicts) by Lionel Wijesiri The early history of Assam is obscure, although there are numerous references in the Mahabharata and the Puranas to a great kingdom known as Kamrup that encompassed the Brahmaputra Valley, Bhutan, Cooch Behar, and the Rangpur region in eastern Bengal. The legendary king Narakaxura, whose son Bhagadatta distinguished himself in the Mahabharata war, ruled Kamrupa from his capital at Pragjyotishpura, the site of a famous temple dedicated to the Tantric goddess Kamakhya, near modern Guwahati. By the middle of the 7th century A.D., the most illustrious monarch of the Varmana dynasty Kumar Bhaskar Varmana raised ancient Assam from obscurity and placed her in the forefront of Indian politics. During this reign Chinese pilgrim traveller Hiuen-Tsang came to Assam and his famous account "Si-Yu-Ki ", he recorded details of the kingdom. Stone and copper inscriptions dating from the seventh to the twelefth century indicate a succession of Hindu dynasties, but it is unclear to what extent the indigenous population of Kamrupa had embraced Hinduism beyond the royal patronage of Brahmans. Ahom Occupation But there is no denying the fact that the name Asam or Assam is connected with the Shan invaders, who entered the Brahmaputra Valley in the beginning of the 13th Century, for the term "ASAM' nowhere occurs prior to the Ahom occupation. The Vamsavali (listing of family forefathers) of the Koch kings, the Jogini Tantra and the Vaishnava literature (Nama-ghosa) apply this term to the Shan conquerors rather then to the country, which they occupied. Therefore there is no doubt that the word is derived from the title applied to the Ahoms. According to the tradition of the Ahoms themselves, which finds mention in some Assamese chronicles is that, the name Ahom is derived from the term Asama meaning 'Unequalled' or 'different from others', which was first applied to them by some local tribes in token of their admiration of the way in which, the first Ahom king in Assam Seu-ka-pha conquered and then conciliated them. On the eve of the movement of the Ahoms to Assam in the early thirteenth century, any semblance of a centralized kingship in the region had collapsed into a fragmented system of tribal polities and loose confederacies of petty Hindu rajas, called bhuyans. The Ahoms crossed the Patkoi Mountains from Burman in 1228 AD and by the sixteenth century had absorbed the Chutiya and Kachari kingdoms of the upper Brahmaputra, subdued the neighboring hill tribes, and integrated the bhuyans into the administrative apparatus of a feudalistic state. During the latter part of the sixteenth and much of the seventeenth centuries, the Ahom repulsed a succession of Mughal invasions of their territory from Bengal as they moved to annex the eastern portion of the powerful Koch kingdom (1682) and to consolidate their rule over the entire Brahmaputra Valley. The kingdom of the Ahom reached its height under Rudra Xingha (reign, 1696-1714), the renowed military strategist and patron of the buranji, or Ahom chronicles. Rudra Xingha established extensive trade with Tibet and built the great city of Rangpur. Uprisings From 1769, disaffected population of the kingdom, under the leadership of their "Mahanta's" (religious leaders), took part in a series of uprisings against Ahom rule. The leader of the first uprising was Ragha Maran. At the request of king Gaurinath Xingha (reign, 1780-1795), the Governor General of British India, dispatched a mission to Rangpur, the Ahom capital, which restored peace to the kingdom. Civil strife, however, persisted. In 1817, the Burmese took advantage of the dissensions within the Ahom nobility and overran the Brahmaputra Valley. Fearing incursions on their own territory, the British drove the Burmese from the Brahmaputra Valley, and under the conditions of the treaty of Yandaboo, between the Burmese and the British, annexed the Ahom kingdom in 1826. In 1838, all of northeast India became part of the Bengal Presidency of British India Rapid steps were then undertaken to develop the region for agricultural and commercial revenues. The British dismantled the Ahom ruling structure, made Bengali the official language, and staffed administrative and professional positions with educated Bengali Hindus. Coal, limestone, and iron mines were opened and the government offered incentives to European entrepreneurs to start plantations for the production of rubber, cinchona (from which quinine is derived), hemp, jute, and most importantly, tea. Because the native population of Assam was unwilling to do plantation labour, the British developed and extensive system of contract labour that recruited impoverished tribal from southern Bihar, Orissa and Andhra Pradesh (current states). By the turn of the century, more than one-half million of these "coolies" were employed on 700 plantations producing 145 million pounds of tea annually. Homeland Early in the twentieth century, the British made vast tracts of land available to predominantly Muslim farmers from the provinces of East Bengal for settlement and cultivation. Nepalese were employed as diary herders and similarly encouraged to colonize new lands. The subsequent immigration of Indian traders, merchants and small-scale industrialists, such as Sikhs, stimulated capital development in Assam and strengthened its ties to India. As a result of this enormous influx of migrants, Assam has transformed the ethnic composition of the state and gradually diminished the political and economic prerogatives of the native Assamese. As a result, ethnicity and migration have become prominent issues in Assamese politics. Following Indian independence in 1947, the Assamese won control of their state assembly and launched a campaign to reassert the preeminence of Assamese culture in the region and improve employment opportunities for native Assamese. This led to the alienation of some tribal districts. In addition, many in the tribal districts were demanding independence from India. Following the Indo-Pakistan strife in 1970s, nearly two million Bengali Muslim refugees migrated to Assam. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, there were persistent disputes between the government and Assamese students and some Assamese political factions over the rights of illegal immigrants to citizenship and suffrage. The state government and the Government of India responded by the use of force to suppress the movement. Many demonstrators were killed. This led to some of India's worst communal violence since Partition toward the end of the movement. The 1990s have seen the demand for the independence of Assam from the centralized Indian government by organizations such as the militarized group called ULFA, (United Liberation Front of Asom). Many other groups have come up demanding autonomy or independence. The Indian government has responded with widespread use of extra-ordinary force and other measures. There have been many armed encounters between the Army and the groups seeking independence. This period also has been marked by great violations of human rights by the Army and the police. Two outlawed outfits are fighting for independent homeland in Assam. They currently operate out of bases inside the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan to carry out their hit-and-run guerrilla strikes on federal soldiers. "The Indian forces still believe in a military solution of the Indo-Assam conflict rather than a peaceful political one," the rebel statement said. Both groups have recently offered to hold conditional peace talks with New Delhi to put an end to more than two decades of violent insurgency in the region. The ethnic violence erupted again in the past three months. Officials appealed for calm while the Federal Government said it could not allow the situation to continue. More than 10,000 people have lost their lives to insurgency in Assam during the past two decades. |
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