Turncoats are common in Indian politics. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has them aplenty. Himanta Biswa Sarma, Assam’s Chief Minister, is one such man. Twenty years ago, when I was a visiting professor in Guwahati’s Omeo Kumar Das Institute of Social Change and Development (OKDISCD), he was one of the most dynamic Congress leaders. As the then Finance and Planning Minister in the Tarun Gogoi government, many saw in him the future chief minister of Assam.

He indeed became the chief minister, in 2021, but not before joining the BJP in 2015. But his ambitions did not end there. He wanted to become the poster boy of Hindutva for the entire northeast. To achieve that, he had to use the USP of the party: Muslim bashing. In no time, he perfected the act. Two of his latest moves fall in that strategy: one, to criminalise bigamy so as to humiliate the Muslim community, and two, to rub an old wound which had healed, the Nellie Massacre of 1983.

Also read: NGO Branded ‘Pakistan-Linked’ by Himanta Had Once Backed Project in Modi’s Gujarat

In so far as the first is concerned, there is nothing wrong to pass any progressive social legislation but its tenor and timing make all the difference. It is a part of the litany of anti-Muslim actions and statements which Himanta has been identified with. He is now busy introducing a Uniform Civil Code (UCC) for the state. What purpose it would serve in a state with 12.4% tribal population, which has to be kept beyond the ambit of any UCC, is a subject for another occasion.

In this essay, we discuss his Nellie politics. A brief recall of the event will help. The Nellie massacre of February 18, 1983 took place against the background of Assam’s anti-foreigners movement in 1979-85. On that day, some Tiwas, members of a tribe of Assam, along with Scheduled Caste and other non-elite caste Assamese, killed 2,072 Muslims (Tiwari Commission) of East Bengal/Pakistan origin in Nellie, then in Nagaon district, now in Morigaon.

Although the main perpetrators of the violence explained their act in economic terms, that is, systematic land grab by Bengali-speaking East Pakistani Muslim settlers, it fitted well the larger narrative of the Assam movement – namely, the continuous flow of Bengali Muslims outnumbering the local Assamese people. The movement leaders, therefore, boycotted the February 1983 assembly election. They were angry that the Bengali Muslims did not heed their boycott call.

To put the matter in Himanta's current Hindutva perspective, let me recall an event from my Guwahati days (2003-06). The OKDISCD had invited Makiko Kimura, a young doctoral student from the Keio University of Japan, to deliver a public lecture on November 10, 2004 on the Nellie incident. Kimura was then writing her book on the Nellie tragedy, which was published in 2013 as The Nellie Massacre of 1983: Agency of Rioters (Sage India).

But just before the event, an express order came from the Home Commissioner of Assam to call off the talk. The then Tarun Gogoi-led government, in which Himanta was a luminary, feared that the event could open an old wound to the detriment of peace; the Tiwas could become violent again. Fair enough; such state interventions are often made in good faith. At that time, however, we were wild with the Gogoi government for its alleged highhandedness.

But the point to be noted is this – if Nellie was meant to be shelved after 21 years as a forgotten chapter of history, why is it suddenly being raked up after 42 years? What prompts Himanta to release the Nellie reports now, both the official and the unofficial ones? Other than keeping the communal pot boiling one cannot think of any other reason. His politics behind the release of the unofficial report is simply to dilute the findings of the official report.

Also read: Nellie's Survivors Have Waited 42 Years, But Justice Still Fails Them

The T.P. Tiwary Commission Report, the official report, was state sponsored, while the Mehta Commission Report, the so-called unofficial report, was sponsored by two NGOs, the Mukti Jujaru Sanmilan and the Assam Rajyik Freedom Fighters’ Association.

The main difference between the two reports was that while Tiwari did not find any direct connection between the election and the violence, Mehta found a deep linkage between the two.

Himanta’s politics, of course, has little to do with the contents of the reports, for Nellie has been long forgotten. Even in the late nineties, when Kimura did her fieldwork in the area, she found that both the victims and the killers had by then developed different concerns, namely, the amount and the delays in releasing the government compensation. The Muslims complained that the Tiwas and other Hindu peasants, who were the killers, were benefitting more from government largesse.

One byproduct of the Nellie violence was the consolidation of ethnic identities, both for the Tiwas as well as the Bengali Muslims. For example, in 1989, the All Tiwa Students’ Union came into being, which started demanding district autonomy on the lines of other tribes. Similarly, in due course, a Bengali-Muslim political party, Assam United Democratic Front (AUDF), came into being. In the elections of 2006 and 2011, it won 10 and 18 assembly seats, respectively. One of the AUDF demands was the publication of the Tiwary Commission Report.

Postscript: Just while finalising this piece, I came across an article (courtesy, Ravi Nair) in the Kashmir Times by Iftikhar Gilani, headlined ‘Nellie Report After 40 Years: How Assam Massacre Shaped Kashmir’s Politics in the 80s’. While the title itself tells the gist of the article, its concluding point is a warning to any political master anywhere:

‘The massacre shaped campaigning. It shaped distrust.... The report [Tiwari Commission] does something rare in Indian statecraft. It tells the truth after the truth became inconvenient. Had those responsible for the massacre of Nellie been punished, the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom would not have happened, and if justice had been delivered quickly to those responsible for the anti-Sikh massacre, the 2002 Gujarat riots would not have taken place.’

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