Darrang incident is not a lone wolf act but leads to strong and underlying anti-Muslim sentiments
NS darang murdersIn Assam, where there were casualties in police firing during an eviction drive, a bad social character of Assamese nationalism and its further darkening has been exposed. The incident was so horrific and strange that I would still call it an act of political sadism. How else can one portray the emotional matrix of a group of people who desecrate the body after a person is shot right in front of their eyes and even to celebrate that act of humiliation also go? The social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist Eric Fromm reminds us that the only way to understand the sense of culture and social character is to pay attention to the ’emotional metrics’. Assamese nationalism must be assessed and diagnosed, among others, for its emotional matrix and how it turns its followers towards it, like flowers towards the sun.
US versus them
Minorities in Assam have been victims of violence so often that it has become a part of their daily lives, although it is the tribals who are the historical subjects of eviction. Amongst the various minorities in the state, the Muslim minority is the most afflicted. Assamese society never opened its doors for them. Assamese nationalists are not used to saying ‘we be’ by speaking our language, but keep your religion and culture a secret, or you can’t live like anyone. The linguistic riots and the Nellie massacre (1983) provided a definite measure of the horrors and destinies of “Bangladeshi” bodies. The National Register of Citizens (NRC) is not even the last nail in their coffin.
Long before independence it was declared that Pakistanis, Communists and Bengalis were the enemies of Assamese. There is a convergence in how Assamese and Hindu nationalists think of their enemy as Muslims or “Bangladeshi” in Assam. Somewhere, they both harbor fantasies of the mass elimination of this figure. However, they have different histories and methods by which they arrived at this similar sentiment. While the latter shows their enemy and their wishes publicly, a section of the former tries to hide behind the latter. To say that communalism and violence against minorities in Assam is only because of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is either a prayer or a fantasy – a beautiful camouflage.
on a margin
Despite the tumult of such hatred and enmity around him, he has continued his life, minding his own business and engaged in deep conversation with the soil and water of the Brahmaputra. He had no community but his own. Whatever they did was declared a cause of decay for the Assamese and their existence, a threat to Assam. To echo philosopher, critic and essayist Walter Benjamin, minorities in Assam are forbidden to probe (or even dream) about the future. They are, as the poet once said, “a silent sob forever”.
In the Constituent Assembly debate on minority rights, Begum Aijaz Rasool rightly said that denying a child the opportunity to learn in their mother tongue is extremist. Minorities in Assam face such extremism in primary education and in all walks of their lives. Everything related to Muslim is screened. clothing, children, family, museum, poetry, food, housing; Everything is questioned, hated, and profiled. Popular songs, newspaper cartoons, wall graffiti, bureaucratic documents, street gossip, classroom conversations, local language prose and poetry, cricket practice camps, or even movies, defame and humiliate “Bangladeshi”. does. The poignancy of hate is so deep, common and frequent, that any potential sympathy for a minority is hopelessly out of reach. Wherever they look, and whatever they hear, they see their distorted identities being treated with disturbing savagery. His every social interaction with the majority of people in Assam is full of dehumanization and violence.
The reaction to the Darang brutality expressed by journalists, politicians and foot soldiers of Assamese nationalism shows how hatred has crystallized in the caste Assamese social structure, and how stunned they are. Their narcissism will not stop even when political sadism is in such a naked display. They are so immersed in their own image that they fail to see any other reality. And like a psychotic, there is no reality other than what they see of themselves and of themselves.
A silence and its importance
What can you say about the silence of the victims despite lakhs of people being declared stateless, housed in detention camps, hundreds of suicide deaths and severe poverty? Imagine how deep the NRC process enjoys social and political legitimacy in which the victim, who lost everything, would not even protest. Alternatively, should they resist, they know the consequences that will affect their body, family, and life as well. This absence speaks volumes about the degree of freedom of minorities and the cruelty with which they are forced to live. Perhaps this silence is also the reason that connects Nelly to Darang. Ashish Nandy reminds us that the perpetrator is permanently afraid that the one they have tortured will nurture thoughts of revenge. So, they attack again. Was the door so open? I hope I am wrong.
connecting thread
The Darang incident was neither the act of a lone wolf nor an isolated incident. The strange phenomenon shows something bigger than that. The actions of criminals are also linked to the past – Nelli, Kherbari and the Assam movement. The only incident brings us to the true masters of the sentiment – Assamese nationalism, with its distinctive figure of the enemy. How do we make a psychological defense for such strong feelings of hatred for Muslims equally distributed in Assamese society?
I am reminded of a Zapatista slogan that said we must learn to host the likeness of the other, not the likeness. Perhaps, there is a lesson there and the need to develop such a social character of hosting the other and the enemy. It is a possible way out of the psychosis and narcissism that plagues Assamese nationalists. As far as Assamese political sadism is concerned, the only way out is to erase the language and culture in its present form and interest.
Suraj Gogoi is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the National University of Singapore
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