[ALOCHONA] Good one on Bangladesh & Assam by Kaushik Barua

Bicycle bombs to Bollywood - immigration and identity

Kaushik Barua, 28 April 2012

OPEN DEMOCRACY

http://www.opendemocracy.net/openindia/kaushik-barua/bicycle-bombs-to-bollywood-immigration-and-identity

 

One breach of the law cancels out another.

 

About the author

Kaushik Barua works with an international development agency and is based in Rome. His first novel Windhorse, based on the Tibetan resistance, will be published in 2012 by Harper Collins India.

 

My first act of vandalism was also my last. I painted four two-foot letters across a row of cars. ULFA. It was an act that I would refer to later to understand a lot of the people I see around me now. I was seven years old in the late 1980s and my hometown Guwahati in the state Assam, in the northeast corner of India, was awash with support for the banned insurgent outfit, ULFA: the ambitiously named United Liberation Front of Assam. We saw them as the Robin Hoods of our times: the ones who stood up for a minority ethnicity, the Assamese, against the monolith of the Indian state. They protested the step-sisterly treatment meted out by the Centre who took our tea and our oil and left us with barely anything: tea estates rolling across the hills and not a single decent job for any Assamese.

 

However there was another crucial strand to the resurgence of Assamese identity. This was not an identity built solely on opposition, but also on exclusion. Therefore, Assamese-speaking people were okay, the non-Assamese speaking tribes in the state had uncertain status, and the enemy in the region was clearly picked out: the Bangladeshi infiltrators. These were the mostly low-income refugees from across the border. The myth of a Bangladeshi invasion of Assam was built into Assamese victimhood. An uncaring centre looked away as we were being taken over by starving economic migrants from the south. A surprisingly articulate slogan was also attributed to them: "We took East Pakistan by partition, Bangladesh by revolution, now we'll take Assam by migration". Under these four letters, I had also painted "Bangladeshis, get out".

 

So the marginalised in the Indian context, the Assamese, were also the oppressors of the further marginalised on our own territory. This other-ing of the Bangladeshi was built on the myths that all discrimination is built on. They had the long beards, unlike Assamese Muslims. They wore those ridiculous wraps, their lungis. They could not speak Assamese. In fact they couldn't even speak Bengali like the true Bengalis, our Indian version. They stayed in dirty slums and reproduced like animals. They could have been the aliens from District 9; an alien species suddenly right in our faces.

 

The ULFA brought a number of valid concerns into the national debate. Issues of developing the north-east, improving infrastructure, agricultural productivity, institutions of higher education for the region were finally being discussed. The ULFA stayed in the woods or camped for months in the jungles of Burma; everyone had a cousin or a friend of a cousin who knew their commanders. They died valiant deaths in a shower of bullets when the police and army—which committed unspeakable atrocities under the guise of counter-terrorism—found their camps.

 

But they also lined up rows of non-Assamese speaking villagers and shot them in cold blood. They sent bicycles with bombs into markets every week, almost like a routine, for well over a decade. They would blow up a market, kill people while they were walking their dogs, invade New Year parties and slaughter guests in kneeling rows. The army would pick up any teenager, or group of teenagers, they could find. For most of the 1990s, teenage boys couldn't meet in groups of more than three in the open, or they might be picked up as suspected insurgents. In most towns, all you could do in the evenings was play chess.

 

Among all this chaos, we didn't forget the original enemy: the Bangladeshi (India had receded in public imagination as enemy number one, except the Indian state represented by repressive security forces). We even had a separate word for them, Mian, which didn't apply to other Muslims or often to the Bangladeshi Hindus. I went to Delhi, like all my friends who had the grades and could afford university. About five years after I had first moved away, though visits back home were frequent through the year, I spent some time in a new rural settlement testing a poverty assessment questionnaire. I knew the young kids were all Bangladeshi settlers: there are ways of telling differences that could potentially make us all racists. But now, they were all dressed like I would have been as a child, they had adopted the same rituals, they spoke Assamese with the comfort of a native speaker, using metaphors and cultural references of the region more often than I would. I asked them where they were from, since I had to fill out the columns on my form. They all said Assam. And it was true.

 

Sure, societies are changing. And enough people are scared of losing what they thought was their ideal idea of their society. Suddenly there are people they thought were different, but ultimately aren't as different as they believe, around them. This is inevitable. It might be happening faster than before, but then so is almost everything else in our lives. We need to have a conversation, not as unequal claimants to a 'land', but as communities who are in this together. What we cannot, and should not, do is resist this with violence or discrimination.

 

Now my wife and I are settled in Rome. Most of the low-income street vendors are Bangladeshi. We often talk to them. Assamese and Bengali are similar languages and we can understand each other perfectly. We often get discounts or special offers in the grocery stores. Our entire supply of Bollywood movies is from a Bangladeshi store where the manager is more up-to-date on the latest movies than we are.

 

People in Europe are quivering at the thought of being invaded by the north African and Asian hordes. The ones with the beards and the tall-minaret mosques. Meanwhile in Italy, some legislators are trying to restrict access to medical care for unregistered immigrants.

 

A lot of the Bangladeshi immigrants are unregistered. A common sight in Rome is a group of handbag sellers bolting across the streets. The police follow a few seconds later. Once I was walking into a friend's building, with giant doors that can only be opened if buzzed from the inside. Two street vendors were racing towards me, their eyes bulging out and a tail of handbags flying behind them. I nodded them towards the open door in front of me. We closed the door behind us, the two of them panting and bent over. We could hear stomping feet looking for them outside.

 

I think my second act of testing the law cancelled out my first.

 

 

A comment from Syed Salamah Ali Mahdi, Born 08-02-1942. B.A (Hons) St. Stephen's College, Delhi, India, 1964. Investment Adviser in Saudi Arabia & UAE. Living in Jeddah since 1966. Married. 3 daughters and 1 son. 9 grand children.

 

Thank you Kaushik for this op-ed piece. It struck a chord somewhere deep within my memory. throughout my 70+ years I have been on the receiving side of pride and prejudice. I was born in Patna, Bihar in 1942 as a Muslim during the best if times and the worst of times, for me and the likes of me.

 

In 1946 Bengali Muslims in Noakhali in what was then East Bengal, did ethnic cleansing against Hindus. A few days later the Hindus in Bihar responded in like manner and killed several thousand Bihar Muslims, including 46 from father's side; uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters and children. This brought Gandhi & Nehru running to Patna to put a stop, in which they succeeded.

 

In 1947 British India was partitioned and the massacres which tool place on both sides, in India & Pakistan are part of History. My father opted to stay put in India. Then onwards we branded as suspect Pakistanis and from one on ethnic cleansing to another by the week, by the month and by the year we you did mnage to survive found ourselves slipping slowly but surely to the lowest of the lowest rung in society, many times lower than the úntouchable Harijans.

 

I could see no future for me in India and when in 1964 I luckily managed to escape being thrown by my Hindu colleagues into one of the industrial boilers in Jamshedpur, I managed to slip into what was then East Pakistan, now Bngladesh only to discover that I had exchanged my 'mian' status in India to Bihari Refugee status in East Pakistan. As the days went by I could sense that something terrible was going to befall us Bihar refugees and very very soon. A few of my Bengali friends advised that I leave East Pakistan as soon as possible before the 'terrible' occured, which it did in 1971.

 

I managed to make it to Karachi late 1965. Here I was to be surprised yet another time. From the day I landed I was branded most times as a Bihari Mohajir (reeeeefugee) but sometimes as a Delhiwala, I being fair skinned, tall and well educated; courtesy St.Stephens, Delhi & St.Xaviers, Patna. Within a few months I knew I was unwanted and once again I had premonitions of disaster, the disaster which followed the general elections in which Fatima Jinnah was pitted against a 'pure bred' Pakistani.

 

Luckily for me, I got an opportunity to work in Saudi Arabia and have lived there ever since 1966 as an ájnabi' or foreigner. No complaints, at the least no 'terrible' surpises have sprung up during the past 45 years. In India, East Pakistan (Bangladesh) and West Pakistan(Pakistan) I had no status except that of a pariah 'mian', Bihari/Refugee and Bihari Mohajir, in Saudi Arabia I am only an ájnabi' but never an unwelcome ájnabi'. But, who am I? I wish somebody, anybody to tell me! 

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