THE KILLING FIELDS OF NELLIE

Granular details of the Tewary report may work as a shield for the Himanta government's ongoing eviction drives - as a pre-emptive strike to prevent more Nellies in future

- PRASANTA MAZUMDAR @Guwahati

THE conviction that a 42-year-old dark chapter of Indian history needs to be re-read completely by people is believed to have prompted the Assam government to make the "official" Tribhuvan Prasad Tewary Commission report on the "Assam Disturbances" of 1983 public last Tuesday. The report extensively covered the Nellie massacre which occurred during the height of the Assam Agitation, also called Anti-Immigrants Agitation. Copies of the report were circulated among legislators in the assembly. The government also laid the report of the "unofficial" TU Mehta Commission - which studied the same events - at the request of the All Assam Students' Union (AASU).

The Assam Agitation

The Assam Agitation was a six-year-long bloody movement that began in 1979 and a significant chapter in Assam and India's history which ended with the Centre's signing of the historic Assam Accord with AASU and All Assam Gana Sangram Parishad (AAGSP) in 1985. The two organisations spearheaded the movement, mobilising public support across the state. It followed deep rooted anxieties among the Assamese people after decades of influx of migrants from East Pakistan and then, Bangladesh. The Assamese viewed the migration as a serious threat to the state's demographic balance and their cultural and linguistic identity.

The flashpoint reached when the 1979 Lok Sabha by-election draft electoral rolls of Mangaldoi had names of a large number of suspected illegal migrants, triggering anger and protest among the local population. Soon, there was a statewide demand to "detect, delete and deport" the migrants who had entered Assam after 1951 even as the agitation escalated beyond student activism. People from cross-sections - farmers, government employees and various civil society organisations became part of it.