Ethnic Conflicts and conflict resolution: A Study of Axamiyā, Bodo and Koch in Assam

Introduction

Since the formation of the Indian state in 1947, the Northeast region of the country has seen numerous violent conflicts of varying intensity. As a region which ‘challenges the separation of the colonial from the national’, the nature of these conflicts have ranged from mass civil disobedience movements engendered by long-standing grievances against the State to armed militancy aimed at secession from the State. But practical experience has shown that instead of addressing the ‘underlying conflict causes’ the State has often responded to them with large scale militarization and a strategy of co-optio of the influential sections within the conflict parties. This has led to the manifestation of new conflicts and exacerbation of old ones rather than to their settlement, resolution, or transformation. And these new conflicts have been directed not just against the State and its various agencies and actors, but have also led to violence between the numerous communities that constitute the multi-cultural, poly-ethnic mosaic of the region.

It would however be naïve to attribute the entire burden of responsibility for the ethnic conflicts in the Northeast upon the State – or its policies towards the region. The complex nature of the ethno-national conflicts that have ravaged the Northeast during its ‘post’-colonial career needs to be studied in a more historicized manner. After all, the State’s policy of co-option could succeed in driving wedges between and within the ethnic communities only because traditional rivalries and existent fissures lent themselves readily to being exploited in this manner. This study will look at these fault lines and fissures and explore how they have been exploited to make latent conflicts manifest. A better understanding of this conflict dynamics, it is hoped, will facilitate an informed approach among those involved in addressing, studying and participating in the mechanisms of peace-building and conflict transformation in the region. The researcher  begins by exploring the intricacies of ethnic relations – historical and contemporary, conflictive and cooperative – with special reference to Assam which, though just one of the seven states of the Northeast, lies at the heart of the region. It is divided into 10 chapters, the first of which gives an overview of the conflicts in Assam before going into the history of the conflicts raging between and within the ethnic communities living there.

Conflicts in Assam: A Brief History

The history of ‘post’-colonial Assam is a history littered with many conflicts – linguistic, political and economic – between the autochthons[1] of Assam and the many settler communities that had been coming into Assam following the colonial rule. It is interesting to trace how the settler-indigenous conflicts that had united the various ethnic and autochthonous communities under a nativist banner, could not keep these communities united for too long. The autochthonous communities soon turned on each other and conflicts between them – some of a manifestly violent nature – broke out in Assam. This is a study of the conflicts between the Axamiyā, Bodo and Koch-Rajbangsi communities in particular.

When the British were withdrawing and Assam decided to join the Indian Union, those at the helm of running the State in its nascent stage did not foresee conflicts arising along ethnic and/or indigenous lines. In Assam, the Axamiyā people had begun to assert their nationalistic aspirations in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, when Assam began to be shaped as an integral part of the Indian nation. But once the Indian State was formed, it was not long before grievances surfaced among the Axamiyā leadership in ‘post’-colonial Assam against the perceived ‘step-motherly’ treatment of the State. The grievances peaked in the 1970s after the formation of Bangladesh as a nation and the inability/reluctance of the Indian State to stop the flow of refugees into Assam. Continued illegal influx of populations from the neighbouring country raised fears of demographic swamping and loss of identity among the Axamiyā people whose resentment found expression in a mass civil disobedience movement that started in 1979. The movement which came to be known as the Assam Movement lasted till 1985 and ended with the signing of the Assam Accord in that year. Simultaneously with the mass movement, the period also saw the birth of the armed militant group, United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA).

While the ULFA continues its armed movement based on the idea of an independent federal Assam where all ethnic communities of Assam – and even the settler communities – can co-exist, the Assam Movement had the exactly opposite impact on the interethnic fabric of Assam. It marked the period when every small and big ethnic group began distancing itself from the Axamiyā identity and subsequently started placing demands for separate ethnic homelands. Since the formation of the Axamiyā nation, the Axamiyā-speaking Hindu middle class had been in the forefront of the nation building process and it had traditionally assumed an attitude of cultural superiority and social dominance over the other ethnic groups. This had started a process of gradual erosion of the interethnic identity that had been building up in Assam over the past so many centuries. When the Indian Union was formed, and the Axamiyā middle class became its ‘political sub-contractor’ in the Northeast, this process gained momentum. By 1985, the breaking point had been reached and the smaller ethnic groups began to assert their own distinctive identities and nationalist demands.

In spirit, the Assam Movement had set out to demand that the Indian State should take concrete measures to stop the illegal influx of the illegal Bangladeshi immigrants, who were the bidexis, or foreigners. Gradually however, it became more and more xenophobic in nature and demanded the ouster of all ‘Ali Kuli Bangali, Nak Sepeta Nepali’ where Ali stands for the East Bengali (later Bangladeshi) Muslim peasant, Kuli for the tea garden laborers brought into Assam in large numbers by the British from parts of mainland India, Bangali for the Hindu Bengalis, and Nak Sepeta Nepali for the ‘flat-nosed’ Nepalis whose immigration into Assam had also begun during the British period. Despite the fact that early migrants from most of these communities had already embraced the Axamiyā language and identity, parochial Axamiyā elements took control of its agenda and all bahiragatas or outsiders – that is, non-autochthonous peoples – were seen as threatening the land, livelihood, language and identity of the Axamiyā community in varying measures, and depriving the ‘sons of the soil’ of their due.

As the Movement progressed, its agenda came to be hijacked by the ethnic elite among the Axamiyā Hindu middle class which actively propagated the idea that ‘sons of the soil’ referred only to the Axamiyā-speaking Hindu community, and at places launched attacks even on other autochthonous indigenous and ethnic communities. The Movement therefore became a turning point in defining the relations of the dominant Axamiyā Hindus with all other communities of Assam, indigenous and settler. The process of alienation and proliferation of new identity movements gained momentum, and post-1985, rumblings of ethnic separatism were being heard. Two years later, in 1987, the Bodo Movement (1987-2003) for a separate homeland was launched.

The Bodo Movement marked the complete separation of the Axamiyā identity from its indigenous roots and invalidated its true historical nature and cultural heritage. The insider-outsider rhetoric took on a completely different turn and although sentiments against immigrant communities continued escalating, conflicts within the autochthonous communities also grew simultaneously and exponentially.

The Bodo Movement took place in two phases: the first phase lasted between 1987 and 1993, when a settlement was proposed by the Assam government in the form of the Bodoland Autonomous Council (BAC) Act signed between the state government and the All Bodo Students’ Union (ABSU) and the Bodo Peoples’ Action Committee (BPAC) which gave leadership to this phase of the Movement.  The second phase started with the failure of the initial settlement in 1993 and lasted till 2003 when the Memorandum of Settlement on Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC) was signed with the militant Bodo Liberation Tigers (BLT). Despite its stated non-violent nature, the movement turned violent in pockets and nativist militant groups like the ABSU-Volunteer Force (ABSU-VF) and the BLT were formed. The National Democratic Front of Boroland (NDFB) was also formed in 1986 and its stated aim was the formation of a ‘sovereign’ Bodoland. Unlike the NDFB however, for the ABSU and the BLT, separatism was never an option and even their vocabulary always remained within the confines of constitutionally sanctioned demands.

The 2003 Bodo Accord gave enormous legislative, financial and executive powers to the Bodo leadership. It provided for minimum interference by the state government in the functioning of the autonomous council formed through an amendment of the Sixth Schedule, thus giving it a constitutional status. Flushed with funds that the state government had no control over except in its disbursal, the Bodoland Autonomous Territorial District (BTAD) was envisaged as having powers equivalent to a state with only the constitutional status of being one not granted. As part of the agreement reached between the government and the BLT leadership, general amnesty was announced for all its cadres. BLT chairman, Hagrama Mohilary, became the chief executive of the BTC in 2005. Currently, his party, the Bodo Peoples Front (BPF), has entered into a seat-sharing agreement with the current Assam government. On the face of it therefore, the Bodo-Axamiyā conflict has been resolved at a certain level.

The creation of the BTAD however, brought the Bodo as well as the Axamiyā communities into conflict with the Koch-Rajbangsis. The Bodo community especially has vehemently opposed the Koch-Rajbangsi community’s main demands – for being enlisted as a Scheduled Tribe (ST) in the Indian constitution and for the creation of a separate homeland of Kamatapur. The Koch-Rajbangsi community has yet to launch a sustained movement like the Assam or the Bodo Movements, and its political demands are yet to attain the intensity of overt violence and widespread political mobilization. However, over and above a few political parties, the community also has a strong students’ union – the All Koch Rajbongshi Students’ Union (AKRSU) – and students’ unions have traditionally been the main mobilising force behind most political action in Assam and the Northeast as a whole.

Since the 1990s which saw the birth of most of the major organizations that are currently fighting a political battle for the rights of the community in North Bengal, the Koch-Rajbangsi organizations is Assam also have become politically more vocal and active. The AKRSU was formed in 1993 in Assam, and after the formation of the Kamatapur People’s Party (KPP) in 1996 and of the Greater Koch Bihar People’s Association in 1998 in North Bengal, it joined forces with these organizations to intensify its political mobilization. In 2008, a faction of the AKRSU contributed to the formation of a joint forum of the Koch-Rajbangsi populations of Assam and North Bengal – the Greater Kamata United Forum – to overcome the difficulties inherent in fighting a united battle by a community divided by administrative boundaries, political affiliations and constitutional statuses. In any case, even if they are not directly part of a joint forum, most other Koch-Rajbangsi organizations of Assam have been extending their support to the organizations of North Bengal.

The Kamatapur State Demand Committee (KSDC) was subsequently formed as an umbrella organization of several Koch-Rajbangsi organizations including the AKRSU, AAKRS, Chilarai Sena, All Koch Rajbangshi Mahila Samiti, Koch Rajbongshi Sahitya Sabha, All Kamatapur Students’ Organisation, Greater Coochbehar Democratic Party, Greater Coochbehar People’s Association, KPP, and so on. More and more, the Koch-Rajbangsi people in the BTAD are getting restive. A few organizations of the community in the BTAD have since organized themselves under the Koch Rajbongsi United Forum (KRUF), a conglomeration of around 10 Rajbangsi organizations, to intensify their stir for a separate state of Kamatapur. Demanding that a separate Kamatapur state be carved out of Assam and North Bengal and Scheduled Tribes status be given to the community, the KRUF held a rally in Kokrajhar on 15 November. Stray incidents of violence were reported in the course of the rally as in the course of most of the other programs of political protest undertaken by the representative organizations of the community. For the most part however, the community leaders have resorted to democratic means in the course of their demand for a desired constitutional status and a separate homeland.

Meanwhile, a Koch-Rajbangsi militant organization, the Kamatapur Liberation Organisation (KLO), was formed in 1995 which is demanding, among other things, the formation of a sovereign State of Kamatapur, independent of the Indian Union. Although not very strong in terms of cadre or arms strength, the idea of militant nativism it espouses has earned the KLO considerable support among the community. Many of the overtly political organizations have also been alleged to have close links with the armed group. ‘Post’-colonial Assam history has shown that the presence of an armed group to represent a particular ethic group has invariably been a recipe for wide scale violence sooner or later. This study wishes to explore whether there is any scope for reconciliation between the ethnic groups in conflict before manifest violence breaks out between them.

As it stands, experience has shown that the conflict settlement/resolution methods that have been adopted so far have failed to heal historical wounds between communities. What is more, they seem to have failed in more ways than one if the large scale violence that continues unabated in BTAD is anything to go by. Some amount of this violence is of course the result of the ongoing political agitation launched by the Koch-Rajbangsi community. For the most part however, this violence is the result of conflicts within the Bodo community in the aftermath of the 2003 settlement.

When elections to the newly created BTAD were announced, the ABSU-BLT combined leadership floated a new political party, the Bodo People’s Progressive Front (BPPF), to fight elections from a common platform. However, during the process of selecting candidates to stand in the elections, splits surfaced and factionalism reared its head within the leaders of the community. The party split into two groups not long after its formation – the BPPF headed by UG Brahma, a former ABSU leader and parliamentarian, and the BPF headed by Hagrama Mohilary. As a result of the split, newer incidents of violence were witnessed leading up to and during the first elections held in 2005.

Meanwhile the NDFB, which had been demanding secession from the Indian union, had always been opposed to the BLT, the surrendered leaders of which group subsequently gained power over the BTC. One of the major reasons for this opposition was that it was widely alleged that the BLT had been propped up by the central government of India to destabilize a regional party-led government in Assam and to foment ethnic conflicts in the state. The NDFB which was anti-India in its stated intent thus had a huge ideological difference with the BLT. This difference between the two groups exacerbated after the formation of the BTAD and widespread internecine violence broke out.

Following a further split in the ranks of the NDFB engineered by the Indian government’s call to bring the rebels of the outlawed group to talks, violence between the pro- and anti-talks factions of the NDFB have also been on the rise. The BTAD is today one of the most violent regions in Assam with more than a hundred persons being killed in the area in 2009 alone (Dainik Agradoot 2010). In February 2010, the Indian Home Secretary GK Pillai has also been reported as expressing concern over the large number of illegal arms in currency in the BTAD (Asomiya Pratidin 2010). Most of these arms were retained by the former BLT cadres although they had surrendered and been granted amnesty by the government. These weapons found their way to more than 200 youth camps that came up in the BTAD subsequently and despite efforts by government and security agencies to seize these arms, the exercise does not seem to have been very successful.

Challenges of Working in a Conflict Zone

Such an atmosphere of continued violence has posed some major challenges for this study which has been based on fieldwork conducted primarily in the four districts under the administration of the BTC – Kokrajhar, Chirang, Baksa (Bagsha) and Udalguri in western and northern Assam. Chapter 2 discusses the field area which is one of the most volatile and conflict prone areas of Assam. It also provides brief ethnographic sketches of the communities in conflict that have been studied in the case study area. The choice of these communities has mainly been dictated by the fact that tracing the relationship between them over the course of Assam history can help us understand how intricate and often intertwined the process of ethnic and national identity formation can be. Despite such close ethnic proximity the fact that ethnic differentiation takes place and conflicts arise, are created and exacerbated between these communities demonstrates the complexity of the politics behind the process. Three communities with such close historical, ethnological and cultural ties which have traversed the entire gamut of co-existence: domination, assimilation, reversal of assimilation, conversion, conflict, and political reconciliation, undoubtedly make for the best cases to study. What is more, they provide the researcher with the opportunity to study not just the dynamics of conflicts between communities but also to explore how these conflicts and state and non-state interventions have created other, more complex dynamics of intra-community conflictive relationships. In the case of the Koch community’s relationship with the Bodo and Axamiyā, the conflicts are yet to conflagrate beyond a certain point. Many of the differences are as yet latent, but if they are not addressed urgently and with empathy and promptness, they may lead to the kind of violent manifest conflict that has characterized the Axamiyā-Bodo relation for decades now. No study of ethnic relationships in Assam will be complete without an exploration of these latent conflicts and the means to diffuse them.

The political and administrative history of the case study area is also dwelt with in details in this chapter. The choice of this area for fieldwork was made because of the concentration of a large number of Bodo, Axamiyā and Koch people there. As the historical overview of the area shows, since pre-colonial times, there has been an overlap of administrative and political influences in the region, which has also been inhabited by communities of varied ethnic backgrounds. In fact, the demographic overlap has been such that when the BAC accord was drawn up in 1993, it failed precisely because no area under the proposed Bodoland region could meet the criteria set forth by the accord, namely that villages having 50% and more of tribal population which shall be included in the BAC. The result was that armed nativist militants went about trying to create the requisite majority by resorting to ethnic cleansing. The BTAD as a result, has been one of the politically most volatile zones of Assam and the most conflict prone.

Moreover, the Kamatapur imagination of the Koch-Rajbangsis and the political demand for a Bodo homeland have overlapping cartographies, and both fall within the case study area thus making it a fertile ground for the outbreak of sporadic violence. What is more, in the first place, the raison d’être of the area as an administrative unit is the protracted Axamiyā-Bodo conflict. It was created as a means to resolve that conflict – studying its current situation and internal problems would also help analyse the successes and shortcomings of the conflict resolution methods adopted by the State. It is therefore, the most suitable area for conducting fieldwork for the current research.

Most significantly, the chapter deals with the challenges involved in conducting fieldwork in a conflict zone. The researcher’s first visit to any place in the BTAD was in 2005 to the westernmost districts of Kokrajhar and Chirang. The national highway that bifurcates each of the two adjoining districts was often referred to locally as the ‘India-Pakistan border’ drawing a parallel with the sustained animosity between the two countries (field interviews). In this case, the parties at war were the NDFB and the ex-BLT cadres, many of whom as already discussed, retained their illegal firearms despite their official surrender. The sporadic violence was also accompanied by an atmosphere of constant political uncertainty and quotidian insecurity for the people on the streets. Free movement and meetings with the various actors are naturally restricted under such circumstances, and controlled by the depth of knowledge of the researcher about the nuances in local politics, the various players and factions involved in this politics, and her resourcefulness and ability to instill confidence among the subjects being interviewed, observed or analysed. Moreover, in a highly polarized conflict zone, where multiple actors are vying for legitimacy and control, the task of managing the various sponsors and gatekeepers of information becomes that much more difficult for the researcher.

In the course of fieldwork, this researcher set up base in Kokrajhar town which was the capital of the BTAD and largely controlled by the ex-BLT camp. She then made frequent excursions into the neighbouring areas, and sometimes inadvertently crossed over to the NDFB controlled side, mostly in the Bhutan foothills and in many cases, extremely isolated. Besides the suspicion of the Bodo political leaders and insurgents, this also managed to at times draw the attention of the local authorities – police officers and civil servants. But despite facing some amount of initial resistance, as the field visits continued over the years, interaction and acceptance became much easier. But the researcher had to always bear the responsibility to exercise caution not just for her personal well-bring and safety, but also that of her interviewees and informants. The researcher who is often not a permanent resident of the case study area can remove herself when confronted by a threat she cannot face. But her informants who do reside in the area are the ones who would have to face the consequences of any political faux pas or lapse of judgement – however naive – made by the researcher. She thus needs to be constantly aware of the ethics of fieldwork while working in a conflict zone.

It is not just the non-state armed actors can thus jeopardise the safety of the researcher and her informants in a conflict zone. In a highly militarized and sensitive area like Assam, and the Northeast as a whole, the State machinery and its various agencies are also equally wary of social researchers working in the region. In the process of the State’s covert counter-insurgency operations, the academic and researcher also gets implicated. Under the circumstances, how is one to collect data, question informants and collect testimonies without jeopardising the sources, or sacrificing independent functioning?

At the same time, in its continued covert operations against the militants, the State encourages co-option of the intellectuals on the one hand, while on the other, there are those who function as mouthpieces of the various insurgent factions and sacrifice the objectivity of social research. Such challenges to intellectual integrity apart, in a region where the security forces are given immunity under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) and are known to have indulged with impunity in offenses ranging from extra-judicial killings to rape to petty crimes against civilians, individual safety is always at risk.

Under the circumstances then, one has to be extremely alert to the nuances of the conflicts being studied. To directly attribute most ethnic conflicts and cases of ethnic violence to inter-ethnic animosities and competitions can often leave the story only half told, or worse still, incorrectly told. In order to avoid this, the researcher must therefore be extremely well versed in the intricacies of the prevalent political climate, and avoid taking anything at face value. In the absence of such a consciousness, it is possible that errors might be made in conceptualising or theorising one’s research thesis itself.

There is always the danger of confounding categories and losing objectivity even in the early stage of conceptualising one’s research and approach to one’s subject of research. Especially, one needs to walk the intellectual tightrope while applying labels and categorising communities, something that cannot be done indiscriminately given the frequently shifting political equations.

Another closely allied problem in conceptualising the communities of Assam is the process of ‘retribalisation’ of ‘detribalised’ communities. It leaves the researcher with the challenge of engaging with changing self-definitions of communities and overlapping histories and conflicting political demands. It is essential that the researcher should have an extremely nuanced understanding of the temporal and spatial variations in such self-definitions and demands. It is nothing but the lack of a similarly nuanced understanding among the political activists and community leaders that had led to the conflagration of ethnic conflicts in Assam.

Before Conflicts: Identity and Nationality Formation in Assam

Chapter 3 deals with the nature of the Axamiyā identity by exploring the various forces – geographic, demographic, historical and cultural that went into its formation. Located at ‘one of the great migration routes of mankind’, Assam and the Northeast as a whole saw diverse racial elements pass through it, all of which left their cultural remnants and contributed to the ethnic composition of the people. Through an amalgamation of Aryan influences from the west and non-Aryan influences from the east, a unique interethnic identity – the Axamiyā identity – had begun to take shape in Assam, one that was ‘less dualistic and more synergistic’. It allowed for individuation of the many communities living in the land while it was itself the end product of the universalization of their identities.

With the coming of the colonial rulers however, there also came a break with Axamiyā inter-ethnicity. Certain colonial administrative policies and socio-economic factors were responsible for setting into motion this process and Chapter 4 discusses in details how they institutionalized markers of ethnic difference, introduced ideas of territorial exclusivity and laid the foundations of settler-indigenous conflicts that introduced the conflict-inducing outsider-insider rhetoric. At the same time, the fathers of the Axamiyā nation building process began to advocate more and more the ‘assimilationist melting pot model’ which was in reality nothing but another form of mono-culturalism being gradually introduced into the discourse. Chapter 4 also discusses two major influences that were responsible for this. The first was the influence of neighboring Bengal where most of the Axamiyā elite and nascent middle class was being educated and indoctrinated into western ideology. Bengali nationalism which had nearly had a century’s head start over Axamiyā nationalism to shape itself in opposition to British imperialism was shaping itself along monolithic lines. At the same time, the pioneers of the Axamiyā nation building exercise were keen to shape Axamiyā as a sub-nation of the great Indian nationality. In order to do so, they began identifying Axamiyā more and more with the Aryan elements in its make-up. The identity was thus hijacked by one section of the people at the cost of Axamiyā inter-ethnicity when individual ethnic groups began regressing toward re-identifying with their origins. The result was marginalization and identity conflicts.

Ethnic Fragmentation, State Policy and Conflict

The fallout of the breakup of the Axamiyā interethnic identity was twofold: for one, it prompted the ethnic components of the Axamiyā identity to dissociate themselves from the Axamiyā label, and secondly, the Axamiyā identity itself came in for a change of definition. Hijacked as it was by the Axamiyā Hindu middle class, it came to be associated more and more with this particular community alone, alienating the other communities from its fold. The result, as already mentioned, was conflicts between communities. These conflicts however, did not erupt overnight; neither did the process of redefinition of identities unfold in one decisive stroke. Many factors, historical, geo-political and socio-cultural, contributed towards this. Chapter 5 and 6 go into these factors in details while analyzing the phenomenon of fragmentation at various levels.

Chapter 5 explores how co-existence gave way to competition when opposition to colonial rule began and the possibility of grasping political power under a new, postcolonial dispensation surfaced. With one particular community assuming sole ownership of the Axamiyā label and hence the right to predominate in postcolonial Assam, the other component communities also felt the need to reclaim their distinctive place within the new nation state in the making. This process assumed different meanings, followed different trajectories and adopted different methods. This chapter discusses all these aspects with relation to the case study communities – Bodo and Koch – as they continued on their path of dissociation with the Axamiyā nation. The factors that facilitated or problematised the process of ethnic fragmentation are also considered here.

Chapter 6 explores the new self-definitions that these communities were gradually fashioning for themselves. These were after all, the grounds on which the ethnic fragmentations were taking place and owing to which the ‘post’-colonial conflicts in Assam all took place. The State policies that facilitated and/or instigated such fragmentation and alienation among communities are discussed here. It looks at policies relating to language, ethnicity, land and livelihood among others to explore how the State’s approach to the ethnic aspirations of these communities went beyond merely creating fissures and actually exacerbated conflicts between them. The morphology of these conflicts is also simultaneously traced.

Ethnic Conflicts, Insurgency and Militarization: State Responses

One of the major fallouts of the ethnic conflicts prevalent in Assam was the proliferation of armed insurgent movements. Aggressive in the extreme, armed militancy is seen by almost all ethnic communities of Assam as the only means of ethnic preservation and assertion by winning a share of the power and resources. Chapters 7 and 8 explore how the Indian State has addressed ethnic aspirations and managed the resultant conflicts and insurgent movements of Assam. The measures taken to resolve these conflicts are analyzed for their effectiveness and the argument is put forward that these measures of conflict resolution have in fact led to an exacerbation of conflicts in more ways than one.

These chapters argue that the Indian State has relied heavily upon Western traditional methods of conflict management in addressing the ethnic conflicts of Assam and the Northeast in general. At the same time, however, it has also tempered its engagement with the conflicts in the region with the traditional Indian model of diplomacy advocated by the great statesman, Kautilya. This model is based on the four principles of sham (conciliation), dam (monetary inducement), danda (use of force) and bhed (division, fragmentation). The result has been successful containment of the conflicts to a large extent. On more instances than one, it has also led to the co-option of certain actors and agents involved in the conflicts as well as to the dilution of the conflict intensity and goals. It has however, failed to transform the conflicts in any meaningful way that would address the final goals of any real conflict resolution/transformation effort. Rather, as Chapter 7 illustrates, it has led to a legitimization of violence in society and a brutalization of both the State’s armed forces and the militant groups. The main reason for this is that through large scale militarization and legislations sanctioning military oppression, the State has been aiming to control the most violent manifestation of ethnic conflicts – that is, armed militancy. The root causes of conflict have remained unaddressed. If anything, they have been strengthened and conflict exacerbated.

Chapter 8 shows how at times, entire sections of the political and civil society leadership have been similarly co-opted with monetary inducements and the promise of participation in power-sharing arrangements. Opposition and protests are curbed using the Kautilyan principles and new power centers are created. A fresh set of ethnic elites are installed in these new centers and they continue perpetuating the same old ethnic hierarchies and perpetrating the same old policies of suppressing ethnic aspirations, thus keeping alive the cycle of violence and conflict. Negotiations are held and peace accords and instruments of settlements are signed by the State with the conflict party but only as an extension of this policy of co-option. As a result, discords follow the signing of most of these accords. The nature and extent of the autonomy granted to ethnic groups under these accords and the policy changes – if any – made in response to them are also brought to doubt. Thus, while the conflict management approaches adopted by the State leave many negative effects on the conflict scenario, there are also many problems inherent in the instruments of conflict settlement and resolution that the State has adopted/adapted so far.

Transforming Conflicts, Invoking Tradition

Chapter 9 argues that the State needs to revisit its approach towards the ethnic aspirations of the various communities in Assam. Kautilyan principles of realpolitik can only contain conflicts and maybe temporarily settle them. However, they have not brought the Indian State anywhere within sight of long-term conflict resolution or transformation. Rather, fissures have been created in the society – between the elite and those at the grassroots, between ethnic communities and between factions of the same community. It has also failed address structural violence in society and failed to invest in attitudinal changes, fostering new relations and developing a culture of peace. At the same time, those who are affected by conflict and have to live with the peace arrangement devised for them by the State have also failed to take ownership of the tenuous peace that despite all the odds, does make itself manifest from time to time. This chapter also then puts forward certain prescriptions for overcoming these gaps in conflict transformation and peace building.

Chapter 10 concludes the study by arguing that one need not always look back at the past through the lenses of conflict – there are various lessons to be learnt in the past and through revisiting certain traditions and traditional practices also, conflict transformation can be effected. It points out that the basis for conflict transformation, ethnic reconciliation and peacebuilding as a whole have always been present in Assam history and in the interethnic Axamiyā ethos. It co-relates the inspirations from the past with certain prescriptions for the future, and it does so while weighing them against contemporary thinking in the field of conflict transformation.

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[1] The label ‘autochthonous’ is used here for all communities that claim to be ‘sons of the soil’ of Assam. Communities such as the Ahom and the Axamiyā-speaking Hindus and Muslims are considered non-indigenous autochthons to distinguish them from the many ‘tribal’ communities or indigenous autochthons of the region. The onset of colonial rule is generally taken as the dividing line determining which populations are autochthonous and which are settlers.