General’s Little Knowledge

At a recent seminar on Northeast India with the theme of “Bridging Gaps and Securing Borders”, Chief of Army Staff General Bipin Rawat, speaking extempore, waded into controversy with remarks that can only be described as political. The All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF), a party led by Maulana Badruddin Ajmal from Assam, has been growing faster than the Bharatiya Janata Party in that state, General Rawat said.

He made this remark in continuation of earlier remarks in which he had mentioned that migration from Bangladesh into India, apart from being driven by the need for “lebensraum”, was being sponsored by “our western neighbour” which in cahoots with our “northern neighbour” was playing the “proxy dimension of warfare”. The General then went on say, “I don’t think you can now change the population dynamics of this area”.

His solution for the problem is “amalgamation”; people will have to live together. The Muslims had come to Assam concurrently with the Ahoms, General Rawat said, so both these groups had claim to the Northeast region. He explained how the Northeast had been “amalgamated” with an anecdote about a scantily-clad Arunachali chieftain sporting tribal headgear with whom he had tried communicating through sign language before the man asked him to speak in Hindi. “Arunachal Pradesh is one state (in the Northeast) where the state language in Hindi. What I am trying to say is there has been an amalgamation, which didn’t happen elsewhere. But to say these regions cannot be amalgamated…Arunachalis speak shuddh Hindi. They don’t say school, they say vidyalay,” he said.

It was a speech delivered in good cheer. The General seemed to think nothing was amiss about any of his pronouncements. Indeed, he even made it a point to end his little cautionary note on proxy warfare via migration from Bangladesh with his concluding note on “amalgamation”.

There is, however, a great deal that is problematic in this speech. To begin with, the General made overtly political statements naming particular political parties in a public speech, which in itself is quite unusual for a serving chief of Army in India. He was in uniform when he made the speech, and evidently speaking in his professional capacity. The content of his arguments on alleged illegal migration from Bangladesh is controversial, at the least. The word he used, “lebensraum”, is not one that is normally used outside of the Nazi context. General Rawat, however, seemed to think the lebensraum argument was the nice bit.

The part he had a concern about was the “proxy dimension of warfare” by Pakistan and China. He did not explain exactly how the Pakistanis and Chinese were conspiring to send hordes of Bangladeshi farmers and labourers into Assam. Instead, the General drew a straight line from illegal migration to proxy warfare to the AIUDF before regretfully announcing the impossibility of changing population dynamics and plonking down on the side of amalgamation.

It has long been an article of faith for Assamese language chauvinists that millions of Bangladeshis are overrunning their land. This belief is now shared and loudly vocalised by Hindu religious chauvinists all over India. No state has expended as much effort on evicting illegal migrants as Assam. The trouble is that even after decades of attempts to find these Bangladeshis by various governments, the numbers of actual illegal migrants detected are relatively modest. According to a white paper issued by the Home and Political Department of the state of Assam, from 1985 to July 2012, altogether 42,338 persons had been declared foreigners by Foreigners Tribunals. Another 12,846 persons were declared foreigners during the same period under the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act. The total number comes to 61,774 persons being declared foreigners over a period of 27 years. This is nowhere near the alleged millions.

The National Register of Citizens, now being drawn up in Assam, is yet another attempt to find the alleged millions of Bangladeshis, this time by asking people to submit “legacy data” meaning data going back to 1971 to prove that they or their ancestors were in the state by then. The difficulties for both the government and affected citizens in digging out pieces of paper from 47 years ago are considerable. There are concerns that many bona fide citizens may be left out of the list due to clerical issues.

The General, in making his statement on illegal migration, seemed oblivious to this background, and a much more complicated set of historical factors going back centuries. He unnecessarily entered a political and foreign policy minefield. India shares a border of 4,156 kilometres with Bangladesh, which is one of the longest land borders in the world. The security of India’s Northeast depends greatly on friendly working relations with that country. He did that relationship no favours with his undiplomatic statement. His conclusion, which was about “amalgamation”, essentially laid bare his prejudices. By equating “shuddh Hindi” with “amalgamation” he implied that the language is, in his view, a necessary part of being fully Indian. This has always been contentious in the south, east and Northeast India.

Had these merely been his private views, aired privately, there would have been no controversy. By speaking publicly in this manner, the General has entered the sphere of politics. The politicisation of the Army, which has been on for the past few years, is a cause of grave concern. One recent Army chief, General VK Singh, joined the BJP soon after retirement and is now a minister. After these statements by the current chief, the Election Commission’s recommendation of a mandatory cooling-off period for government employees to enter politics, rejected by the previous government, should perhaps be revisited in the public interest.