[India Today]

Published date: 15th Mar 1983

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Blood will have blood.. 

-Macbeth, William Shakespeare 

ON THAT fateful Friday, the thought of death hovered over Nellie and the surrounding villages like a vulture. Ever since the poll announcement lit the fires. under the ethnic and communal cauldron that is Assam, the 15,000-odd Muslims living in a cluster of a dozen villages between Jagi Road and Moregaon in Now gong district, on the lush char areas on the south bank of the Brahmaputra, 45 km from Gauhati, knew that for the next month they would be living on a knife’s edge. 

Almost all were Bengali Muslims who had crossed over from Mymensingh, now in Bangladesh, which made them prime targets for the Assamese. Further, they had made it clear that they would not respond to the poll boycott and would participate in the elections. What is more, raider gangs from the villages had been making forays across the river into the Mangaldoi areas of Darrang district to clash with Assamese there. 

The stage was set for one of the most gruesome massacres in Indian history. The polls opened in Nellie on February 14, and immediately afterwards Assamese in the villages surrounding the Muslim pocket held meetings and announced. that pro-election Muslims must be socially ostracised and anybody trading with them would be fined Rs 500, 

Bloody Clashes: Meanwhile, news came of the slaughter at Gohpur, 133 km from Tezpur, the headquarters of Darrang district. There, the Boro tribals, supporters of the pro-poll Plains Tribals Council of Assam (PTCA), were enraged because of intimidation from the Assamese. Together with the volatile tea garden labour in the Tezpur sub-division, they resented having had vital bridges destroyed.  

Nobody in Gohpur-or even Gauhati-is very clear how the Gohpur killing began on February 14. The rumour quickly spread that more than 17 Assamese villages had been burnt down by tribal hordes and more than 1,000 people killed. Three days later, when police parties finally began to scour the area, it was known that the Assamese had also hit out: 27 Boro villages attacked and at least 30 Boros killed by torch-wielding Assamese. The death toll on both sides did not add up to more than 100. 

Preliminary Killings: Gohpur, as it turned out, was only the prelude to a grisly theme. Nellie and the surrounding villages were tense with fear and hate on February 16 after five Lalung children were found dead in the Lahori Gate area near Nellie. The Lalung tribals are anti-poll and anti-PTCA: they felt that the Muslim immigrants most of them came to Assam in the 50s and ’60s-had occupied prime land once tilled by the Lalungs. 

Matters were not helped when three Muslim children were found dead on the place where the tribals’ bodies had been found. On the same day-February 17-the Muslims of Dharamtuli village, one of the Nellie cluster, were forcibly prevented from voting in the second phase of the poll. At the same time, there were reports of Muslim attacks on the Assamese-Hindu villages of Dakchuki, Menapara and Dhula in the Mangaldoi area across the river. 

Howling Mob: Friday, February 18. At around eight in the morning, a huge mob had surrounded the village, armed with guns, spears, swords, ‘daos’, glinting in the morning sun. Cries of “Jai ai ahom!“, the rallying slogan of the anti-foreigner agitation that means “Long Live Mother Assam”, rent the air. Nuruddin, a Nellie resident, relates what happened next: “We were all standing in front of our house, watching the mob gathering in the distance and wondering what we should do. Suddenly we found the mob running towards us and as we started fleeing I fell down. and felt the running feet around me. Then, there was fire and smoke and I do not know how long I lay there.” 

A young victim of the slaughter (left), Assamese militants up in arms (top) and three of the hundreds of corpses that littered the paddies near Nellie 

 Nuruddin was fortunate; he escaped the murderous frenzy of the mob, which was composed mostly of Lalung tribals, though there were some Mikir and Boro tribals as well.. Intelligence sources later said that the mob included some Assamese Hindus and Nepalis. It seemed as if all the decades of hate and frustration were being concentrated in the bloody 24 hours that the killings went on. The slaughter and arson occurred mainly in a tiny delta between the small rivers Kopili, Killing and Demal. The land is very marshy and the fleeing villagers had no chance. 

The reason why, as it was later estimated, 80 per cent of the dead were women and children was that the men ran faster. As the daos rose and fell with monotonous precision, the women and children tumbled in heaps in the rice paddies. Mothers were still clutching their babies-both slashed and chopped about like hunks of meat on a butcher’s slab. 

Macabre Ploy: The Muslim villages in the area huddle together as in a ghetto. Soon, the others Demal. Matipar-bat. Borburi and Dharamtuli. among them were engulfed in the blood-lust. The Muslims started retreating towards the Demal Bil, a huge stretch of water, and many succeeded in crossing over to the other side and burning the bamboo bridge in the hope that this would keep the attackers at bay. However, the macabre cunning of the attackers became immediately evident the fugitives were pounced upon by dao-wielding Lalungs from the rear and the killings redoubled in fury.  

Later, the survivors said that they could not organise themselves as the attack had been too swift and sudden. However, it appeared that most of the men were away and there seemed to be some truth in the report that they had crossed the river to Mangaldoi to attack Assamese settlements there. In fact, the army cordoned off the Muslims returning across the river on February 18, because they feared reprisals-but this may have prevented many Muslims from reaching their villages when the slaughter was going on. 

Villagers from Nellie and the other settlements, however, see a sinister design in the fact that women and children bore the brunt of the attack. Says Tahermuddin Thakur: “It looks as if the attackers wanted to make sure of getting rid of the entire new generation and also to ensure that no new births took place.” 

Ruthless Attackers: The stories of the survivors are similar in evoking the stark brutality of February 18. Nurul, 16, fled with his parents to the Demal Bil; the killers caught up with the running family and Nurul saw first his mother falling and then his father, who was decapitated by one of the hundreds of daos flashing efficiently on that morning, afternoon and evening. Nurul fell unconscious and that was probably why he was spared the attackers wrath. 

Saifuddin, who had married barely a year ago, says: “We were running with the others when we got separated in the mêlée. I jumped into a pond along with some others and that is how we were saved.” Nuruddin lay low while the killings went on and then when the attackers lost their momentum a bit, “I got up and ran towards some bushes and hid there all night”. 

Anwar Huq was away when the attackers struck and when he returned the village had been reduced to ashes. Says Huq: “I went about like a madman searching for my relatives. And suddenly under a tree I saw my sister lying dead. Her neck had been slashed. I later found that all 20 of my relatives had been killed. I am the only member of my family left alive.” 

Refugee Camp: All of that Friday, the killings and arson went on, and carried on into the morning of Saturday. The paramilitary forces that were deployed throughout Assam-Nowgong had been identified as one of the districts where there would be trouble if elections were held-were nowhere in sight. Two days after the massacre, the authorities managed to set up an open air camp for the survivors in which 2,000 people huddled. Quite a few of them had managed to salvage, of all things, squawking chickens which were one source of food in the refugee camps. Said Manik Mia: “These birds were the only things we had and we just picked them up and ran for shelter.” 

Talking to the refugees, it appeared that the attack had been planned for quite some time. They said that “people from other places” were frequently seen coming to Assamese villages-Mukuria, Palaguri, Sil-bheta and holding closed door meetings with AASU leaders. According to Abdul Hai of Demai village, many of the attackers were unknown faces but were led by known AASU boys who led them on shouting “Jai ai ahom” and “Death to the mias“. 

Even as three army columns moved into Nowgong district, the authorities began to count the dead. Conservative estimates were 600, but intelligence sources say that it will be at least 1,000. In addition, 10,000 were injured or left homeless. Camp inmates felt that many more have died besides those lying in the fields. Said Robi: “I have seen bodies being thrown into the Kopili river on the night after the raid.” However, he could not identify the people tossing the corpses into the water. Curiously, when Mrs Gandhi visited the site on February 21, there was not a single body to be seen in the areas she visited. 

Numbed Survivors: The refugees display a despairing resolve not to leave the region. Says Rajab Ali, who lost his mother and brother: “Where can we go?” Others are numbed by the inferno into which they were plunged last fortnight. Says Akram Chowdhury, one of those who emigrated to India from Mymensingh a long time ago: “We had been living in peace all these years. Now we are attacked by our neighbours who were friends only the other day.” 

Today, Nellie is a graveyard, with all the attendant sights, smells and sounds of death: the ghastly hulks of gutted houses, the stench of rotting flesh, the sound of relatives. mourning their mutilated dead. For the survivors huddling over their meagre meals in the camps, protected by armed guards from the madness that prowls the valley, the past is a blood-stained nightmare, the present a daze, the future only uncertainty. Perhaps the only one to be sure of what the future will bring is the vulture. It knows how to wait, it is a patient bird.