Mr. Chairperson, representatives of respective Nations and International Organisations and learned participants, my sincere appreciation for being here to listen to us today.
I am very grateful to the Interfaith International for giving me the opportunity to appraise you regarding the nation of Assam situated in East South Asia, whose rights to remain a Sovereign State have been denied since 24 February 1826.
A low intensity war has been going on continuously for the past fifteen years over the issue of restoring the Sovereignty of Assam. The parties involved are the Government of India and the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA). The ULFA had to take up arms as the last resort to restore the sovereignty of Assam from the colonial occupation of India . In her own statistics India reveals that more than ten thousand Assamese lives have been lost so far as a result of this conflict. But, it is firmly believed by other parties that this is only a very conservative estimate and the actual figure is much higher.
As things stand today, many more deaths are inevitable now that India has decided upon a military solution. I would like to draw your concerned attention to the fact that nine Civil Society representatives, called the People’s Consultative Group (more generally known by its acronym – PCG) under the stewardship of Prof. Indira Goswami of Delhi University and Mr. Rebati Phukon, has been interacting with the Indian Government for the past twelve months. By gleaning through media reports, there have been clear indications that the Indian Prime Minister felt that there were political issues and he needs to resolve those fulfilling his role as, in his words, ‘the servant of the Indian Constitution’ . He agreed to discuss with the ULFA any issue in order to arrive at a solution. In the hope of resolving the conflict politically and swiftly, the ULFA dropped two of the organisation’ s long held conditions, that is, 1. To hold talks only in a third country; 2. Talks to take place under United Nations presence.
Now as the peace process has come to a dead end, it appears very clearly that India had no inclination to discuss the restoration of the Sovereignty of Assam but was aiming for a repetition of ‘Assam Accord, 1985’ - an agreement which was not worth the paper it was written on. As soon as it became blatantly obvious that the ULFA is not prepared to accept anything short of the restoration of Assam ’s sovereignty, Indian authorities have taken steps to scuttle the discussion process with the PCG.
The pertinent question that needs to be discussed here is - does Assam have the legitimate right to Sovereignty?
Please allow me to indulge you with two quotes here. Dr. John Peter Wade wrote on 20 March 1800 , “That the Kingdom of Assam was at an earlier period flourishing and powerful and capable of sending forth an army of four hundred thousand men. That the Kingdom of Bootan and Nepal were subdued by the Monarch of Assam who extended their conquest into the banks of the Ganges by the capture of Gaur and that Tipera, Coosbeyhar and the countries to the east of Corotia river formed a part of their dominion.” Also, Dr. Audrey Cantley in 1984 wrote, “Anthropologically speaking, almost nothing is known of Assam . For many centuries it occupied a peripheral position both geographically and politically in relation to India . The term Assam , Asam, or Ahom was originally applied to the country ruled by the Ahoms.”
Permit me to pose a question. If the Ahom Royal household made Tai the official language of Assam and revived Buddhism (known to be widely practiced in Assam till the 7th century) and made it the State religion, could the departing British merge Assam with India ? In this case they would have had no option except to leave Assam a Sovereign State like Burma ( Myanmar ) and Ceylon ( Sri Lanka ), despite the Assam Congress’s decision to join hands with the Indian Congress party to get freedom from British colonial rule. In the Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946, the ‘Grouping Plan’ offered by the British to the leaders in India prior to the Partition in 1947, placed the non-Muslim majority Chief Commissionership of Assam inside Group C, suggesting that the British authorities realised very well that the Assamese had a separate identity from India.
Mindful of these facts, please consider that leaving aside the pre-1228 period, for 600 years Assam had a Sovereign identity as an ethnic composite society bound by a common lingua franca, ideological affinity, well defined borders, her own currency, a standing army and a highly developed civil administration which even the British East India company found satisfactory to continue unchanged for many years after taking control of Assam.
During the de-colonisation of India , it is known, that the then district of Sylhet within Assam , could have made the choice to go with India . It did not. This suffrage to Sylhet was given on the basis of religion. That the rest of the people of the Chief Commissionership of Assam were not given that suffrage was a gross injustice. Due to the decision of a few leaders within the Assam Congress to merge Assam with India , it became internationally believed that this was the opinion of the Assamese people as a whole. However simmering discontent of being under Indian rule since 1950s and mass eruption in 1968, 1971 and 1979 supporting an Independent Assam paints a different picture. The world hardly knows about these struggles as India managed to violently suppress each one of them with an iron hand.
The region to which Assam belongs has a long international border with China , Burma and Bangladesh and is connected with India by a thin stretch of merely 20 kilometres known as the Siliguri corridor. All the international neighbours of Assam have disputes with India resulting in India having fought war with two of them – China in 1962 and Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan ) in 1971. India has made our territory its battlefield in its quest for regional hegemony. To secure her deployment of forces against China , India has carried out extensive political engineering in which significant international borders of Assam have disappeared.
India has managed to isolate Assam totally - physically as well as from the world media. Assam and the region want to be free of Indian rule, which has been using unprecedented brutality in suppressing legitimate aspirations of the peoples of the region. Since the mid 1990s it has unleashed a reign of terror under a security blanket, and the ratio of Indian troops to the indigenous Assamese population is known to be amongst the highest in the world. Currently there are Two Hundred Thousand security personnel are deployed in Assam by the Indian authorities.
India says that she cannot concede the right of self-determination to peoples of Assam and elsewhere in India because of the specific limitation of ‘territorial integrity’ being sacrosanct and the International community appears to support this stance. But India did not feel any such constraint when it invaded East Pakistan in 1971. India ’s direct involvement created Bangladesh and the International community gave recognition to the independence of Bangladesh from Pakistan , of Singapore from Malaysia , of Belize from Guatemala . That shows that the limitation has been ignored in practice by States. Keeping this in focus, may I respectfully ask the International community how can India justify use of draconian laws and brutal repressive measures trampling human rights amounting to State terrorism in protecting her territorial integrity?
With this briefest introduction to political Assam and the rights to her sovereignty I would fervently appeal to the world community at large from this floor of the United Nations to look into the anguish of Assam and impress upon India to be reasonable and fair; and to bring about the logical conclusion to establish Assam as one of the members of the South Asian member nations which has been demanded by the majority of the indigenous people of Assam.
I thank you all for your kind attention.
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