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The Shillong Times
Tuesday, 20 August 2019
SPECIAL ARTICLE
Kashmir’s “Grow More Food” Moment: Is It Becoming a Second Assam?
By
Jyotirmoy Prodhani
History has a peculiar tenacity to often get repeated.
In order to avoid the disasters of history it is rather prudent sometimes to
reopen some pages of history itself, even if apparently of a distant land.
Kashmir, quite paradoxically, faces a possible future which was the past of
Assam. More importantly, if the present regime is a keen follower of history
then some pages from the history book of Assam might well become extremely
handy to implement some of the most pernicious and most devastating policies
which, as it happened in Assam, would definitely change the face of Kashmir
forever. Ironically, Kashmir might well become the second Assam.
The post Article 370 abrogation and the virtual collapse
of Kashmir, quite uncannily engendered some dominant narratives that are doing
the round, some might be in lighter vein but some are definitely with real
intent. They are mostly around the land of Kashmir, even women as well. For the
torrid imagination of the rest of ‘Bharat’ the most attractive package of this
‘Monday master stroke’ is the sudden availability of land and women for
possession from a place which has been rightly mythified as the ‘Paradise on
Earth’. The ominous prospects of disorientation of the ‘terra
Kashmir’- the land of Kashmir- is so profound and
seemingly imminent that when ‘Bharat’ is spinning on its head out of
uncontrollable jubilation, the original inhabitants are gasping in mortifying
silence looking vacantly at the prospect of ruthless dispossession. If it
happens, can they resist this? They can, but they would be robbed of the moral
ground if they try to do so, for they would be made into despicable targets of
loud and deafening rhetoric slur to be branded as ‘anti nationals’, ‘anti Human
Rights’, ‘anti-development’ and of course as ‘xenophobic’. Ironically, some of these terms have been
randomly used by a section of the ‘enlightened intellectuals’ in a different context, for a different set of people
who had to initiate
acts of resistance against similar
fate of dispossession. Nevertheless, given
the extraordinary determination and pace to accomplish the stated objectives of the present regime, the irredeemable
demographic disorientation of Kashmir and the marginalisation of the Kashmiris
are almost a foregone conclusion, though one would be
genuinely relieved if proven utterly wrong.
What is most likely to happen now in Kashmir,
in fact, had happened in colonial Assam
in the late 19th
century till the years preceding
India’s independence – unprecedented state engineered influx to Assam, the
most devastating colonial experience of the state unlike anywhere in India. Assam during those
days was an orientalised territory; exoticised and
oriented as a land of lazy, indolent, worthless people; a territory of hostile
geography, a place of ferocious wild animals, infested with venomous insects
and disease, torturous terrains of thick dark jungles and at the same time
vast, vacant, endless stretch of uncultivated fertile land and of course the
seductive presence of countless luscious women. This orientalisation was so
effective and complete that it had provided the unquestionable legitimacy to
colonise the land. Kashmir too, perhaps, is likely to get orientalised with
similar essentialist rhetoric for settler colonisation. In fact, the major
image of Kashmir that has occupied the popular imagination of Bharat at
present, instead of being the ‘Paradise on Earth’, is that of a wretchedly
undeveloped, poor, backward, corrupt fiefdom of a couple of ‘families’ and the people
of the land as largely ‘anti-nationals’, ‘pro Pakistanis’, ‘Islamists’, ‘racist’ and ‘xenophobic’ – a veritable ‘area of darkness’.
It is interesting that one East Bengal cleric and the
Indian Muslim League leader, Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhasani, who was the most
active protagonist to have Assam annexed to East Pakistan after the 1940 Lahore
resolution of the League for a separate Muslim homeland, considered the ‘virgin
land’ of Assam like the “luscious young woman beckoning the men from the neighbourhood which the landless
Bengalis could not resist”. (Saiful Islam, 2017, p 108) Almost similar
prospect has obsessed the popular imagination of ‘Bharat’ – “vacant lands and
fair girls of Kashmir”. The English colonial officials and leaders like Bhasani
were belligerent in their arguments favouring large scale land grabbing in
Assam by the East Bengal immigrants to make the land of Assam ‘productive’ and
bring more ‘development’. According to them “to bring development and turn the
jungles into crop producing land, the poor landless, hardworking, skilled,
industrious and land hungry immigrants from the overpopulated East Bengal must
be settled in the vacant lands of Assam”. It would not be a surprise if the pro
development section of ‘Bharat’ speaks the same language arguing for the
rampant occupation of the vacant
lands of Kashmir
by the ‘poor’, ‘landless’, hardworking’ ‘industrious’ people from the over populated states of the rest of India like UP and Bihar.
In 1872 the Commissioner Agent, Col. Hopkinson wrote to the
Secretary of Bengal to “implant surplus Bengalis
in the vacant lands of Assam”. Assam
Commissioner Sir Henry Cotton was explicit about his colonial
agenda when he wrote, “the millions of acres of uncultivable lands now lying waste
represent millions of rupees which might be dug out of the soil, but are now allowed
to lie useless like the talent wrapped
in a napkin”. This is a seductive discourse
for any ruling regime to justify colonising land of the colonised. There would soon be many like Bhasani and the British colonialists
to put forth similar logic in the context of Kashmir replacing the relevant nouns.
In fact, to such an argument
the entire Bharat would jump with unbridled
enthusiasm to ‘save
Kashmir’ from ‘poverty’ and bring ‘development’ leading
to endless inflow
of people towards
the valley.
The Union Government is most likely to come up with a
special programme for fresh settlements like the most notorious “Grow More
Food” scheme of 1940 and the equally sinister Assam Land Settlement Act of 1942
(ALS) which coincided with the Lahore Resolution for Pakistan. The notorious
“Grow More Food” was devised by the Assam Prime Minister Sir Syed Saadulla and
his Revenue Minister, Manowar Ali, also known as the ‘famous duo’ of that time,
under which few lakhs of acres of land were thrown open for settler
colonisation. (Heads of provincial governments in colonial India were called
Prime Ministers) Under the ALS ACT, 1942, every landless Muslim immigrant
family from East Bengal were entitled to get 30 bighas of land in Assam but no
indigenous people was entitled to get even an inch of the government land under
the same Act. Through this Act, barring a few, almost all the reserved and
grazing fields were thrown open for grabbing by the immigrants. One would not
be surprised if the vast grazing lands of Kashmir are also being encircled for
similar colonisation. In 1920 a provision was adopted, the Line System, to give
some protection to the land of the indigenous population but there was huge
opposition by Bhasani and the Muslim League. In 1942 66 lakh 900 and 33 acres
of land were allotted to the East Bengal immigrants under “Grow More Food” programme. Soon many districts
became immigrant majority
districts in Assam. Assam experienced what later became the fate of
Tibet- the indigenous becoming homeless in their own land. In 1945 overjoyed Sir
Saadulla wrote enthusiastically to Liaquat Ali Khan that “in four districts of
lower Assam the Muslim population quadrupled.”
(see Sanjoy Hazarika,
Strangers of the Mist p58) One never
knows, a similar letter of joy might also be written from Kashmir on the possible
demographic overhaul in the
land.
Will the same fate begin to haunt Kashmir that would
turn the natives of Kashmir into unwanted ‘xenophobic’ nuisance as the settler
colonisers used to consider the indigenous inhabitants of Assam to be? In that
case it would not only change the geography of Kashmir but also the culture and
language of the land. The way the eco system
was destroyed as mere jungles
during the “Grow More Food” campaign in Assam,
Kashmir might also soon resemble the arid stretches of the over populated
states of India in the name of “Develop Kashmir More” programme, or something
similar. If such disappearance of Kashmir occurs that might well be the
‘Mission Accomplished’ for ‘Bharat’ but a great loss for ‘India’.
We have lost Assam, let us preserve
Kashmir.
