Borders,Commodities and Citizens across Mud and River: Assam,1947–50s

The Sylhet Referendum: Towards Partition

At Independence, Assam, with 80,000 square miles and occupying 6.69 per cent of the total area of India (one-fifteenth of the total land surface), ranked fifth in size amongst the Indian states. ⁵ A month earlier, Assam’s geography had been completely different. On 7 July 1947, before Britain formally announced her date of departure from India, the Sylhet Referendum was held, wherein the district explicitly decided to join Pakistan. Sylhet had an area of 5388 square miles.

The referendum had taken place in a highly animated political climate. Prior to the referendum Rohini Kumar Choudhury, the Assamese Congressman, had written to Sardar Patel to postpone it. Choudhury was of the opinion that, given the political climate, the voice of Sylhet’s Hindus would not be able to withstand ‘the white heat of the communal frenzy’. ⁶ Purnendu Gupta of the Indian National Trade Union Congress, based in Sylhet, had also warned Patel of the fate of approximately 200,000 tea garden labourers in the event of Sylhet deciding to join Pakistan. Patel, however, expressed his inability to postpone the referendum, and instead parleyed with Gopinath Bardoloi, the Assam Premier, to make the Assam Congress work hard ‘in favour of retention of Sylhet in Assam’. The Indian Home Minister was of the opinion that ‘45 per cent of Hindus are in Sylhet and some of the Muslims are also desiring to remain inside’ and thus believed that Sylhet would vote to be with India. However this was not to be and of the 423,660 valid votes that were cast, more than 56 per cent voted for Sylhet’s amalgamation with the proposed East Pakistan. ⁷ Other observers had also predicted a pro-Pakistan sweep much earlier. ⁸ The British government meanwhile decided that if the vote was in favour of East Pakistan, a Boundary Commission, on the lines of Punjab and Bengal, would be set up to demarcate the areas. This Boundary Commission eventually allowed Assam to retain the four thanas of Patharkandi, Ratabari, Karimganj and Badarpur. ⁹

On 17 August, two days after Independence, the Award was finally published. As Sir Cyril Radcliffe announced the Partition Award, Assam’s geography was thus mutilated. Its western frontier came to have limited access to mainland India, whether through surface routes or railways. The existing railway routes to Bengal now passed through East Pakistan and its surface links to northern Bengal were poor. The vibrant river route was also disrupted; like the railways, this route had to pass through East Pakistani territory. Physical dislocation also forced the people across the newly created border to get worried about their political future. Some 50,000 to 60,000 people from the Garo community living in the Mymensingh district, which was contiguous to the Garo Hills in Assam, had demanded before a sub-committee formed by the Constituent Assembly that their areas be merged with Assam. Gopinath Bardoloi, Assam’s premier and head of this committee, had also written to Mountbatten endorsing this demand. ¹⁰ However, the Commission refused to concede and the Garos living in the lowland came to be part of East Pakistan. Over the years, East Pakistan would witness the birth of Garo identity politics. ¹¹

A Militarized Border: Source of Diplomatic Uneasiness

After 1947, a 600-mile long border came to separate Assam and East Pakistan. Dotted with rivers, river islands, hills and marshy lands (beels ), India’s eastern border appeared like a fluid land mass. ‘Most of it lies along the foot of the hills…there are practically no roads over the hills…a good part of the border is the river which is so wide and full of subsidiary channels and islands that it was difficult to draw a line’, wrote Bishnu Ram Medhi, the successor to Gopinath Bardoloi and Assam’s chief minister (1950–57) to Nehru. ¹² The Brahmaputra, with its wide expanse and constantly fluctuating channels, became part of this border, Medhi reminded Nehru.

Meanwhile, this new but largely muddy and riverine border with East Pakistan led to regular trouble. There were claims and counter-claims about the territorial jurisdiction of both India and East Pakistan over the demarcation, and the actual demarcation could not take place for several months due to rain. Clashes along the border, and news and rumours of harassment of citizens of respective nations also became common. For several years, the major tension was regarding the forest patches in the border areas of Cachar, the southern district of Assam. In January and February 1948, Prime Minister Nehru repeatedly cabled Liaquat Ali Khan, his counterpart in Pakistan, condemning the East Pakistan government for attempting to ‘encroach’ into the Pathari Reserved Forests (RF) in Cachar. ¹³ The RF was part of Karimganj of Sylhet. East Pakistan denied any such wrong-doing and retorted that it had inherited from the Bengal government the right of collecting revenue from the RF. ¹⁴ This was the first relatively major incident of any kind on the Eastern borders and it turned out to be a considerable source of diplomatic unease. The Assam government also claimed that the Pakistani army had flag marches in these areas and Nehru demanded that Pakistan withdraw its forces, warning that a failure to do so would lead to India having to take action. ¹⁵ In the first week of February, Nehru spelled out the government’s stand on this increasing hostility on India’s eastern frontier. He admitted that the Pakistani police had seized 42 square miles of Indian territory in Assam.

As allegations intensified, the government of India rushed military equipment to Assam. Such incidents remained in the forefront of public rhetoric on both sides, but ironically, they also helped in providing a better idea of where the border should be. Allegations of East Pakistani fishermen encroaching into Assam or Assam’s telegraph men intentionally cutting down telephone lines of East Pakistan were commonly heard. ¹⁶ Several such incidents were reported from the Sylhet and Dawki borders.

Increasing border disputes also intensified rumours about the possible amalgamation of India and Pakistan. ¹⁷ Mountbatten made a quick visit to Assam, Manipur, West Bengal and Burma in early March, 1948. Pressurized by this, in April 1948 both governments signed an agreement to ‘discourage any propaganda for the amalgamation of India and Pakistan or portions thereof’, ¹⁸ covering the provinces of East and West Bengal and Assam, as well as the states of Tripura and Cooch Behar.

The Khasi and Jaintia hills posed a more precarious situation. Of the 25 chieftainships or ‘states’, only two bordering East Pakistan did not merge with India well into early 1948. In March, one of these little states, Nongstoin, rich in mineral resources, openly expressed its desire to join Pakistan; ¹⁹ its chief advisor had fled to Pakistan. Another state, Rambrai, refused to join India. The Bardoloi ministry was relieved when both these Khasi states finally signed the Instrument of Accession in March 1948. ²⁰ However, for another couple of years, the Communist leaders from Mymensingh, who had a powerful presence in the Garo Hills, remained a matter of concern for the governments of both India and Pakistan. ²¹

The fears with regard to the boundary issue were voiced by Gopinath Bardoloi, who wrote to Nehru in February 1948 saying: ‘it is necessary to point out that the border troubles, particularly those in Assam, must not be taken as an isolated problem. They cannot be considered negligible for [especially] a place like Assam…’ ²² Nehru held a different view; he acknowledged the seriousness of the troubles on the Assam border but thought that Assam needed to think ahead. Nehru assured Bardoloi that Assam ‘has a bright future and it seems to me that the only way to tackle our problems is to do so constructively through development schemes and not negatively’. However, the boundary disputes refused to die down. As The Times of India reported: ‘…it was a little difficult to say exactly the spot where the boundary ended unless one consulted maps and surveys’. ²³ There were regular meetings and exchanges between officials to demarcate. ²⁴ Disputes continued in the Mizo hills, Goalpara and Cachar borders. Hilly forest tracts and rivers made the task of boundary-making extremely complicated. While the disputes seem to have become less tense as negotiations for settlement got underway, even in 1955, when both Indian and Pakistani officials met at Shillong, The Times of India again reported that ‘a permanent boundary is yet to be marked’. ²⁵

One obvious outcome of the demarcation of the boundary was that along the borders, cultivable agricultural land lay fallow for several years. In the East Khasi hills and Sylhet, it took several years to overcome these obstacles until both the governments signed a Pact in 1955 to liberalize a visa and passport system so that farmers on both the sides could move freely. ²⁶ Illegal cattle trade as well as rustling was a recurrent source of unease between both nations. In a gesture of ‘goodwill’, in 1955 both sides admitted the problem of cattle lifting and in one such instance, the Sylhet administration handed over a draft of Rs 3000 as payoff for cattle having been lifted from East Khasi hills to Sylhet.

There were some important developments in the attempts to regularize human movement across Bengal, Assam, Tripura and East Pakistan. A permit system had been put in place between West Pakistan and India in 1948; in 1952, a formal passport and visa system was introduced. The introduction of a passport system in West Pakistan immediately created a great ‘panic and insecurity’ across India’s eastern borders, leading to ‘alarming’ levels of exodus from both sides. However, border traffic here was unregulated until 15 October 1952 when a passport and visa system was also introduced. ²⁷ A special visa called ‘Category-A Visa’, valid for five years, was introduced for Indian visitors travelling to East Pakistan who were living within 10 miles of the Indian border. This category of visa holders did not need to pass through a check post or register themselves with the Indian police. District Magistrates were allowed to grant special visas to the ‘people living in the border areas between the two Bengals and Assam and Tripura [sic]’. ²⁸ These groups of people mostly included cultivators and small artisans who were solely dependent on cross-border economic exchanges.

With the introduction of the passport system, an increasing flow of people to Assam, particularly into the southern-most district of Cachar, became noticeable. The 1951 Census estimated the figure at a little less than 100,000. ²⁹ This number was soon contested by different organizations that hinted at a much higher figure ³⁰ and sought increased rehabilitation efforts. ³¹

Not everyone appreciated the passport system and it caused new problems. The tea planters in Tripura, for instance, resented it. The official mechanism to issue passports and procure visas took a long time and the planters, never accustomed to any bureaucratic highhandedness, were the first to express their uneasiness with the new system. They found the system inconvenient as it gave rise to transport difficulties, particularly in their ability to procure coal from the Pakistan-run East Bengal Railways. ³²

Similarly, as families split along the borders, more restrictions were imposed on the people living and wanting to cross the borders on a regular basis. The splitting of families also meant scattered immovable properties, including agricultural lands. Farmers had to procure permission from both sides to carry back their agricultural produce. In 1950, cultivators were allowed to carry approximately 1400 kilograms of paddy across the Assam—East Pakistan and Tripura—East Pakistan borders. ³³ This system continued well into 1954.

Rehabilitating the Refugees

Partition also intensified cross-border migrations. Compared to the Punjab, the magnitude of violence in India’s east was far less, but it sparked off a passionate political controversy. In India’s west, the refugees were settled in the vacuum created by the departure of Muslims. However, in the east, a corresponding efflux from India had not balanced the influx from East Pakistan to India. This was the assessment of a report by the Ministry of Rehabilitation in New Delhi. ³⁴

Several factors contributed to an absence of physical violence in India’s east. The memories of the Noakhali communal violence and the Calcutta killings of 1946 were still fresh, and may have acted as deterrents to further outbreaks of violence. Unlike in the west, where the migration took place within a short span of time, in the east the exodus took place slowly and over an extended period of time. The migrants also did not take a definite route or a particular mode of transport that could allow them to become easy targets for their opponents.

The question of immigration was not new to Assam and had been at the centre of a storm since the early decades of the century. By the 1920s, anti-immigration voices had become a powerful ideological force through platforms dominated by Assamese Hindu leaders; it was also not unusual for tribal leaders to unite with them for the common cause. Such resistance had forced the British government to introduce a regulatory mechanism. For instance, the settlement of the East Bengali jute cultivators in the Brahmaputra valley was regulated through a highly controversial mechanism known as the Line System. ³⁵ By the time this administrative mechanism was withdrawn by the Muslim League-led Assam government in 1938, it had succeeded in acting as a prelude to the birth of Muslim identity politics. During 1946 and the early months of 1947, the leaders of Muslim League had succeeded in convincing the large Muslim peasant population in Assam to join the pro-Pakistan movement.

The arrival of refugees, largely Hindus, from East Pakistan would add another layer to Assam’s anti-immigrant politics. The deliberations of the Assamese public failed to differentiate between a refugee and an immigrant. Refugees had begun to trickle into Assam starting from October 1946 but it was still not considered a big crisis. However, closer to Independence, Dainik Assamiya was worriedly reporting about how the local population from Kamrup had expressed their displeasure against the arrival of Hindu peasant refugees from East Bengal. The refugees, numbering approximately 12,000, had arrived in small towns north of Kamrup. After August 1947, refugees poured in in large numbers and reached a large figure by 1950. ³⁶

The Indian officials who prepared the 1951 Census came to the conclusion that most refugees came from Sylhet, followed by Mymensingh and Dacca (Dhaka). ³⁷ Independent surveys hinted at Comilla as another place from where refugees moved in. ³⁸ The Census Report of 1951 also noted that in 1949, the refugees were ‘middle-class intellectuals’ who were following the proceedings of the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan and were generally worried about the fate of Hindu population in Pakistan or richer classes who could afford to come away. ³⁹ Later refugees were mostly petty traders, small peasants or government employees.

As the question of East Bengali refugees became a highly contested political question, the governments of both India and Pakistan tried to address this by signing the Nehru–Liaquat Agreement on 8 April 1950. This carefully drafted Agreement tried to quell the refugee-related political disquiet in India’s and Pakistan’s east. Reaching out to the refugee populace, the Agreement promised that there would be ‘freedom of movement and protection in transit’, ‘freedom to carry movable property, an end to harassment caused by customs officials, and if anyone returned before the end of 1950’, the government ensured that the person would get back their immovable property. The Agreement might have succeeded in restoring confidence amongst the minority populations in both countries since, by the end of 1950, a slowdown of the inflow of refugees was reported.

Why did the East Bengalis move out? R.B. Vaghaiwalla, Census Superintendent of Assam in 1951 had grossly misunderstood the situation at hand when he explained it this way:

In Pakistan the wholesale opting out of experienced non-Muslim officers and their replacement by junior inexperienced Muslim officers, greatly weakened the administrative machinery and created a general feeling of insecurity and lack of confidence in the bona fides of the new State. This coupled with other facts, such as, the lessening of prospects for Hindus in government, and administrative services, in business and trade which in these days of control depend largely on permits, licences, and government sympathy and encouragement, examples of petty types of fanaticism and intolerant attitude towards other religions and the oft repeated declarations of the top ranking leaders of Pakistan that Pakistan will become a purely Islamic State…caused an exodus of Hindus from Pakistan to India. ⁴⁰

This situation might in fact have been true for only a few Hindu officials working for the government

While the exact numbers remained a matter of speculation, the Assam government carried out a census in July 1949, which indicated that there were 114,500 persons who had arrived after the Partition. ⁴¹ A later assessment suggested that approximately 5 million people had moved from East Bengal to India between 1946 and 1964—mostly Hindu Bengalis—of which an estimated 13 per cent moved to Assam. ⁴² However, it must be noted here that a large number of refugees did not report to the check posts, avoided direct routes for fear of confiscation of their valued goods, etc. More than half of the total refugee population also came during the months of February and April in 1950. By 1957, an official report claimed that ‘so far 1,28,500 families of displaced persons have come over to this state for permanent rehabilitation…’. ⁴³

The early batches of refugees in Assam were not given any official proof of their refugee status. Those who arrived in the early 1950s were expected to pass through ‘border camps’ and were issued registration certificates there. However, not everyone passed through these camps or received such certificates. Refugees without any special support from the Assam government began to scatter themselves ‘almost imperceptibly among the local residents especially of those areas which had already some Bengali population’. ⁴⁴ Government employees and many others with economic strength explored private avenues to seek employment or a place to live in. Family ties, kinship or personal acquaintance became useful in this moment of crisis. Social organizations such as the Ramakrishna Mission, Marwari Relief Society or the Shillong Refugee Aid Society, all belonging to different cultural ethos, became active in making arrangements for relief. One significant place of attraction was the railway colonies, which were already predominately populated by Bengali-speaking people. About 50,000 refugees were found staying in the main railway colonies of Assam by 1948. ⁴⁵

Before the refugee crisis became visible, the Hindu Bengali employees of the Assam government in Sylhet who had opted for India also presented a challenge for the government of Assam. These employees had to be accommodated within the present job schemes. This was a serious issue, given the recent history of competition between the Assamese- and Bengali-speaking job seekers. Assam’s trade and economy were partially in the hands of Bengali traders, apart from the Marwaris. On several occasions, even Gandhi had referred to this control of trade and government jobs by the non-Assamese traders and the Assamese dislike of the same. ⁴⁶ It was felt by the Assamese that the only option available for the educated was to seek government jobs and this, too, they feared would become increasingly difficult with the migrations. On 22 August 1947, the government opined that these employees could not be absorbed in Assam as this would be ‘in excess of their requirements or create blocks to local recruitment’. ⁴⁷ The Bengal press denounced this stand by Assam. ⁴⁸ However, as pressure mounted, the Assam government in July 1948 offered employment to 1153 of the 1496 government employees in Sylhet who had opted for Assam and whom the government of East Bengal had already released of their duties. ⁴⁹

As refugees poured in, land became an important issue and the Assam government expressed its inability to provide any more land to the refugees. It refused to offer any support to them, with strong backing of the public. This lack of compassion was widely known. Sucheta Kripalani, an AICC member who had headed a Congress fact-finding team to look into refugee rehabilitation in Assam, recalled those experiences in 1974, saying that refugees were

…living in huge camps, mostly in forest like areas, in great distress, suffering from all kinds of diseases (and) not getting adequate food, medical attention, in spite of all that the state government was doing. But the state government did not have much heart in the work that they were doing. ⁵⁰

The Assam government had decided that under no circumstances was land to be given to non-indigenous people. ⁵¹ Gopinath Bardoloi, the then chief minister, wrote to Jawaharlal Nehru of his government’s helplessness in arranging land for the newcomers as the Congress government in Assam came under pressure from various quarters. Pro-Hindu and exclusivist Assamese nationalist leaders bitterly opposed any further land settlements for the migrant population, while left-wing peasant organizations had been vociferously demanding land for landless local families. A similar mood among urban Hindu Assamese families was captured by the sole English daily published from Guwahati. An editorial in the The Assam Tribune was forthright:

Since independence, the attack is being carried on from two flanks. First, there are the Muslim immigrants whose love and attachment to Pakistan are as strong as ever. There is no evidence of a change of heart and yet they are finding it much easier to migrate to this province under the shelter of the secular state policy of the government of India. Then there are Hindu immigrants who apparently want to create a Bengal in this province. ⁵²

The Bardoloi ministry came under further attack from Nehru for its ‘narrow-minded policy’. Nehru’s stance was understandable. His government was involved in handling one of the biggest human crises in Indian society: the settlement of millions of refugees on Indian soil. ⁵³ Whatever may be Assam’s internal challenges, in Nehru’s view, the larger goal of the nation was more important. However, for Assam, migration had been a politically and culturally sensitive issue for some time. Since the 1920s, the settlement of people from outside Assam had often caused tension within the populace. For all the governments in Assam after 1936, whether led by the Muslim League or the Congress, the settlement of ‘outsiders’ was the hardest fought political subject. Bardoloi’s response to Nehru’s appeal was to give a comprehensive picture of per capita availability of land along with the complex socio-political landscape surrounding the uncultivated government lands available for distribution. ⁵⁴

Nehru possibly saw the situation on the eastern borders of India as different from that of western India. He thought that persuasion and diplomacy with the East Pakistani leadership was the best possible way out. Nehru promised Akbar Hydari, Assam’s governor, all possible support but opined that he did not want any ‘barrier to free movement but a large influx of people should certainly be avoided’. Nehru also wrote to Bardoloi expressing his concerns at the ‘double immigration of Hindus and Muslims into Assam’ but advised Bardoloi that ‘there should be no bar to individuals coming’, while also feeling that Bardoloi was justified in stopping large groups arriving without approval of the Assam government. ⁵⁵

In order to ease migration into Assam, the first of several Inter-Dominion conferences took place in Calcutta in April 1948. While the Assam premier had a poor view of the possible outcome from these conferences, the possibility of the introduction of a permit system was raised and Nehru continued to appeal for a reasonable stand on this subject. If immigration continued, the question of refugee rehabilitation would also acquire greater importance.

Meanwhile in early 1949, Mohanlal Saxena, the Union Rehabilitation Minister, visited Assam to discuss the prospects of settlement of the refugees. The Bardoloi ministry promised that ‘they would do their best to rehabilitate such refugees as have not been absorbed in the province as quickly as possible’. ⁵⁶ This assurance was more than enough to help the Assam Jatiya Mahasabha, an Assamese political organization, kick off an agitation opposing any such plan. Newspaper reports in the Times of India quoted Ambikagiri Roy Chowdhury, the chief of the Mahasabha and a fierce orator, blaming the Assam government for pursuing a ‘weak-kneed policy and sacrificing the whole future of the Assamese people by accepting the harmful suggestions from the Centre’. ⁵⁷ The Assam government, sensing opposition to the rehabilitation programme in the province, expressed its inability to offer any large-scale land settlement programme to the Bengali Hindu refugees. In addition, in a press release dated 9 May, the Assam government flatly denied the assurances it had made to Saxena.

Assam’s failures on refugee settlement became well known, in contrast to Delhi where refugee rehabilitation had acquired a gigantic scale with Nehru’s government handling it effectively. With experiences gained in Delhi and its neighbourhood in settling migrants arriving from West Pakistan, Nehru was unwilling to agree to any opposition from Assam. Almost a year later, in May 1950, an exasperated Nehru, stressed by similar problems on India’s western frontier, wrote to Bardoloi:

You say that there is no further land available in Assam. This is a question of fact which can easily be determined. It is patent, however, that if land is not available in Assam, it is still less available in the rest of India which is very heavily populated, barring the deserts and mountains. What then are we to do with the millions of refugees we have to deal with? ⁵⁸

The refugee rehabilitation question brought Nehru’s government and the Assam government in open confrontation. ⁵⁹ At the same time, the West Bengal government held the view that the burden of the refugees was to be shared jointly by the Indian government and West Bengal’s adjoining states. ⁶⁰ The intelligentsia of West Bengal also shared similar views. The economist Radha Kamal Mukherjee estimated that land amounting to 17.3 million acres in Assam was lying fallow and Bengali refugees, who possessed the ‘sturdy spirit of individualism, courage and enterprise’, should be settled in Bengal’s contiguous areas. ‘East Bengali farmers fought the tiger and the crocodile’, Mukherjee proudly stated, to overcome the hazards of the forest and the flood to make East Bengal the granary of rice as well as jute in India and one of the ‘most flourishing gardens of Asia’. ⁶¹

Assam’s Congress leadership demanded that before land and other resources were shared with the refugees, Assam’s local population who were landless and needy had to be provided for. ⁶² Thus, the Assam government defended its position by citing its own inability to provide land to the local landless population and this reason was given credibility by the fact that Assam had had a history between 1948 and 1950 of being on the brink of widespread peasant mobilization to seek land for the landless. ⁶³ Bishnuram Medhi, the revenue minister in Bardoloi’s government, and soon to succeed Bardoloi as the chief minister, was more than vocal in this regard and used his resources to challenge the Indian government’s pressure. He also resisted the appointment of Bengali officers in the refugee rehabilitation work. Patel commented that Medhi ‘has been the protagonist of the view that no surplus land was available in Assam’. ⁶⁴ Despite Assam’s resistance, Nehru had insisted on a dignified refugee settlement, thereby infuriating Assamese leaders. Patel was firmer; he insisted that the government had ‘to give priority to refugees, even against local sentiment’. ⁶⁵

In 1949 the Assam government thus turned down an offer for building a township near Pandu at Guwahati, citing as reasons internal security and Hindu Bengalis’ communist political orientation. ⁶⁶ As the refugee rehabilitation programme was being opposed by the Assam government, the Union Ministry of Rehabilitation then assumed the responsibility. Meanwhile, the Assam government’s Department of Relief and Rehabilitation began operation from May 1950.

A month later, Bardoloi stated that Assam had taken responsibility of rehabilitating 225,000 refugees. Of these 10,000 had been allotted land in areas ‘from which Muslim immigrants were evicted’, apart from settling a few in tea gardens and Reserved Forests. ⁶⁷ This, however, did not help the Bardoloi government much. It got caught up between pressure from the Assamese and the tribal population who demanded land and refugees who demanded better support. A worried Bardoloi wrote to Patel that, if the Assam government had to accept the demands of the refugees ‘as superior to those of the local people, or even at par with them’, the Assam Congress ‘should decide not to contest next election’. ⁶⁸

The Indian Ministry of Rehabilitation roped in the Indian Tea Association (ITA) to hand over a small portion of unused land from its gardens to be distributed amongst the refugees. This, too, did not go well with Assam’s Congress leadership, forcing the ITA to go back on what it had promised. ⁶⁹ After hectic parleying, it was agreed that only 50 per cent of land acquired from the Assam tea estates would be given to the refugees. Meanwhile the Assam government passed the Assam Land (Requisition and Acquisition) Act, 1948, primarily intended for taking over extra lands from the tea estates. ⁷⁰ However, this Act could hardly help the government to take unused land from the powerful planters.

While the settling of refugees was an important issue, there was also the question of rehabilitation, which, too, began at a rather slow pace. Provision of cultivable lands, urban colonies, establishment of new markets or provision of financial loans emerged as the key features of the government’s initiative. New townships came up in Guwahati, Goalpara and Shillong. A small number of farmers were given land in Kamrup, Goalpara and Cachar. Three homes were established in Nowgaon, Guwahati and Rupsi to take care of destitute women, children and the old. The able-bodied among them were taught crafts like spinning and weaving, paddy husking, preparation of puffed rice, pottery making, gardening and cow keeping. ⁷¹

There were also cases of mismanagement. One such case was the offer of support from the Indian Tea Association. Due to mounting pressure from various quarters, the Indian Tea Association, now with less-powerful lobbying capacity, promised 3 acres of land each to 3500 families of ‘displaced persons who have recently come from East Pakistan’. The ITA offered a total of 70,000 acres of land from the state’s tea gardens. The total cost of this rehabilitation was estimated at ₹ 1,745,000 and the ITA received ₹ 100,000 from the state government. These families were mostly cultivators of jute and paddy. As the scheme took off, it could hardly meet its promises, leading to serious accusations against the ITA. Complaints of offer of unfit land or of ITA not having actual ownership of enough land, and increasing hostility from the tea garden workers, complicated matters further.

‘The refugees were dumped by truck on jungle-covered knolls’, wrote a reporter in The Times of India, ‘they could at best construct huts perched on hill-tops and hope for the land they had been promised. Very few families got land worth cultivating, not to speak of three acres each, and then it was said that the land was not fit for jute or paddy.’ ⁷²

The failure to provide land to large sections of the refugee population, who used to earn their livelihood from land, compelled the Assam government to redefine its rehabilitation programme. Allowances and meagre amounts of resettlement loans were offered for a brief period of time. Such paltry amounts merely met the daily needs of this population.

However, the apprehension about settling refugees in a state already burdened with migration from previous decades slowly disappeared and the state became more proactive in the 1950s. The Assam government took over the task of administration of refugee rehabilitation in February 1953. In 1957, an official from Assam proudly stated how the government reception centres were opened in the first stage in the ‘bordering districts of Cachar, Goalpara and United Khasi Hills’. ⁷³ By 1957, the Assam government could boast of genuine progress in the relief and rehabilitation programme.

Linking Assam

The Partition, as mentioned above, snapped Assam’s railway connection as the Bengal Assam Railway and its properties were divided. Assam no longer had access to Chittagong and the Calcutta ports; these ports could be accessed only via East Pakistan. By the end of 1949, Pakistan’s railway stopped all goods in transit to and from Assam. ⁷⁴ As the Brahmaputra flowed through both India and East Pakistan, river trade also virtually collapsed during this period.

Already towards the end of 1947, Assam’s political leadership had become desperate to avoid this crisis. In November, Assam’s governor Akbar Hydari, chief minister Gopinath Bardoloi and revenue minister Bishnuram Medhi met the leadership of the government of India in Delhi. The Indian government responded quickly and decided to undertake restoration of communications with Assam. Meanwhile, the air and postal services to Assam had also come to a halt. All of this massively impacted the export of tea and the trade in jute.

Directly linking Assam’s western part with the districts of north Bengal was more of a natural challenge. The Indian railway engineers had before them a gigantic task to plan, design and restore a disconnected railway link in the shortest possible time. ⁷⁵ The Indian government had to give priority to political and security reasons while considering the restoration of this link. In earlier times, economic profit and business viability played an important role. At the same time, paddy trade in the newly formed North Dinajpur district and the mineral resources of the Garo hills also came to play an important role.

Work to restore the railway line began in the early months of 1948. The Assam Bengal Railway had to build tracks over a distance of 142 miles between Assam’s Fakiragram and Bihar’s Kishanganj. Known as the Assam Rail Link project, the work was completed in two years and 33,400 workers had to toil in a most inhospitable landscape dotted with rivers, water bodies and marshy land. Most of the workers came from the United Provinces, Bihar, Madras and Bombay, apart from local agricultural labourers. In addition, 6000 grade-IV employees and 735 officers were engaged for the task. Most of the officers were Hindu Bengali refugees from East Bengal. The Chief Project Engineer was one 44-year-old Karnail Singh, an engineering graduate from the Roorkee Engineering College.

The most difficult task was to construct bridges across the torrential rivers Teesta, Torsa, Sonkosh and Raidak. New engineering innovations had to be developed to overcome these challenges. An estimated 379 bridges had to be constructed in this stretch of Himalayan foothills covered with dense jungle, rivulets and water bodies. The engineering feat that the Indian railways had achieved in such a short time invited praise from the Indian media. The Economic Weekly, a leading Indian journal, commented that ‘Of the engineering projects completed during the post-war period, none has been so remarkable as the Assam Rail Link.’ ⁷⁶

By the end of 1949, this stretch of railway line was completed and goods trains began to run from 8 December. The new line increased the distance between Assam and Calcutta but the Indian government stressed on retaining the pre-1947 rate of freight, keeping in mind the demands of the tea-plantation lobby. Passenger trains ran starting 26 January 1950, coinciding with India’s first Republic Day. This added a new meaning to Assam’s geographical link with India, which played a crucial role in defining new regional aspirations; it also provided relief to the ailing tea export.

A Fragile Economy

As we have seen, Partition had put Assam in a precarious position insofar as her communications with the rest of India were concerned. Her trade and commerce suffered greatly, especially the export of tea, of which this province produced 45 per cent of the country’s total, and the bulk of which was conducted through the port of Calcutta. For several months, there was almost complete cessation of Assam’s trade. ⁷⁷ In October 1947, a worried Assam government asked for central assistance of Rs. 10 crores for speeding up welfare works. The government also asked for Rs. 10 crores as annual grant from excise duty earned from the sale of petrol, tea and jute in the state. ⁷⁸ Gopinath Bardoloi publicly claimed that Assam had not received its due economic share from the new federal structure, nor was it empowered to impose fresh taxes on its people. ⁷⁹

The price of consumer goods rose exponentially across India immediately after Independence. The general index number of wholesale prices, which stood at 244.1 in August 1947, rose to 302.2 in November 1947 and rose further to 389.6 in July 1948. ⁸⁰ Prices of essential commodities had in fact begun to rise after 1944. ⁸¹ Assam escaped from the worst effects of the price rise, but the earthquake in 1950 worsened the situation.

Partition severely affected the production of jute and tea, the two most important commodities in Assam connected to the global economy. The production of jute involved millions of small farmers and any ups and downs in its economy immediately hit the peasantry. In 1945–46, of the total jute produced in India, Assam produced 6 per cent, West Bengal districts 9 per cent and East Bengal 80 per cent. Profit earned from jute helped Assam pay for cloth, pulses and consumer goods ⁸² and jute was the highest earner of money for Assam, exceeding that of tea.

Raw jute from Assam had to reach Calcutta, where all the mills were located. Earlier, the hydraulic pressure mills there had pressed raw jute to be shipped to the Dundee mills, which produced finer cloth material to be used as packaging material. From the 1870s, the situation changed and Calcutta mills also began to produce packaging material used to pack Indian export items. In order to reach Calcutta, jute from these regions now had to cross the border twice—once into East Pakistan and then out of East Pakistan into India.

In 1947 India’s domestic requirement of raw jute was 7.05 million bales while it produced only 1.6 million bales. ⁸³ This massive deficit of raw jute led the Indian government to initiate schemes for the expansion of area under jute cultivation as well as the intensification of its cultivation, besides imposing a ban on export of jute seeds. In 1949, fertilizers and seeds were supplied to farmers in Assam and an additional 50,000 acres came under jute cultivation. ⁸⁴ Between 1947 and 1955, such steps led to a 76 per cent increase in jute acreage of Assam. ⁸⁵

However, despite such efforts, due to fluctuations in the international prices of jute following the Pakistan government’s attempt to regulate unauthorized flow of jute from East Pakistan to India, jute producers from both Assam and West Bengal suffered heavily. Moreover, in 1949, the government of India also withdrew the rights of some provinces, including Assam, to a share in the revenue from export duties on jute and jute products. Facing bitter opposition from these provinces in the Constituent Assembly, the union government agreed to give grants-in-aid in lieu of export duties on jute. ⁸⁶ Export duties on jute along with income from tea exports contributed to a major share of state revenues and this denial would significantly cripple Assam’s economic health.

That the Partition would invite trouble for the lucrative jute production in India’s east was already prophesied in 1943 in the pages of The Geographical Journal. ⁸⁷ Compared to India’s struggle to rejuvenate a crippling jute industry by expanding production to new areas as well as intensifying production in the existing areas, for Pakistan jute now became a crucial agricultural produce that would support the new nation’s ambitious industrialization and economic modernization programmes. ⁸⁸ Jute would shortly lose its importance in Assam’s economic life.

With regard to the tea economy, the Partition dislodged and displaced the unified structure and organization of the tea industry, which became subject to dual control by India and Pakistan. ⁸⁹ In addition, for global export, tea had to reach either the Chittagong or Calcutta ports, and Assam needed its regular supply of rice, for distribution to plantation workers. The Partition disrupted the export chain of Assam and worked as a setback to rice imports. Supply of essential foods to tea gardens was severely disrupted. Tea gardens also faced difficulties in procuring coal for their factories.

So the primary trouble for both the tea and jute producers was the broken transport linkages. The Standstill Agreement, signed between India and Pakistan immediately after Independence, under which goods moving from one country to the other would be exempted from customs duty, was terminated in March 1948. As a consequence, many customs check posts came up. All these rendered the transport of tea along the pre-Partition routes difficult, if not impossible. Moreover, Indian tea could not get effective priority in booking wagons mainly because the Pakistan railway system had to carry jute from Calcutta to Chittagong. Both jute and tea were given equal priority prior to the Partition. There was a shortage of wagons. Besides, a number of railway employees who were working in the Pakistan railways opted for India, and others who took their place were not familiar with bulk handling of tea. Planters in north Bengal looked for new routes but the choice was severely limited for Assam, since there was no direct rail link with India. The new Assam–Bengal Rail link, discussed above, turned out to be a boon to the Assam tea planters. Notwithstanding these challenges, the price and cost of production of tea went up two-fold between 1943 and 1948, but the planters nevertheless succeeded in boosting their profit. ⁹⁰

Apart from the ban on export of jute from East Pakistan to India, there were regular reports of Pakistan withholding the transit of jute sent from Assam to Calcutta via river routes. ⁹¹ Export by steamers came down heavily. As steamers faced difficulties, by 1950 the Bengal Steamer Company Limited suspended its service. The desperate tea and jute suppliers used air services to send their products to Calcutta. In 1950, 30 aircraft were in regular service to transport both jute and tea.

Everyday economic life across the new border received a serious setback. Partition enforced a change in the production structure and marketing pattern. Supply of coal and limestone from the Khasi and Garo Hills to East Bengal (now in Pakistan) declined. Labourers working in these mines lost their regular employment. The hill population’s traditional access to the agricultural lands in the foothills of East Bengal came to an end. Minerals, vegetables, fruits and a wide range of horticultural products from the Khasi and Jaintia hills were now left with no access to markets. ⁹² Vegetables and fruits produced in these areas had for long enjoyed a lucrative market in Bengal through Sylhet, with urban households of Calcutta highly favouring the oranges produced in the Khasi hills. The ‘miles and miles of orange grove’ seen by P.R.T Gurdon, the widely travelled British official, a few decades earlier slowly declined after Partition. ⁹³ The Khasi and Jaintia Hills used to export 1,200,000 maunds of orange to East Bengal before Partition but this came down to 240,000 maunds in 1948–49 and 12,000 maunds in 1949–50. This picture was true for potato, bay leaf, areca nut, fruits and limestone. ⁹⁴ Profits earned by hill farmers from the sale of oranges, betel leaf and bay leaf also fell sharply. ⁹⁵ Several official reports noted the sharp decline in the general living standard of the people in the border areas. ⁹⁶ It was also noted that ‘The rich buildings in the border area villages, which are now tottering away, bear eloquent testimony to the past prosperity of the border economy.’ ⁹⁷ Thousands of labourers lost their jobs in orchards. Much later, P.R. Kyndiah, a veteran in Khasi political life, lamented the decline of orange trade as follows: ‘[In] the old days before 1947… there was a saying…that the border people are so rich and well off that you can pluck gold out of the tree leaves, that is, the golden oranges. That time has gone with the coming of independence followed by partition’. ⁹⁸ Trade and production in these products saw a substantial reduction. The Assam government partially restored road linkages with Cachar and the isolated Garo hills. ⁹⁹ Such efforts could hardly restore those deeply rooted economic linkages. Government-enforced barriers, however, could not practically stop economic interdependence. Widespread growth of unregulated everyday economic transactions became a headache for the government. ¹⁰⁰ Several years later, Khasi political leaders, including the experienced Nichols Roy, grumbled about this situation. ¹⁰¹

As the supply link got disrupted, food shortages became common in Assam. Omeo Kumar Das, Assam’s food minister, went on a fast in June 1948, citing his inability to control the crisis. Meanwhile, the government decontrolled rice and rice prices rose sharply soon after Independence. On 27 June 1948, rice was sold at Shillong for Rs. 65 per maund. The Times of India reported how, due to the price rise, families in Shillong could have only one meal a day. The government claimed that this crisis resulted from the failure of the price fixation system. Most cultivators refused to part with their stocks, expecting a further rise in prices. Rice husking mills stopped working due to non-availability of paddy in the rural markets. ¹⁰² The other side of the story was that the Brahmaputra valley experienced major floods more frequently. ¹⁰³ The intensity of the floods worsened with the construction of embankments. The government responded by remitting revenue and extending financial relief.

Broken trade and commercial networks forced even right-wing organizations like the Hindu Mahasabha to plead for mutual goodwill between India and East Pakistan. At a public meeting held at Shillong, speakers from these groups, also attended by members of the Forward Bloc, admitted that ‘by practically discontinuing trade with India, the government of Pakistan had driven people living on the border to the verge of starvation’. Voices were raised seeking imposition of economic sanctions against Pakistan. ¹⁰⁴

The Idea of Citizenship

As Partition gave a fillip to cross-border flows of population, a passionate public debate immediately arose regarding the legal status of newcomers within the constitution of the new nation-state. For years, the idea of citizenship came to be a serious matter of social and political contention. ‘Who were to be India’s citizens?’ This question was elaborately discussed ever since India’s Constituent Assembly first met in December 1946. ¹⁰⁵ In April 1947, a report on the question of citizenship suggested that ‘every person born in the Union or naturalized according to its laws and subject to the jurisdiction thereof shall be a citizen of the Union’. ¹⁰⁶

Contrary to an animated discussion on the idea of citizenship, the experiences in Assam presented a different picture. Since 1948, the Assam government had written to the union government expressing apprehension of increasing arrival of refugees. ¹⁰⁷ It demanded that the flow of refugees should be stopped and suggested a permit system between Assam and East Pakistan be introduced. The union government dithered on introducing a permit system, for this would have serious repercussions. As explained above, such a system would come into effect only in 1953. The union government feared that any such restrictions would create trouble and curb the ‘freedom of movement of a large number of persons, who, even in their ordinary avocations, had to pass between East Pakistan and either Assam or West Bengal’. Instead, it suggested that it could introduce a legal system to ‘expel from Assam any foreign nationals who entered that State and whose continuance was likely to cause disturbance to its economy’. ¹⁰⁸ The Assam government agreed to this. However, as introduction of any such mechanism required legislative approval, the union government drafted a bill for this purpose. The Assam government also lost no opportunity to highlight the problem of increasing numbers of refugees into the state. Sometime in the middle of 1949, it stated that half a million refugees had entered Assam, though Rohini Kumar Choudhury and many other Congressmen thought it was an underestimate. ¹⁰⁹

To overcome pressure from the state government, the union government introduced The Undesirable Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Billin Parliament in December 1949, on which there was immediate discussion. Meanwhile, communal riots broke out in Goalpara, Kamrup and Darrang in the early months of 1950. A large number of families, estimated at 100,000 persons, living in these areas fled to East Pakistan. ¹¹⁰ Given the tense situation in Assam, the union government promulgated an ordinance in January 1950. The following month, the parliament had discussions on the bill. The objective of the bill spelled out Assam’s political climate:

During the last few months, a serious situation has arisen in Assam due to immigration from East Bengal. Such large migration is disturbing the economy of the state, besides giving rise to a serious law and order problem. The Bill seeks to confer necessary powers on the Central Government to deal with the situation. ¹¹¹

When the bill was taken up for discussion, as many as 15 members spoke at length on the first day. In their speeches, the members celebrated the idea of Indian citizenship. Amongst many others who defended it aggressively, Bhupendra Singh Mann from Punjab did not conceal his open hostility to Pakistan. Mann was highly critical of the government for not showing enough concern for Assam. ¹¹² Members from the United Provinces, West Bengal, Punjab, Assam and Orissa unequivocally demanded that Assam, given its complex history of migration and its influence on the political life of the province, must be safeguarded against any menace of refugees. The government succumbed to these pressures and at one time even admitted that the refugee influx to Assam bore ‘characteristics…which might justify the inferences that it was a planned one’. ¹¹³

However, Rohini Kumar Choudhury, one of the vocal Congressmen from Assam, made it clear that a distinction be made between genuine refugees from East Pakistan and other migrants who were not victims of Partition. Deva Kanta Borooah, another Assamese Congressman, and a well-known literary figure, had this to say:

We must draw a line between these two types of people—people of Pakistani origin and nationality who owe no loyalty to our country and to our state, and people who, for their love of India and patriotism have been persecuted in Pakistan and have taken shelter in Assam. ¹¹⁴

The Assam members clearly made it known that there must be a distinction between ‘genuine’ refugees and those who were part of the pre-Partition inflow. Other members might have differences on methods and procedures of identifying a refugee and a migrant but they shared one common idea: the non-Hindu population, which primarily included Muslims, which had migrated to Assam after 1947, needed to be expelled and did not deserve citizenship.

The Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act 1950 came into effect from 1 March 1950. The Act empowered the Indian government with differentiating between a genuine refugee and an illegal immigrant and to remove the latter from India. The Act, however, barred the application of its provisions on refugees fleeing Pakistan. The definition of Indian citizenship acquired a concrete form during the census enumeration of 1951. The Indian Ministry of Home Affairs instructed the census officials to prepare a National Register of Citizens (NRC) for all the provinces. Authored by the census enumerators and prepared on the basis of the census documents, the NRC recorded an individual’s nationality but did not include the names of displaced persons. ¹¹⁵ The government held that this not-to-be published register would serve as a permanent administrative record for maintenance of electoral rolls and similar administrative purposes. ¹¹⁶ The district administration became the custodian of these registers. For provinces like Assam, this register came invested with immense political meaning. The census process was itself not foolproof. RB Vaghaiwalla, Assam’s Census Superintendent, wrote of the difficulties faced during the final preparation of the NRCs as they were ‘written by unqualified or ill-educated enumerators’. ¹¹⁷

A majority of the people were unaware of the importance of this register as a legal document to prove citizenship. The other states silently allowed it to slip into hibernation. In the early 1960s, the government took advantage of these NRCs to identify illegal migrants. A decade later, there arose political demands to appropriately use this as an effective instrument of citizenship. Both these special instruments would play an important role in Assam’s electoral politics throughout the later decades of the twentieth century.

Meanwhile, despite engaging debates in the Constituent Assembly to conclusively shape the idea of citizenship, the problem was not resolved. The Indian government was yet to arrive at a conclusive legal definition of an Indian citizen. The existing legal framework of citizenship was defined by the Foreigner’s Act 1946,which defined a ‘foreigner’ as a person who was not a natural-born British subject or had not been granted a certificate of naturalization as a British subject under any law in force in India. Changes in this definition came in 1957 when India redefined; now a foreigner came to be defined as a person who was not a citizen of India and this brought Pakistani nationals under the under the category of a ‘foreigner’.

Epilogue

After 1947, as both India and Pakistan took control over their respective borders, little was done to reinstate pre-Partition connections. This meant that everyday family relationships, agricultural fields and commons along this border acquired new meanings, hardly comprehensible for thousands of inhabitants. The urgent restoration of transport linkages with India came as a breather to the Assam tea planters. The fate of millions of small peasants producing jute could, however, hardly match that of the fortune of the tea planters. A small-scale jute mill would be established in Assam in the 1950s but that did not help stabilise the jute economy. Assam was now also deprived of her access to both the two major eastern Indian ports, Chittagong and Calcutta, and the Brahmaputra lost its centrality as a major artery of trade. Most hill areas remained geographically isolated. The economic challenges for Assam never disappeared. These overwhelming and deep economic dislocations still require redress.

India’s eastern border along East Pakistan gave a new sense of political identity to Assam and the idea of Northeast India emerged. This further played a role in shaping the idea of a geographically and politically exclusive Assam and her people. Partition and freedom gave birth to the Northeast as it has come to be known. A ‘national’ border helped in fuelling Assam’s uneasiness in the decades-old question of migration from East Bengal. The pre-partition political controversies surrounding the question of migration of East Bengali Muslim peasants acquired bigger political dimensions. The 1950 law further legitimised the exclusiveness of Indian citizenship in Assam and the idea of citizenship became complicated in Assam.

The political rhetoric and newly introduced bureaucratic machineries aimed at regulating human mobility across these borders, as well as strengthening the idea of borders further worsened economic prospects for cultivators, traders and others. A lack of economic opportunities further fuelled the cross-border mobility of people. These movements added to Assamese political opposition against migration. This soon came to be debated under the shadow of ‘citizenship’. Between 1979 and 1985 widespread and popular violent protests took place across Assam, demanding the expulsion of illegal ‘citizens’ from the state. This did not help resolve the controversy of citizenship, which has virtually refused to disappear from Assam’s political landscape.

The post-Partition crises in Assam only exacerbated a larger tension between the Indian federal union with a bias towards the centre and the idea of a federal Indian system, visualized by Assam and her people.