As the country went into poll mode with the curtain raisers at Mizoram and Chhattisgarh in the second week of November, elections – of a significantly different kind – also began in western Assam. The Rabha Hasong Autonomous Council (RHAC) formed way back in 1995 had its first-ever tryst with democracy when the first round of polling to the council finally took place on November 13, 2013 after countless postponements and protests opposing them.

While the first phase of polling went off rather peacefully with a turnout as high as 70 per cent, the build-up to the elections saw violence, exceptionally bloody and gruesome even for a region constantly on the simmer. Most of it, though, has very expectedly gone undocumented by the national media. The stray references in inconspicuous newspaper boxes and half-a-minute spots on TV news have done very little to dispel the popular notion most of the country seems to hold of the recent happenings – that it’s simply one tribe slaughtering another in a godforsaken part of the country. That, of course, is far from the ground reality. There is a deeper context and history to the recent spate of violence, which have only flared up because of the elections.

It was in 1995 that the then Chief Minister of Assam, Hiteshwar Saikia, finally caved into the long-standing demand of more autonomy by the Rabhas – one of the many Indo-Mongoloid tribes of the state – and formed the Rabha Hasong Autonomous Council. The Rabhas, however, got a much-diluted version of what they had actually demanded. The RHAC was not formed under the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution as the Rabhas had wanted it to be. Instead, a memorandum – later converted into an Act  – with an objective “to provide maximum possible autonomy to the tribals within the frameworks of the state” was what validated the RHAC.

The Sixth Schedule of the Constitution, which seeks to give greater autonomy to tribal communities, is a special provision for the Northeastern states of Assam, Tripura, Meghalaya and Mizoram. Assam has a total of three autonomous councils formed under the Sixth schedule, namely the Dima Hasao Autonomous District Council, Karbi Anglong Autonomous Council and the Bodoland Territorial Council. Along with them, there are also six other autonomous councils which have not been formed under the Sixth schedule but by Special Acts passed by the State Assembly. The Rabha Hasong Autonomous Council is one of them. The basic premise behind granting autonomous status to a region is simple on paper – there is majority population of that particular tribe.

The Assam government’s granting of autonomous status, though, has been mostly random and most approvals have often been desperate pre-poll appeasement measures.  But in a state like Assam, which is home to more than 20 notified Scheduled Tribes, appeasing one tribe invariably leads to antagonising another.  And that is exactly what happened in the case of the Rabha Hasong Autonomous Council.

The jurisdiction of the RHAC extends up to Rani revenue circle of the Kamrup (rural) district and covers almost the entire district of Goalpara. The cogwheels for trouble were set rolling in February when Panchayat polls were announced by the state government in the region. The Rabhas, who were already disillusioned at the non-occurrence of even a single council election since 1995 and the absence of any concrete demarcation of the council area, erupted. They challenged the government order by referring to a provision in a memorandum they signed with the state government, which stipulated that the provisions of the Assam Panchayat Act, 1994 and the Assam Municipal Act, 1994 would not be applicable to villages included under the RHAC. What followed was another round of appeasement by the government in the form of the announcement of elections to the council in April – a move that didn’t go down well with the non-Rabha population of the area. They contended that in south Kamrup – which fell under the jurisdiction of the council – there were as many as 239 villages where non-Rabhas were a majority. That led to more protests and roadblocks resulting in the elections getting shelved temporarily.

The RHAC’s autonomous status has always been dubious as is evident from the multiple amendments the Rabha Hasong Autonomous Council Act has been subjected to since it was first tabled.  In fact, as recently as November 1, 2013, the Supreme Court issued notices to the Government of Assam, the State Election Commission and the Rabha Hasong Autonomous Council (RHAC) in response to a writ petition challenging the constitutional validity of the Rabha Hasong Autonomous Council Act, 1995.

Meanwhile, the RHAC elections in the council have finally begun and the first phase went off surprisingly without incident. It remains to be seen what response the Supreme Court’s order will elicit from the concerned parties. The court has given them a period of three weeks to respond and by that time the election process will be over – if they don’t get countermanded like the Panchayat polls did following violence.  Sadly, only a stalemate that reeks of petty appeasement politics is what seems in the offing for the people of the region – as always.