Assam elections: How NDTV got it all wrong

In the year 1808, a Scottish physician named Francis Hamilton was instructed by the Governor-General of Bengal to undertake a survey of the whole of the territories spanning the districts of Eastern India. There was a caveat — the gentleman was “prohibited from quitting the company’s territories” and was asked to confine his “inquiries to consulting such of the natives of those countries as you may meet with, or natives of the British territories who have visited the countries in question.”

Subsequently, Hamilton was quite candid about the fact that he wrote Account of Assam, on the basis of information collected from Assamese fugitives in Bengal and the Bengali visitors to Assam. Hamilton’s most reliable guide was “a very sensible Brahman of Bengal”. And so he went on to organise the people of Assam into categories like “governing nations” as well as a hierarchical order of tribes, all on the basis of what Hamilton had heard from certain Brahmins.

More than 200 years later, on the night of April 8, 2016, three gentlemen from New Delhi sat down on the bank of the Brahmaputra, in Guwahati, to discuss what has been called Assam’s most important assembly elections in decades. Aired live on NDTV, Prannoy Roy, the news channel’s co-founder and most recognisable face, began by lamenting that “national media” had not focused much on these really “complex” and “fascinating” elections, although “it’s important to realise that this election is of great national importance”. Roy quickly got philosophical: “Often we in Delhi think a great deal of ourselves, but it’s a far away from Assam”.

Unlike Hamilton who didn’t have the permission to see for himself how the Brahmaputra looked from the bank in Guwahati, Roy and company — comprising psephologist Dorab Sopariwala and journalist Shekhar Gupta — were seated right in the heart of the state. Also, unlike Hamilton, Roy was armed with numbers and data. Yet, even after 200 years, the modern understanding of the region doesn’t seem to have changed much.

Beginning on an exclamatory note on this “beautiful, beautiful river” (the Brahmaputra) and on the “so many states and countries” that border this recently-discovered little kingdom called Assam, Roy flashed some graphics to tell the viewers what Assam is all about. The graphics on top read, “Assamese: A Minority in Assam”. Out of the 31.2 million people in Assam, we were told, 22 million were migrants, “which is over 66 per cent” (actually, it’s 70.5 per cent if we’re going to be precise) and the Assamese number just 10 million. Two red circles, one bigger than the other, represented the set of migrants and the Assamese respectively in Roy’s Venn diagram.

Roy further asked, “How do the migrants and the Assamese actually break up?” Three smaller red circles appeared on screen. “It’s a big divide!” he exclaimed. Of the migrants, the Muslims number 11 million; Bengali Hindus are six million; and the tea garden workers, “which have come from Jharkhand, and Orissa and areas around that” add up to five million. Roy then divided the Assamese into two categories: “the original Assamese”, or Ahoms, (now only two million) and the Bodos (1.4 million). “Christians which actually overlap a bit here and there are 1 million”, he said, adding that the Mising tribe were 0.6 million, and “other tribes” were about 1.6 million.

The entire discussion that followed was premised on this extraordinary classification. The idea that a heterogeneous community called the Assamese can exist above and across caste, tribal and religious divide is not admissible. According to NDTV, not unlike the ethnological schema of the colonialist, there are some people sprouting out of the soil called the Assamese, indistinguishable from the Ahoms. Then there are, like flowers in a garden, groups called “tribes”, with names like the Bodos and the Mising and “Other Tribes”, which belong to one side of the divide between minority and majority. Finally, there are the two big Others: Muslims and Bengali Hindus, which suggests no Muslim can be Assamese, all caste-Hindus are Bengali, and the Christians and tea garden workers are just here and there.

Prannoy Roy has the means to measure the numbers in these groups, but apparently not the curiosity to wonder how these communities have actually lived through history with one another and sometimes even switching groups.

Roy seems to be equally unaware of the extremely complex and entangled history of Muslims in Assam, that the 33 per cent of Muslims see themselves as “indigenous”, that a huge chunk of migrant Muslims from the erstwhile East Bengal read, write and speak in Assamese along with their local dialects, and that around 3 lakh Assamese Muslims are now members of the Bharatiya Janata Party. What explains the spectacular ignorance of a postcolonial nation’s best commentators, who claim to speak authoritatively of politics in every nook and corner of the country?

Sopariwala and Gupta tried to qualify Roy’s version of history by adding how most migrants have been absorbed into Assam over the years except for “Bangladeshi Muslims”, but their corrections never call into question the very premise of this classification. They also don’t challenge what Roy meant by calling the Assamese a minority in Assam, nor do they have a problem in clubbing all Muslims and “caste-Hindus” in the category of migrants. While Gupta raises the important point about how the Indian subcontinent was one nation at a point, he offers an equally curious narrative of migration into Assam.

In Gupta’s version of things, Assam’s history begins with the mainland Indians entering it. “This was a region which was very empty because it was not very hospitable,” he said. “It had a lot of swamps, with very hostile conditions, and it was very far away from the mainland. It is only when people started venturing out in search of economic opportunities, and the British discovered tea and then oil … and Assam started to get populated by people coming in from outside.” Gupta, despite having covered the region for more than three decades, continues to represent the ‘mainland’ version of history that is founded upon what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri once called “the utopia of open spaces”. Hardt and Negri wrote, “The North American terrain can be imagined as empty only by willfully ignoring the existence of the Native Americans — or really conceiving them as a different order of human being or subhuman, part of the natural environment” (Empire, 2000, p. 169). In a similar historical imagination, typical of the Indian nation-building project, Assam (or for that matter, much of the wild swampy terrain in the east of the Ganges) could be incorporated into the history of the nation only through the histories of the mainlander’s migration into that “empty”, “inhospitable” land.

Adding to Roy’s theory of assigning tribals and Muslims to fixed territories and how they vote, Sopariwala went one step further and claimed, “Upper and Lower Assam are like two different countries.” Later in the show, he was baffled as to why BJP had to field its chief ministerial candidate Sarbananda Sonowal in Majuli, “which is a Mising majority”. “Now why would a leader who is an Ahom going to a constituency like that!” Sopariwala wondered.

Sonowal, in fact, is not an Ahom in the modern classificatory schema of tribes. Even if he were one, in the rigid taxonomy of the NDTV pundit, the idea of one “tribal” contesting in a territory occupied by other “tribals” is not plausible. When Gupta added that Majuli is the largest river island in the world, Sopariwala tried to crack a joke by saying that’s why the tribe that lives there is “Missing” (referring to the Mising). No one laughed.

Unlike in Bihar last November, NDTV might get its projection right, this time in Assam. However, no excuses can save the factually and sociologically erroneous interpretation of communities and their histories, as if what goes on in the national television had no impact in shaping and fermenting distrust and division in the country.

In his masterpiece, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, the political anthropologist James C Scott argues that the central problem of the modern state has always been to make a society legible, “to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription and prevention of rebellion” (p. 2). Simplifying the society, to borrow Scott’s phrase, into neat divisions of castes, tribes and religions, as if they were uniform and exclusive entities with distinct political ideologies — where the individual and the local doesn’t matter — not unlike the classificatory vision of the state and the big political parties, is what exemplifies NDTV’s understanding of electoral democracy. That the elections could also be about roads and bridges, floods and erosion, local rivalries, inter-ethnic alliances, anti-incumbency, corruption, illicit money flow, insurgency and peace, land rights, gender issues, and more importantly unique regional histories tends to escape this blinkered point of view.

In that, there is not much difference between seeing like a Francis Hamilton, seeing like a state, and seeing like a New Delhi Television.