Briefing on South Asia and
South Asia Confederation of Nations?
Delivered by Dr. M. Hazarika of
Assam Watch (UK) on 29th September 2006 at the briefing session on
South Asia and South Asia Confederation of Nations during the Second Session of
the Human Rights Council (18 September to 6 October 2006) Geneva, United
Nations, Sponsored by Interfaith International.
Mr. Chairperson, representatives of respective Nations
and International Organisations and learned participants, my sincere
appreciation for being here to listen to us today.
I am very grateful to the
Interfaith International for giving me the opportunity to appraise you regarding
the nation of Assam situated in East South Asia, whose rights to remain a
Sovereign State have been denied since 24 February 1826.
A low intensity war has been
going on continuously for the past fifteen years over the issue of restoring the
Sovereignty of Assam. The parties involved are the Government of India and the
United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA). The ULFA had to take up arms as the last
resort to restore the sovereignty of Assam from the colonial
occupation of India. In her own
statistics India reveals that more
than ten thousand Assamese lives have been lost so far as a result of this
conflict. But, it is firmly believed by other parties that this is only a very
conservative estimate and the actual figure is much higher.
As things stand today, many
more deaths are inevitable now that India has decided upon a
military solution. I would like to draw your concerned attention to the fact
that nine Civil Society representatives, called the People’s Consultative Group
(more generally known by its acronym – PCG) under the stewardship of Prof.
Indira Goswami of Delhi
University and Mr. Rebati
Phukon, has been interacting with the Indian Government for the past twelve
months. By gleaning through media reports, there have been clear indications
that the Indian Prime Minister felt that there were political issues and he
needs to resolve those fulfilling his role as, in his words, ‘the servant of the
Indian Constitution’. He agreed to discuss with the ULFA any issue in order to
arrive at a solution. In the hope of resolving the conflict politically and
swiftly, the ULFA dropped two of the organisation’s long held conditions, that
is, 1. To hold talks only in a third country; 2. Talks to take place under
United Nations presence.
Now as the peace process has
come to a dead end, it appears very clearly that India had no inclination to
discuss the restoration of the Sovereignty of Assam but was aiming for a
repetition of ‘Assam Accord, 1985’ - an agreement which was not worth the paper
it was written on. As soon as it became blatantly obvious that the ULFA is not
prepared to accept anything short of the restoration of
Assam’s sovereignty,
Indian authorities have taken steps to scuttle the discussion process with the
PCG.
The pertinent question that
needs to be discussed here is - does Assam have the legitimate
right to Sovereignty?
Please allow me to indulge you
with two quotes here. Dr. John Peter Wade wrote on 20 March
1800, “That the
Kingdom of
Assam was at an earlier
period flourishing and powerful and capable of sending forth an army of four
hundred thousand men. That the Kingdom of
Bootan and
Nepal were subdued by the
Monarch of Assam who extended their conquest into the banks of the
Ganges by the capture of
Gaur and that Tipera, Coosbeyhar and the countries to the east of Corotia river
formed a part of their dominion.” Also, Dr. Audrey Cantley in 1984 wrote,
“Anthropologically speaking, almost nothing is known of
Assam. For many centuries
it occupied a peripheral position both geographically and politically in
relation to India. The term
Assam, Asam, or Ahom was
originally applied to the country ruled by the Ahoms.”
Permit me to pose a question.
If the Ahom Royal household made Tai the official language of
Assam and revived
Buddhism (known to be widely practiced in
Assam till the
7th century) and made it the State religion, could the departing
British merge Assam with
India? In this case they
would have had no option except to leave
Assam a
Sovereign
State like
Burma
(Myanmar) and
Ceylon
(Sri
Lanka), despite the Assam Congress’s
decision to join hands with the Indian Congress party to get freedom from
British colonial rule. In the Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946, the ‘Grouping Plan’
offered by the British to the leaders in India prior to the Partition in 1947,
placed the non-Muslim majority Chief Commissionership of Assam inside Group C,
suggesting that the British authorities realised very well that the Assamese had
a separate identity from India.
Mindful of these facts, please
consider that leaving aside the pre-1228 period, for 600 years Assam had a
Sovereign identity as an ethnic composite society bound by a common lingua
franca, ideological affinity, well defined borders, her own currency, a standing
army and a highly developed civil administration which even the British East
India company found satisfactory to continue unchanged for many years after
taking control of Assam.
During the de-colonisation of
India, it is known, that
the then district of Sylhet within Assam, could have made
the choice to go with India. It did not. This
suffrage to Sylhet was given on the basis of religion. That the rest of the
people of the Chief Commissionership of Assam were not given that suffrage was a
gross injustice. Due to the decision of a few leaders within the Assam Congress
to merge Assam with
India, it became
internationally believed that this was the opinion of the Assamese people as a
whole. However simmering discontent of being under Indian rule since 1950s and
mass eruption in 1968, 1971 and 1979 supporting an Independent Assam paints a
different picture. The world hardly knows about these struggles as
India managed to
violently suppress each one of them with an iron hand.
The region to which
Assam belongs has a long
international border with China,
Burma and
Bangladesh and is connected
with India by a thin stretch
of merely 20 kilometres known as the Siliguri corridor. All the international
neighbours of Assam have disputes with
India resulting in
India having fought war
with two of them – China in 1962 and
Bangladesh (formerly
East
Pakistan) in 1971.
India has made our
territory its battlefield in its quest for regional hegemony. To secure her
deployment of forces against China,
India has carried out
extensive political engineering in which significant international borders of
Assam have
disappeared.
India has managed to
isolate Assam totally -
physically as well as from the world media.
Assam and the region want
to be free of Indian rule, which has been using unprecedented brutality in
suppressing legitimate aspirations of the peoples of the region. Since the mid
1990s it has unleashed a reign of terror under a security blanket, and the ratio
of Indian troops to the indigenous Assamese population is known to be amongst
the highest in the world. Currently there are Two Hundred Thousand security
personnel are deployed in Assam by the Indian
authorities.
India says that she
cannot concede the right of self-determination to peoples of
Assam and elsewhere in
India because of the
specific limitation of ‘territorial integrity’ being sacrosanct and the
International community appears to support this stance. But
India did not feel any
such constraint when it invaded East
Pakistan in 1971.
India’s direct
involvement created Bangladesh and the
International community gave recognition to the independence of
Bangladesh from
Pakistan, of
Singapore from
Malaysia, of
Belize from
Guatemala. That shows that
the limitation has been ignored in practice by States. Keeping this in focus,
may I respectfully ask the International community how can
India justify use of
draconian laws and brutal repressive measures trampling human rights amounting
to State terrorism in protecting her territorial integrity?
With this briefest introduction
to political Assam and the rights to her sovereignty I would fervently appeal to
the world community at large from this floor of the United Nations to look into
the anguish of Assam and impress upon India to be reasonable and fair; and to
bring about the logical conclusion to establish Assam as one of the members of
the South Asian member nations which has been demanded by the majority of the
indigenous people of Assam.
I thank you all for your kind
attention.
Please check with
delvery.
e-mail:
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