Four Decades of Nellie: Isn’t an Apology Due?

The Nellie massacre of 1983 killed thousands in Assam. In the larger Assamese society, the tragedy is either underplayed or justified

Jyotirmoy Talukdar

Today, the Nellie massacre completes 40 years. On the morning of February 18, 1983, thousands of Bengal-origin Muslims were massacred near Nellie in central Assam – not when the night was dark but when the sun was up.

In the larger Assamese society, the tragedy is either underplayed or justified. I decided to approach 13 individuals from the state with one question: is an apology due for Nellie? “I have no direct answer to the question. Had it been committed by the government, the answer would have been yes,” says Professor Akhil Ranjan Dutta, a well-known social scientist in the country who has commented extensively on the region’s political past and present.

“The Nellie massacre was the outcome of chauvinism, propaganda and communal hatred. Those who committed it were also victims of the same ills. Imposing an election in such an emotionally volatile situation was a mistake on the part of the government. Will the government tender an apology?

Not the incumbent government as the ruling party was not there during that period. If an apology had to be tendered, it would have to be by those who led the movement and subsequently formed the government, to be precise (the ex-chief minister) Prafulla Kumar Mahanta and his colleagues. Assamese people as a whole are not responsible as there were divisions within the Assamese society regarding the movement and its strategies.”

‘Deliberate memoricide’

For the scholar Angshuman Choudhury, though, such an apology should come, first and foremost, from the Assamese society at large.

“But to decide who or what the ‘Assamese society’ is can be a complex exercise in itself. In my view, it is the mainstream Assamese political, intellectual and cultural class that needs to face the victims of Nellie and apologise for the unimaginable violence inflicted upon them in the name of protecting their homeland.

This does not, of course, mean that all of those who apologise directly took part in the violence, but that they were – and continue to be – active stakeholders of a certain body politic that enabled the violence either by commission or omission.

They also need to apologise for the structural violence that followed the physical violence of Nellie – the systematic, and often, deliberate memoricide of the event, the refusal to talk about the perpetrators, and the pushback against those who tried to talk about the victims,” says Angshuman, who is an Associate Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

Both he and Dutta seem to agree on a point regarding the parties that led the governments in question – Congress at the state and the Union when Nellie happened, and the Asom Gana Parishad soon after it. “Many of the leaders of the Assam Movement are still alive and are members of the political fraternity and civil society in Assam today.

They, especially, need to participate in this act of apology for allowing the dominant sentiments within their movement to be violently directed against a vulnerable ethno-religious minority. I also believe that the Indian state owes an apology to the victims of Nellie. It needs to apologise for not fully preempting the violence and also, abjectly failing to prevent it.

The day’s government – ideally in Assam, but also in New Delhi – needs to do that on behalf of the state. I also believe that much like in the case of the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom, the Congress party, which was in power in the state and centre at that time, needs to apologise to the victims of Nellie for not doing enough to save them from the machetes, arrows and sticks that changed their lives forever.

I hope Rahul Gandhi, if and when he marches into Assam as part of the Bharat Jodo Yatra’s second leg, does that on his party’s behalf. It would be the morally upright thing to do,” believes Anghsuman who has regularly written on the state’s ethnic complexities.

Acknowledgement, dialogue, memorialising Most of the people who I spoke to for this article emphasised on the need for reconciliation rather than an apology. Aman Wadud, a human rights lawyer trained in the University of Texas and based in Guwahati, says, “The only way forward is justice and reconciliation. Not even one person has been punished for killing thousands of innocent people in Nellie. Although four decades have passed, there must be an attempt to punish the guilty, only such an attempt will pave the way for reconciliation.”

Bonojit Hussain, an independent researcher and activist, feels that the first step