Author: Sunanda K. Datta-Ray
Publication: The Telegraph
Date: April 16, 2004
Without garrulous convivial G.L.
Agarwal, munching peanuts by the maund all through the night and leaving
the floor as thickly carpeted with shells as the Long Bar in Singapore's
Raffles Hotel, Guwahati doesn't seem the same. Agarwal, owner of the North-East
Times, is stomping the field in Tezpur as the Bharatiya Janata Party candidate.
Tezpur and five other constituencies
will vote on April 20, the rest six days later. But the guess is that my
friend won't make it to the Lok Sabha. A few saffron pennants hanging limply
in the rain and candidates who have been ordered not to venture out after
sunset do not suggest the BJP will storm the Congress citadel of 10 seats
out of 14. That includes Koliabar, the Gogoi family's Amethi. The chief
minister, Tarun Gogoi, represented it for three terms. His younger brother,
Dip, the sitting MP, is contesting again.
Agarwal being Marwari in a region
that everyone thinks of as fiercely parochial is neither here nor there.
Assam swarms with Marwaris. Leaving aside the old Banga kheda issue, one
reason, I think, why they arouse no resentment is that almost everyone
here is an immigrant. I am reminded of a British cartoon when the late
Enoch Powell warned that rivers of blood would flow if all immigrants were
not sent packing. It showed the Queen bound, packaged and labelled "To
Germany".
Even those with names like Mahanta,
whom one thinks of as dyed-in-the-wool Assamese, fall in that category.
"We are Brahmins from Kanauj!" a Mahanta boasts, harking back to the early
16th century. Some would have to be dispatched to China, others to Burma.
As chief minister, the late Hiteshwar
Saikia (commander of a hundred just as Hazarika commands a thousand) imported
a Laotian to teach his fellow Ahoms their forgotten ancestral Tai language.
"Rome conquered Greece, Greece conquered
Rome," murmured the erudite chief secretary, meaning Ahoms had been completely
assimilated in exile. Instead, therefore, of representing only Muslims
of suspiciously Bangladeshi origin, the United Minorities Front should
speak for the whole of Assam.
If that sounds incongruous, what
about electronic voting machines carried by bullock cart and elephant back
to booths in the remote interior? Or yesterday's triumphant Asom Gana Parishad,
divorced from its erstwhile partner, the BJP, wandering in the wilderness?
Or the Shiv Sena's Sumitra Das apparently blissfully unaware of the year
of Independence!
Guwahati was bone dry on my first
visit 40 years ago. "Sura tonic wine is very popular!" they advised. Now,
there are probably more whisky ads - Bagpiper, Directors Special, Royal
Challenge but mainly Bagpiper - per square kilometre than anywhere else.
The Stadium guesthouse, the only place to stay then, has blossomed into
the Landmark hotel.
The Assamese might forgive Ms Das
her ignorance of Independence but never her ignorance of the magic letters
IMDTA - the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act which sets
1971 as the cut-off date for illegals.
It is a topic of debate in so far
as anything concerned with a lacklustre election is discussed beyond the
rarefied world of newspaper columns where we must keep the news going.
Saikia once claimed that three million Bangladeshis had infiltrated in
a single year. Mr Gogoi denied in the Barak Valley that there was even
a single infiltrator, then reneged on the claim in Jorhat.
Seeing the IMDT Act as an instrument
to legalise illegals, many Assamese regret that the BJP's bill to repeal
it lapsed last December.
When he was here recently, Atal
Bihari Vajpayee stoked the fires of communalism by playing on that fear.
"Mr Vajpayee ought to be made to
do prayaschitta with a gamocha round his neck," thundered a Congress supporter.
If so, it will be a stylish penance.
Guwahati shops are overflowing with
the finest gamochas in India, elaborately embroidered in red on purest
white. Even Sonia Gandhi had one draped round her neck.
