The Bodo question

Over six years after its signing, the Bodoland Accord is yet to usher in substantive changes on the ground.

ON February 20, 1993, a memorandum of settlement was signed between the representatives of the All Bodo Students' Union and the Bodo People's Action Committee (ABSU-BPAC), which had led a sustained and often violent agitation for the creation of a separate state of 'Bodoland' comprising nearly one-third of Assam. The accord, however, was on the creation of an 'administrative authority within the State of Assam', called the Bodoland Autonomous Council (BAC) and not of 'Bodoland'.

The so-called Bodoland Accord was supposed to bring to an end the six-year-long agitation that was formally launched in March 1987. The Bodo agitationists' war cry, 'Divide Assam Fifty-Fifty', and the all-too-evident hostility to and alienation from the larger Assamese society, which had evolved over the centuries through a complex process of assimilation, albeit on terms determined by its dominant segment, and of which many Bodo people still consider themselves a part, encapsulated the essence of Bodo nationalistic aspirations as articulated by the ABSU leadership. Relevant in this context are the facts that the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) was in office in Dispur when the agitation was launched and the Congress(I) under Hiteswar Saikia was in power when the accord was signed. Both these political parties, which held power alternately since the general elections of 1983, have drawn their own inferences and sought to make political capital out of these undeniable facts.

The accord delivered little. With no political or financial authority - the word 'political' finds no mention in the Bodoland Accord - the powers and potentialities of the envisaged BAC fell far short of the expectations roused by the agitation leaders. "The objective of this scheme," the memorandum admitted, "is to provide maximum autonomy within the framework of the Constitution to the Bodos for social, economic, educational, ethnic and cultural advancement." Many vital and highly complex and contentious issues relating to the demography, territory and boundaries of the BAC area, in particular the inclusion or exclusion of villages with a mixed (Bodo/non-Bodo) population composition in the proposed BAC area, were left untouched, indeed undefined. They remain so to this day. Ever since the accord was signed, Bodoland politics has been characterised by the apprehensions among the non-Bodos living in the BAC area (who, in their own view, constitute the majority) about their rights, status and even safety - justified in many instances as later events showed - and ideological and organisational differences within the Bodo nationalistic stream, which led to splits and violent reprisals. These too remain to be addressed.

It was thus evident even at the moment of the seeming triumph of the Bodoland agitation that the BAC would not take off and would die a natural death. It was equally clear that the confrontational issues that underpinned the agitation would take on new, unpredictable forms. Indeed, even before the Bodoland Accord was signed, the agenda of separatist Bodo nationalism as articulated by the ABSU, which was supposed to find its fulfilment separately from Assam but within the Indian Union, had been taken over by other armed and trained militant forces. In a controversial intervention, Prafulla Kumar Mahanta, the then Chief Minister, alleged that some of these groups had been created, armed and trained by the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) of the Union Home Ministry.

Such militant groups, whether they were inspired and created independently by the Bodo agitation leaders or with the encouragement of other agencies, have charted an independent path in a manner all too similar to the trajectory of other agitation groups and their armed wings in this region. Their objective is a 'sovereign Bodoland'. Again, in a manner all too familiar in the region, the splits and the atomisation of such structures, often manipulated by the agencies of the state by exploiting other sub-ethnic or religious divides with a view to encouraging mutual bloodletting, has resulted in their eventual consolidation, and not mutual destruction. They are bitterly hostile to one another but no less hostile to the Indian state.

The Boro Security Force (BdSF) was formed on October 3, 1986, and it later came to be known as the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB). The Bodo Liberation Tigers (BLT) split away from the NDFB in June 1996. The list is seemingly endless. As always, to divide is also to multiply. In the event, the NDFB, which has close but undefined links to the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) and other separatist armed outfits, remains committed to the goal of a 'sovereign Bodoland'; the BLT, after nearly four years of its own 'armed struggle' and a lot of killings, entered into a ceasefire agreement with the AGP government in March 2000, preparatory to peace talks. The idea of an alternative structure, the Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC), as part of the agenda for the 'peace talks' yet to be held with the BLT, was apparently mooted soon after the ceasefire and accepted by the government in March last year - though differences over territory, boundary and the inclusion of villages remain. Despite the consensus, non-Bodo inhabitants of the area have threatened to launch an agitation against the creation of the BTC.

Another complicating factor is the decision of the State government to concede the demand of two communities to be classified as Scheduled Tribes - Koch Rajbongshis, who belong ethnically to the Bodo stock though they have become 'detribalised', and the Adivasis. The case of Koch Rajbongshis is interesting in that the processes of de-tribalisation, which generations of them have gone through, and re-tribalisation, which some of them are now seeking, are among the unobserved constants in the process of social change in Assam.

Unlike the BAC, which was set up simply as an 'administrative authority within the State of Assam under a scheme', the BTC is to be constituted under the provisions of the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution. This would entail an amendment to the Sixth Schedule, which as it stands is applicable only to the hill districts of Assam - Karbi Anglong and North Cachar Hills.

Officially, the BAC continues to exist. However, in the past two years or so there appears to have emerged a consensus, as always at the level of the leaderships in Kokrajhar, Dispur and Delhi, that the BAC needs to be replaced by a BTC - yet another experimentation in an endless alphabetical fiction. It is generally agreed that a crucial role-player in the emergence of such a consensus is the BLT. In his media briefing following the all-party meeting in Guwahati last month on the resumption of peace talks with the BLT as part of the process which would eventually lead to the creation of the BTC, a State Minister specifically described the emerging consensus on the inclusion of 126 more villages in the envisaged BTC as "an endorsement of the previous Asom Gana Parishad government's decision".

Despite this apparent consensus, formidable obstacles still remain in the path of the creation of a BTC. While all the factors that prevented the BAC's effective functioning remain, some of them in ever more aggravated forms, the decision to constitute a BTC under the Sixth Schedule raises other issues that have a bearing on the broader tribal politics of the region.

The Sixth Schedule, extensively amended since the adoption of the Constitution, along with the Fifth Schedule (applicable to the scheduled areas and the Scheduled Tribes outside the northeastern region) was described by the late Mohammed Hidayatullah, Chief Justice of India, as "miniature constitutions for certain scheduled areas of India" ("The Fifth and Sixth Schedules to the Constitution of India," The Anundoram Barooah Law Lectures, Second Series, Guwahati, 1979). The Sixth Schedule, which contains the provisions for the administration of tribal areas of Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram, is applicable only to the 'hill areas ' of these States. Its origins go back to the very constitution of Assam as a separate province of British India in 1874. Parts of the province, described as 'backward tracts' which were to be administered under the Scheduled Districts Act of 1874, have, over the years and several political and constitutional changes, including the crucial North-Eastern Areas (Reorganisation) Act of 1971, became the States (or parts of the States) of Nagaland, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh.

The Schedule as it stands is applicable only to the two autonomous hill districts of Karbi Anglong and North Cachar Hills, as well as the tribal areas of Tripura and parts of the Chhimtuiupui district of Mizoram inhabited by the Chakmas, the Pawis and the Lakhers. The application of the provision of this Schedule is uniquely informed by a crucial geographical factor: that the Schedule is applicable only to the 'hill areas' of the given State.

The assumption behind this restrictive and specific application has been informed by a deeply entrenched colonial, paternalistic, perhaps even racist, mindset in the political and bureaucratic establishment regarding both the history of the people and the geography of Assam and the northeastern region, the last of the frontiers to be incorporated into British India. The "isolated and backward" people of these "remote hill areas" of a region, which itself was the back of beyond of the country, were uniquely handicapped and hence required special constitutional safeguards from the "rapacious exploiters from the plains". Such provisions were never made applicable to the tribal communities in the plains of Assam because it was assumed that since they lived in close proximity to the non-tribal communities inhabiting the plains, they would in course of time become "assimilated" into the communities in their neighbourhood and indeed cease to be "tribal".

The assumptions worked for a while, but not any longer. The hill tribal people are not more isolated than the more economically and socially backward people of the plains, tribal or non-tribal; and the tribal people of the plains are no more getting assimilated into neighbouring non-tribal caste Hindu (or Muslim) society. Indeed, as noted above, a reverse process of 're-tribalisation' among communities that were supposed to have 'de-tribalised' themselves is also on.

Anachronistic as such provisions may appear now, over a century and a quarter after they were conceptualised, they remain on the statue books and are jealously guarded by those who benefit from them. Hence, any move to extend the provisions of the Sixth Schedule to the plains tribes (Bodos in this instance) is bound to find resistance from those who are exclusively covered by these provisions. Indeed, one of the three major demands of the Bodoland agitation, the demand for the recognition of the Bodo Kacharis of Karbi Anglong as a Scheduled Tribe in that district, in effect their inclusion in the Sixth Schedule, was resisted by the leadership of the Autonomous State Demand Committee (ASDC), the dominant political party in the Karbi Anglong district throughout the years of the Bodoland agitation. The Bodoland Accord does not even refer to this demand, though it refers to the "scheduling and de-scheduling of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes residing within the Bodo areas".