On February 18, 1983, the vilest of human instincts manifested in Assam’s Nellie village when about 2,000 Bengali-speaking Muslim settlers were slaughtered at the height of an anti-immigrant agitation. Many of the victims of that mass murder 42 years ago were women and children. After the dust settled, as many as 688 criminal cases were filed; 310 reached the chargesheet stage, while the rest were closed due to ‘lack of evidence’. Two years down the road, all 310 chargesheeted cases were dropped by the then Asom Gana Parishad government as part of deal to forge the Assam Accord. None of the accused ever faced trial. Adding insult to injury, successive governments sat on the reports of two commissions that probed the bloody pogrom—one official and the other commissioned by NGOs. Both those reports were finally made public this week, months before Assam goes to the polls. Add to the cauldron a bill recently tabled in the state assembly banning polygamy—and ‘othering’ to accentuate pre-poll polarisation becomes a possibility.
The official one-man panel headed by retired IAS officer T P Tewary had submitted its report to the Assam government in 1984. Three years later, the report was formally tabled in the assembly, but access was limited as the speaker’s office had only one copy. Now that the Himanta Biswa Sarma government has made the elusive report public, it’s odd to note that Tewary did not read any communal angle in the savage butchery, observing that the clashes were primarily economic in nature, resulting from land disputes. The panel faulted the police for sleeping on a specific alert from within the department on Nellie being a tinderbox waiting to explode. Pointing to the slew of violent episodes across the state before and after Nellie, the report stated: “The victims were not confined to one religious, ethnic, or linguistic group. In some places, the attackers were Assamese and the victims were Bengali-speaking people, both Hindus and Muslims.”
Probe reports are meant to fix accountability. But since no accused even reached the trial stage, that objective has been rendered useless. Yet, the Tewary report ought to have been made public four decades ago to give the survivors some sense of where things stood. Denying them the courtesy of even that understanding was highly unfortunate.
