(Part-1)
Bengalis or the true sons and daughters of Bengal must awake for its own sake. Given its progressive and cosmopolitan outlook largely because of its historical significance for being the driving force of Bengal Renaissance, the Bengali speaking people culturally inherits a questing mind with a romantic view of life and things about themselves.
This romanticism influences much of its ethos that took in its purview an entire precinct of socio-economic and cultural spectrum including religion.
Its emergence in the historical backdrop of pre and post independence India rests largely because of this questing mind and dissident note, which even questioned and refashioned and in some cases revolutionised many pre-conceived thoughts and practices deemed otherwise irreprehensible.
Needless to say a majority of great thinkers, authors, musicians, artists, academics and statesmen etc were born of its soil, and which were later to become the yardstick of anything that implied India.
This precocious development of the Bengali race against a vast humanity that was still much in its natal stage over the entire eastern and northern plains of India had ripples sent across that were both discordant and enlightening at the same time; and the after-effect which has lived up to this day.
The awakening of Bengali mind apart from all other nuances created two distinct contradictory forces in the common psyche, especially among the Hindi speaking people. It was the acknowledgement of this enduring Yardstick at one end and hostility stemming from their racial incapacity on the other. In fact the rest of India barring the South nurtures this antagonism that is deeply rooted in history. It is an overview of a general mindset that has been fuelled by vested interests to further their cause of unrestrained hegemony subservient to the imperialists.
Historically Bengal’s re-awakening dug up two great pitfalls for its people:
1. A generous, highly accommodating and justice loving cosmopolitan attitude.
2. A sense of narcissism with its glory and new found identity over the years.
Both these aspects in one way or the other have shaped its path through numerous social upheavals and violent backlash, which muddled its political uprightness and reduced its masses to petty partisan politics full of gore and futile promises san the intellectual fervour that was once fundamental to its very spirit.
Again on the other hand these two aspects left the people blind to issues that were more prominent and vital from the point of survival as a race and its destiny. It filed them with an intoxication of self-indulgence that superciliously ignored the writings on the wall and subsequently failed to address the growing needs of the time, issues like cultural and economic insulation against outsiders too eager to reap on its riches.
The flawed notion of India.
Irrespective of the many good it might have appealed to the rest of India including Bengal, the flawed notion of being an Indian has much to do in the destruction of Assam and Bengal.
Hindi speaking people who have no history of its own in the ilk of Bengal and southern India began to see these places as Promised Land. With south being insulated much on account of its language, Bengal and Assam fell easy prey to their aggressive onslaught.
In the absence of formidable resistance, Assam much in common with Bengal due to geographical and linguistic proximity suffered the brunt of these people seeking greener pasture. When the Assamese finally realised, the damage had already been done and it was done beyond repair.
Consequently the ethnic population sensing danger of losing land to the outsiders went ahead with the demand of separate statehood and Assam underwent two partitions—one is Mizoram and the other is Tripura.
What was left behind was much of a no man’s land with Assamese compelled to share with others at equal footing fuelling mass scale anguish that eventually gave rise to ULFA.
Though gaining popularity riding on the people’s dissent in its initial stage, ULFA ultimately lost ground to centre’s high handed tactics and its own incapacity. Furthermore terror as a means to political end was bound to end in a fizzle.
With ULFA neutralised, the future of Assamese people remains as elusive as ever with outsiders grabbing their land and opportunities and all set to outbreed them to a minority.
(End of part-1)
