Nellie: 'Memoricide' Of A Massacre

Hundreds of people from the Lalung tribe who lived nearby poured into Nellie바카라�s villages where Bengali-speaking Muslims lived. In just about six hours, at least 1,800 Muslims from 14 villages were massacred. The victims were predominantly women and children.  The news of the violence of an unprecedented--and rather unimaginable--scale sent shockwaves through the Bengali-speaking Muslim populations in Assam, where an anti-migrant movement had been in full swing since 1979. February 1983 turned out to be extremely violent. The Government of India went ahead with conducting the State assembly elections despite the All Assam Students바카라� Union and the All-Assam Gana Sangram Parishad calls for boycott and violent resistance.   

These Assamese nationalist organisations demanded that elections could be conducted only after foreign nationals had been removed from the electoral rolls. According to an Indian Express report dated February 14, on the first day of the three-phase poll, at least 89 lives were lost in pre-poll violence. The second phase of the election was on February 16, when Nagaon went to the polls. Nogaon in the Brahmaputra valley of central Assam was among the heartlands of the anti-migrant agitation. Amidst Assamese nationalist organisations바카라� calls for a boycott of the elections, many Bengali-speaking Muslims went to polling booths, including Nellie residents, apparently responding to appeals by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi바카라�s Congress Party, which promised to protect their interests. 

Following the Nellie massacre, some said that the Muslims바카라� defiance of the call for the poll boycott had triggered their tribal neighbours바카라� wrath. Whatever the triggers, this has gone down in history as post-Independence India바카라�s first genocidal pogrom. It took quite a few days for the administration and the people to figure out the true extent of the mayhem. The Assam movement seeking the detection, disenfranchisement and deportation of foreign nationals belonging to eastern Bengal started in 1979, seven years after East Pakistan became Bangladesh through a bloody Liberation War.

Migration from eastern Bengal was not a new phenomenon but the war had triggered a large-scale out-migration from eastern Bengal to all neighbouring Indian states바카라�Assam, West Bengal, Tripura and Meghalaya. Probably, many did not return after the end of the war and the creation of Bangladesh. 

Trouble broke out in Assam in April 1979 with the publication of electoral rolls for the by-poll in the Mangaldoi parliamentary constituency. It was observed that the number of voters had significantly increased from the last electoral roll (1977). Reviews confirmed over 26,000 voters on the list were not Indian nationals. This Mangaldoi by-poll did not commence because the Union government of Prime Minister Charan Singh fell, necessitating a fresh national general election. 

Violence against suspected migrants remained limited to stray incidents of killing till the end of 1979. However, in January 1980, violence erupted in the region north of the Brahmaputra River in Kamrup district. It was in the middle of the parliamentary general elections that Assamese nationalist organisations had called for a boycott. Due to widespread violence, polls were conducted in only 3 of the 14 constituencies. On January 5바카라�-between the first and the second phase of the polling-바카라�North Kamrup witnessed widespread violence.

According to Amalendu Guha바카라�s October 1980 article in the Economic and Political Weekly, the January genocide in North Kamrup alone caused the deaths of about 200 people, going by some non-official estimates. Bodies of about 80 people were found and identified. All of them, except two including that of a non-Asamiya CRP jawan, belonged to linguistic or religious minorities. Nearly 25,000 Bengali-speaking Muslims were rendered homeless by large-scale arson. Amidst escalating tension, the Assam Assembly elections were announced in February 1983 amidst violence and calls for a boycott. Imposing the elections despite widespread local resistance was, many Assamese politicians and civil society members have alleged, a 바카라�most immature바카라� call on the part of the Indira Gandhi administration. 

In a 1985 article, Keya Dasgupta and Amalendu Guha showed that on election day of February 16, 1983, when the Brahmaputra Valley was burning, the Daily Assam Tribune of Guwahati carried a significant quotation under the caption 바카라�Message For Today바카라� at the top of its editorial column. It was a quotation from Adolf Hitler, saying, 바카라�The very first essential for success is a perpetually constant and regular employment of violence.바카라� Nellie happened two days later. Two days after Nellie, when the gory details had just begun to come out in national and foreign media reports, the 바카라�Message for Today바카라� section of the same paper바카라�s February 21 edition quoted Benito Mussolini as saying, 바카라�There is a violence that liberates, and a violence that enslaves; there is a violence that is moral and a violence that is immoral.바카라� Early media reports published on February 19 put the death toll at about 250-300. By February 21, the death toll increased to over 800-1000.

Finally, the official figure recorded 1,800. In Assam, it had little impact on the ongoing anti-migrant movement. The local media and the Assamese civil society by and large ignored or downplayed the incident or blamed it on provocations바카라�-from the government as well as Bengali-speaking Muslims. But, to their discomfort, the Nellie massacre became international news. 

Kalyan Sonowal noted in his 2017 thesis that national newspapers gave the Nellie incident extensive coverage, while regional newspapers 바카라�did not seem to have much interest in the incident바카라� and focused on highlighting the anti-immigrant movement that was going on. Later, noticing the coverage in the national and international media, Assam바카라�s regional newspapers had to change their approach relatively towards reporting the incident. It was evident from the following chain of events that even mayhem of such magnitude could not bring the warning communities to the table of reconciliation. For the friends and families of the victims, there was no closure. Not a single perpetrator was punished for the killings.

Those who survived received a paltry sum of Rs 5,000 from the Government of India for rehabilitation. Those who continued to stay there lived with the knowledge that they were living with the killers of their friends and families.  In 2019, according to a report by Citizens for Justice and Peace, of the 1300-odd population in Nellie바카라�s Borbari village, only about 150 found their names in the National Register of Citizens (NRC), Assam, and the rest-바카라�roughly 90%--where excluded. But in Assam, sympathy comes rarely to people of suspected foreign origin바카라�-the Bengali-speaking Muslims in most cases. 

In 2023, Angshuman Choudhury, Associate Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, termed the larger Assamese society바카라�s attitude towards Nellie as 바카라�deliberate memoricide.바카라� Speaking to The Wire, Choudhury said that structural violence followed the physical violence of Nellie. By structural violence, he meant 바카라�the systematic, and often, deliberate memoricide of the event, the refusal to talk about the perpetrators, and the pushback against those who tried to talk about the victims.바카라�