Forgetting Nellie: 42 Years and Counting…

Exactly forty two years ago, on the morning of February 18, 1983, Sirajjudin was on his way back from the market, having stepped out to get a few essentials. As he drew closer to his village, he saw people running towards him, away from their homes and the village. Panic stricken, Sirajjuddin looked for his family, finally spotting his two sons cowering in a pond nearby. He hoisted the younger son upon his back, held his elder son by the hand and began running. On either side, he could hear shots being fired. As he pushed his way through the exodus, his elder son’s fingers somehow slipped out of his grip. He lost him to the stampede. 

Soon after, Sirajjudin saw an Assamese man running after him with a sickle. Tired from carrying the child, and unable to keep up speed, soon the man had caught up with him. The man raised his sickle high into the air, and with one motion, cracked open his younger son’s skull. Letting the lifeless body drop, Sirajjudin somehow made it to the river, and escaped his pursuers. Around him, corpses dotted the land as far as he could see. He would revisit these harrowing memories to filmmaker Subasri Krishnan for her 2015 film What the Fields Remember. The Nellie massacre had begun, and would, over the course of six hours on February 18, 1983, take over 2000 lives. All of the victims were Bengali Muslims.

The Nellie Massacre is among the bloodiest pogroms in independent India, a cataclysmic ethnic cleansing exercise that was perpetrated by the hegemonic Assamese and minority Tiwa communities in the backdrop of the intense, anti-foreigner Assam Movement (1979-1985). The death toll is comparable to, if not higher than, the 2002 Gujarat riots. Yet, it occupies little space in Assamese and Indian public imagination today. Even as Nellie is seared into the memories of Assam's Bengali/Muslim population, it lies without acknowledgement, restitution, and reparation from the Assamese community.   

The Nellie Massacre is among the bloodiest pogroms in independent India, a cataclysmic ethnic cleansing exercise

Bringing up old stories

Last year, when one of the authors (Padmini Baruah) interviewed several Bengali-Muslim people in Assam for a research on citizenship disenfranchisement, Nellie came up again and again. 

Zubeda Begum (name changed), a survivor of citizenship detention who had spent ten years in jail due to a legal revocation of her citizenship, remembered Nellie as a part of her childhood, “When we were growing up, there was no sign of Hindu-Muslim violence. We all played together, we ate together. Even in 1983, when we heard about Nellie, we simply could not believe it. Our village did not see any conflict at all.” 

She acknowledged that things had changed now. “With this government, hate is being sowed in people’s hearts,” she said. A Muslim activist known for their role in campaigns and movements for minority upliftment told me that there had been no justice for the people in Nellie whatsoever: “You are bringing up old stories, no one has any memory of this,” they said, “Do you understand me? No one cares.”

It would be wrong to see Nellie as a standalone, let alone an aberrational, event. Rather, it should be understood as a social and political metaphor that transcends a particular period of modern Assamese history. ‘Nellie’ is not a floating word – it has a certain prefix and a suffix. 

‘Nellie’ is not a floating word – it has a certain prefix and a suffix. 

What happened forty two years ago was precluded by a decades-long push by the dominant Assamese civil society to mark out and reject the cultural ‘outsiders’. For example, the ‘Bongal Kheda’ movement in the 1960s asserted to establish Assamese as the official state language and retain jobs for the Assamese by violently targeting (mostly Hindu) Bengalis. K.C. Chakravarti, an academic, recorded in 1960 how influential Assamese socio-cultural organisations like the Assam Sahitya Sabha legitimised the ethno-linguistic agenda of the movement. The fervent linguistic nationalism, fuelled by sociopolitical rhetoric around the unmitigated influx of Bengali Muslims into Assam after the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, reached a fever pitch by the late 1970s. It is at this point that the right-wing Hindu nationalists, then seeking provincial entry points in a bid to dislodge the ‘secular’ Congress, intervened to give an explicitly anti-Muslim edge to Assamese nationalism. By the time the Assam Movement began, Bengali Muslims had become the explicitly marked cultural enemy in Assam. There was no going back from there.

The forgetting of Nellie has enabled majoritarian impunity

The suffix (of Nellie) is equally critical for us to grasp, if we have to understand the event in full. The pogrom set the tone for a form of xenophobic social and political script in Assam that plays out in different forms even today both kinetically and iteratively. From Assam’s former governor S.K. Sinha’s 1997 report titled Report on Illegal Migration in Assam, which warned of “external aggression” of ‘illegal immigrants,’ to the Supreme Court’s decision in Sarbanda Sonowal (2005) which reverted the burden of proof of citizenship to suspected ‘illegal immigrants’, this hydra-headed script has taken many forms. Most of all, it indelibly marked out the bodies of Assam’s ethno-religious minorities for bureaucratic and physical violence. 

The fading of Nellie’s memory by the dominant society has brought a sense of impunity to the State. We have seen its striking refractions in the last decade, as the Bharatiya Janata Party has captured the Assamese electorate with great success through routinised acts of violence against the Bengali Muslim community, such as forced evictions and alleged extrajudicial killings. In the last eight years, Assam has evicted over 10,000 families from their land and homes. One of the authors (Padmini Baruah), during their field work, found multiple sites where the state had razed down government schools, Anganwadi centres, water storage units, madrassas, and mosques. Assam’s chief minister has gone on record more than once to explicitly deny social and political space to the Bengali Muslims.

Nellie comes up, every now and then, in majoritarian discourse, not as an event that warrants sombre introspection, but as an idealised historical act that must be repeated if Assam is to be ‘saved’. 

Preserving Nellie's memory

Recently, against all odds, a new crop of young academics, writers, and poets – including many from the Bengali Muslim community of Assam – have begun to revive and reinstate Nellie’s memory. This literary revival is mostly aimed at reminding the old and young of Assam and the rest of the world of the pogrom and the politics around it. 

The pogrom set the tone for a form of xenophobic social and political script in Assam that plays out in different forms even today both kinetically and iteratively.

It is worth asking, however: why must we faithfully remember Nellie every year? Is there any value in digging up old trauma? Should we not move on? 

A people have the right to forget as much as they have the right to remember. Most Bengali Muslims in Assam have chosen to suppress the memory of the event. One cannot imagine the weight of the memories of community trauma and humiliation. 

But, what happens when the perpetrator community chooses to forget it? 

It is this basic distinction that the civil society in Assam and beyond needs to recognise. If we do decide to move on, we must necessarily ask: on whose terms do we do so?

It is a difficult question, but here, we go back to our original point – that Nellie isn’t a mere historical event, but a metaphor. It is a microcosm of politics and society not just in Assam, but all of India today. That the horror and disgust of Nellie is discernible even after four decades in our mundane bureaucratic practices, social spaces and political attitudes is precisely why we must continue to talk about it in as many words as we can every single year. This annual ritual is, of course, driven by a collective hope that not all is lost, that we still have the time and space to prevent a repeat of it.

A postscript: Padmini Baruah sought to do an autoethnographic exercise – their positionality, as a child of an active participant and block level student leader in the Assam Agitation, means that they are rooted in, and have access to the rooms of, the oppressors. They asked all the members of their extended family, young and old, what they remembered about the Nellie Massacre. In the older generation, the response was muted: “We remember it happening far away.” “We obviously didn’t want violence, this was a non-violent movement.” “I don’t think that we bear the responsibility for this, this was just a mob mentality. This was not the Assam Movement.” The universal response from the Assamese millennials: “What? Never heard of it.”