Stories that Seldom Make the Front Page

In January 2007, about 900 people who lived in a makeshift camp in Solabila, in Bongaigaon district in western Assam, were woken up at night and asked to pack their meagre belongings and board several buses that would take them to a resettlement camp a little further away in Barpeta district. The residents of Solabila were then herded into the buses that refused to move. Children, pregnant women and elderly people were cramped into privately owned buses in the cold January night. By dawn, many wanted to relieve themselves, some wanted to get out of the bus and stretch their limbs and the younger ones just wanted to get back into the decrepit shacks they used to call home. However, policemen armed with rifles and batons barred them all from getting off the bus. The reason for the delay — they were told — was because local people of the proposed resettlement camp were annoyed that they had not been consulted about this move and in protest, decided to destroy a few key bridges that led to the area.

The residents of Solabila were no strangers to displacement. All of them were Bengali-speaking cultivators, whose ancestors had farmed the inhospitable chars along the Brahmaputra for decades. Over time, some had begun to acquire permanent leases, or land titles to cultivate along the wet-rice growing areas of western Assam. They had somehow escaped being victimised as foreigners during the Assam agitation in the early 1980s. However, with the beginnings of a radical political mobilisation of the Boro people of western Assam, the Bengali-speaking Muslim peasant was soon to become the first adversary in a political process marked by violence. In 1992, some radical Boro armed groups burned down hamlets and villages occupied by Bengali-speaking Muslims, all along the banks of the Brahmaputra in the current district of Bongaigaon. People from different villages escaped northwards to the hills of Bhutan. That was the only direction they could head for. To the south was the river Brahmaputra. To the east were inhospitable lands cultivated by Assamese peasants, many of whom had just participated in an anti-foreigner movement. To the west were what they perceived to be more bands of armed Boro militia. So they headed north, to a place none of them had ever been to before. A few days later, the Bhutanese police and local people pushed them back into Assam. After living furtively along the Bhutan-Assam border for months, many decided to settle in Solabila, near the Bongaigaon-Barpeta border. They settled along the Gai river and lived along a highway, breaking stones, making roads, sifting sand from the river-bed, working as agricultural labourers and even moving away to other states in search of work.

Between 1993 and 1999, many of the residents of the camps tried to reclaim the land that they had lost during the conflict. They did not manage to get very far as political manoeuvrings in the course of the Boro movement had made it difficult for many non-Boro people to feel secure about claiming land in place that was seriously contentious. Hence, they lived along fringes of forests and along highways that took them to distant places in search of work. Incidentally, they highways also claimed the lives of many children, who in the absence of regular schools and madrassas, played along a road where traffic was fairly dense. Their parents left the camp in search of work. Yet, the moment there was even a faint rumour about the possibility of the administration forcing a resettlement of the camp, its residents would make the arduous journey back from places as far away as Lucknow, just so they could stake their claims as displaced citizens of a state within the Indian union.

Their political power is extremely limited, given the fact that they are unable to claim any property rights over land and other resources within Bongaigaon district. The local politicians in the area are more often than not against the presence of Bengali-speaking Muslims in an area where other ethnic groups have contending claims to resources and rights. A combination of factors ranging from their inability to claim recourse to instruments of law; their ethnicity; and so on, people from Solabila are rendered invisible in the public sphere. Even though Assam has a vibrant local media, stories of displaced persons do not find their rightful place in discussion forums and policy-making circles. The irony of the situation is brought home when one realises that the only time they can lay claim to being part of a citizenship regime, is when they are forced back to the camps for displaced people to make sure that their names are not deleted from the voters’ list.

Visibility and the Public Sphere

The story narrated above has several issues that have a special bearing on what one considers as the public sphere. Some of these issues deal with citizenship, sovereignty, power/powerlessness, ethnicity and most of all, visibility/invisibility in everyday political discourse. Where do these issues figure most centrally? Who shapes their contours? How can one alter the trajectories of these stories? These are questions that frequently come into play when one thinks about the reason why forced migration (especially internal) does not receive its due in local and national politics. This can be partially answered in the manner in which we construct the national in South Asia, especially along its least visible spaces such as Northeast India.

The nation-state as a modern construct draws upon older forms of associations. In Asia, the modern nation-state was grafted over older structures that developed indigenously (Winichakul 1996: 67-91). The present-day Indian state, for example, was a complex political creation that involved the transition from colonial empire to inclusion of older regional geo-social formations (Chapman 2000: 77-86). Historically, the region forms a zone that can be seen as the north-eastern frontier of South Asia, as well as the north-western frontier of Southeast Asia. Willem van Schendel includes it in his reconstruction of a physical space concealed from dominant discourses on geographical realignment of area studies (in Asia) and political decision-making following the period of decolonisation of large parts of South and Southeast Asia (van Schendel 2002: 647-668). The region’s pre-colonial political and social landscape was a reflection of the multi-dimensional migrations into its hills and valleys. It comprised old kingdoms and chiefdoms as well as wide swathes of land where authority of the kings and chiefs were negligible. Commercial interests, coupled with a keen eye on geopolitical balance of power led the British to “draw lines between hills and plains, to put barriers on trade between Bhutan and Assam and to treat Myanmar as a strategic frontier- British India’s buffer against French Indochina and China” (Baruah 2004:5). During the course of the anti-colonial struggle in the twentieth century, notions about the region being a frontier were not challenged. In the emerging historiography of the region there was an attempt to restructure the relationship between the region and the national hinterland with an overriding emphasis on establishing a place in the national space of the emerging idea of India.

The development of social and political structures in the Northeastern region of India has been characterised by extreme levels of violence for the last two decades. This violence has articulated itself in myriad forms. It has appeared as an outright conflict of interests between ethnic groups and the state; within ethnic groups and at times for or against notions of development. Resources and identity remain the first, and often last explanatory comment on the expressions of violence. On one hand, armed groups professing allegiance to certain ethnic groups in the state have been involved in militant political activities, directed mainly towards the preservation of their resources and identity. In some cases, this struggle has involved alliances across ethnic boundaries, subverting officially sanctioned definitions of the problems as one of migrants versus locals. On the other hand, the response of the state apparatus has been to restrain, regulate and repress these demands at various points of time. This has led to the institutionalisation of authoritarian practices that, though localised, are rather jarring (Baruah 2005:3).

In the construction of a political society, in such instances, need further interrogation given Habermas’ criteria for identifying what constitutes a civil society. The idea of the ‘public sphere’ in Habermas’s sense is a conceptual resource (which) designates a theatre in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk (Fraser: 1993. 110-111). The public sphere in its classical/liberal bourgeois guise was partial and narrowly based in that sense, and was constituted from a field of conflict, contested meanings and exclusion. Thus the meaning of ‘civil society’ here is constituted through the ‘original’ separation and opposition between the modern, public-civil-world and the modern, private or conjugal and familial sphere: that is, in the new social world created through contract, everything that lies beyond the domestic (private) sphere is public, or ‘civil’, society (Pateman: 1989. 31-32). A conception of civil society, in the liberal western construct, is inconsistent with realities in less-developed capitalist societies. If (one) takes civil society in its characteristically modern meaning – as a way of interfering to the terrain of voluntary associations that exist between economy and state – there are two reasons why politics in frontiers contradict this. For one, societies in the frontiers are typically shaped by a legal order that is autocratic and militarised (Baruah ibid.) Secondly, such societies are less individually oriented than dominant societies, as being part of peripheries where the lure of the nation-state and citizenship is weak, they rely more on people-hood constituted by genealogical and kinship ties (Murray 1997: 11). It is apparent therefore that societies in peripheral, militarised regions have to be judged by different criteria from the ones that Habermas comes up with. It is therefore instructive to remember that contentious and conflict-ridden regions may produce a bewildering diversity of voices in the public domain. Even a small town of twenty thousand people in Manipur has as many seven daily papers in different dialects. These papers are part of a larger repertoire of political disarticulation of citizenship regimes that forget the margins and its inhabitants. Such regions and societies are rendered invisible in larger (national) spheres.

Reflecting on the Public Sphere and Growth of Media in South Asia

How does one read the role of the media in such regions? Is it enough to say that the media works in different ways in different places? Recent developments in the South Asian media landscape is worth delving into if one is to understand the kind of transformation that society, state and media have undergone in the region. In India, the last two decades has seen a massive growth of regional and national media, in both print and electronic forms. Newspaper circulations have increased all over India since the 1990s (Ninan 2007: 27). The number of satellite television channels in the national and regional levels has increased in the last decade. In countries like Nepal, community radio stations have revolutionised local politics. In Kathmandu alone, there are 17 privately owned radio stations (as of December 2007). Pakistan has recently allowed broadcasts from private radio stations. Moreover the growth of newspapers in countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan are also phenomenal. All these changes would lead one to assume that the average citizen has greater access to information now, than in the past.

This is not true across the board. It is true that print and television media have multiplied over the last few years. However, this has not automatically lead to a plurality of voices in the public domain. With the notable exception of Nepal, the media has followed a predictable path of widening its reach, while reducing the width of concerns that actually find a place in the public domain. Therefore, stories of forced displacement, refugees, civil rights violations and so on, are placed along a same continuum of concerns that compete with advertising space, pageants and hostile business takeovers. Obviously, the scope for a plurality of voices diminishes in such a milieu, where a particular political and economic class increasingly owns media houses.

In the past the state’s legislative, executive and judiciary were seen as the purveyors of a country’s sovereignty. The media was supposed to occupy either an autonomous, or subservient place within this constellation. In theocratic monarchies (like Bhutan), the media was the sole transmitter of government policy. Today, with the executive, legislative and judiciary losing much of their authority to trans-national financial institutions and corporations, the media has emerged as another site for establishing legitimacy. This is somewhat of a mixed opportunity in every sense of the word. For those who are able – and this definitely includes those who wish to secede from the problems of poverty – can create another reality, where conflicts, displacement and the poor are no longer visible. Those who cannot seem to be doomed to a life outside rule of law and outside remembered norms of political discourse. In order to engage with a public domain that has changed tremendously in the past few decades, one has to unlearn the established notions of what constitutes the public sphere.

Selected and Suggested Readings

Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities (Revised edition). London: Verso Books.
Baruah, Sanjib. 2005. Durable Disorder: Understanding the Politics of Northeast India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Calhoun, Craig. 1993. ‘Introduction’ in Craig Calhoun (Ed). Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chapman, Graham P. 2000. The Geopolitics of South Asia: From early empires to India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing.
Fraser, Nancy. 1993. ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’ in Craig Calhoun (Ed). Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
McLuhan, Marshall. 2003. Understanding Media. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press.
Murray, Stuart. (Ed) 1997. Not On Any Map: Essays on Postcoloniality and Cultural Nationalism, Exeter: University of Exeter Press.
Ninan, Sevanthi. 2007. Headlines from the Heartland: Reinventing the Hindi Public Sphere. New Delhi: Sage Publications.
Pateman, Carol. 1989. The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory, Stanford: Stanford University Press, California.
van Schendel, Willem. 2002. Geographies of knowing, geographies of ignorance: jumping scale in Southeast Asia. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20:647- 668.
Winichakul, Thongchai. 1996. Maps and the Formation of the Geo-Body of Siam, in Stein TØnnesson and Hans Antov (Eds), Asian Forms of the Nation. Surrey: Curzon Press. Pp. 67-91

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