Pluralistic Assam, but...

That Assam is a pluralistic state was once again proved when the newly-elected Members of the 15th Assam Legislative Assembly on Friday took their oaths in several different languages. While the majority of them took the oath in Assamese, several also used Bodo, Bengali and Hindi. At least one newly-elected legislator from Karbi Anglong, and one AIUDF MLA from the Barak Valley even chose to take the oath in Sanskrit, thus generating interest among the media as well as the citizens. Assam has so many languages – both Scheduled and non-Scheduled – that it presents a mini-India of sorts. Likewise, Assam also has a wide variety of ethnic and indigenous communities, apart from those which have migrated to this region only in the past two hundred years or so. Looking back, one would be amazed to find that human footprints on this land have been traced back to the Early Stone Age or Paleolithic Age (40,000 years to 35,000 years). Moreover, ethnologists have found several ethnic types in Assam, which include traces of Negritos, apart from the predominant existence of pre-Dravidians, Eurasians, Austroloids, Mongoloids, Alpines or Armenians, Mediterraneans, Indo-Aryans and Irano-Scythians. The melting pot that Assam is today, therefore, owes its mixture of people to such diverse races, cultures and traditions that have come to live together in a small geographical area bounded by hills and mountains on all sides, with the mighty Brahmaputra flowing majestically through it from east to west. What is also very wonderfully reflected about the unique pluralistic character of Assam is in the choice – and unanimous choice – of the new Speaker as well as Deputy Speaker of the 15th Assembly. While a widely experienced Biswajit Daimary, elected the Speaker, belongs to the Bodo community, the newly-elected Deputy Speaker Dr Numal Momin comes from the Garo community, and that too from Karbi Anglong. A similar ethnic balance has been also reflected in the well-represented council of ministers which Chief Minister Dr Himanta Biswa Sarma constituted the previous week. Going by the ethnic composition of the council of ministers as well as the choice of the Speaker and Deputy Speaker of the 15th Assam Legislative Assembly, one can also say that these are important steps towards the protection of the "jaati, maati and bheti" of the indigenous communities, which was promised by the BJP-led alliance during the run-up to the election to the 14th Assam Legislative Assembly in 2016. There are however many people – and many so-called educated people – in Assam who does not realize the significance of the pluralistic indigenous demographic composition of Assam.

Every educated, socially and politically conscious person of Assam needs to understand the significance of this ethnic and indigenous plurality of the state for various reasons. The first and foremost of such reasons is the urgent need for all the ethnic and indigenous communities of Assam to remain and work unitedly in the backdrop of the growing clout of the immigrants who draw their roots to erstwhile East Pakistan and present-day Bangladesh. It is a fact that the Assamese-speaking community has been the worst threatened by the growing clout of the immigrants since Lord Curzon had clubbed Assam with Eastern Bengal in 1905, and subsequently when Md Saadulla had opened the floodgates to the East Bengal immigrants in the name of 'grow more food", which Lord Wavell had later described somewhere as "grow more Muslims". It is also a fact that CS Mullan, the then Superintendent of 1931 Census operations had prophesized that the day was not far when the immigrants of East Bengal (read erstwhile East Pakistan and present-day Bangladesh) would create such a situation that the Assamese will remain in majority only in Sivasagar district. But then, while the people with Assamese as mother tongue have genuine fears of losing the majority status of their language, it is also to be kept in mind that the growing menace of the immigrants has already very seriously affected the Bodos, Rabhas and Tiwas. A cursory look at the electoral rolls of Kokrajhar will probably reveal how rapidly the number of immigrants has increased. In present-day Goalpara, only one Assembly constituency is today in the hands of indigenous communities, and that too because that particular constituency has been kept reserved for the Scheduled Tribes. The situation in Morigaon, where the Tiwa community was once in quite a majority, is also no different. The unfortunate part of the story is that while a sizeable section of Assamese-speaking people are yet to accept the fact that Assam is a multi-ethnic state comprising indigenous tribal and non-tribal communities, they also fail to take seriously the growing threat of the immigrants, behind which there is a long-drawn international game-plan of establishing a different country in India's east by merging Assam with Bangladesh.