On 13 August, all the executive members of AASU and AAGSP were hurriedly summoned to Delhi by the Union home ministry to hold ‘a detailed and broad-based discussion on the Assam problem’.
The first batch to reach Delhi at around 5 p.m. on 14 August had eighteen of them, besides a central intelligence officer, state chief secretary P.P. Trivedi and Hiranya Kumar Bhattacharyya, an Indian Police Service (IPS) officer of the 1958 batch. Bhattacharyya’s vigilantism over the electoral rolls of the Mangaldoi parliamentary constituency of Assam as the deputy inspector general (DIG border police) during the Gulap Borbora–led Janata Party regime in the state in 1978–79 provided the first ammo to the six-year-long students’ agitation against ‘illegal foreigners’.
At the BSF guesthouse in Tigri, they waited for the group of six who had been in the national capital since 9 August and had since been negotiating with Pradhan and Union Cabinet secretary P.K. Kaul. On 14 August, this group of six was at the Union home ministry the entire day. Besides Bhrigu Phukan, Prafulla Mahanta and Biraj Sarma, it included Nagen Sarma, Lalit Rajkhowa and Kumud Sarma, who played the role of interpreter as he was better versed than the others in English.
Yet another IAF flight brought AASU executive members Zoinath (Joynath) Sarma and Bharat Narah, chief convenor and deputy of AASU’s voluntary force, Swaccha Sevak Bahini (SSB), late in the evening on 14 August.
At about 11.30 p.m., Phukan, Mahanta and the four others returned to the guesthouse with the final draft of the Accord. Deliberations ensued among AASU and AAGSP members. Some of them didn’t agree to a few clauses, particularly the cut-off date of the midnight of 24 March 1971 that would sieve out a foreigner from an Indian residing in Assam, an exclusive provision for the state. Their original demand was for 1951 as per the National Register of Citizens (NRC), yet another exclusive exercise conducted in Assam to determine residents of the state then. There was also an argument among the assembled AASU and AAGSP leaders over there being no clear promise from the central government about scrapping the Illegal Migrants (Determination Tribunal) (IMDT) Act, which the agitation leaders strongly felt the Congress had brought in especially for Assam to allegedly shield the ‘foreigners’ and their vote bank in the state. However, Phukan and Kumud Sarma categorically told everyone that there was no scope to negotiate anymore. The final draft was the finalized draft, which said, ‘The Government would give due consideration to certain difficulties expressed by the AASU/ AAGSP regarding the implementation of the IMDT Act, 1983.’
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‘[Union home secretary] R.D. Pradhan told us that the government couldn’t scrap an Act passed by Parliament just like that, but it will try to create a political consensus for its removal. But we insisted that that stand of the government must be mentioned in the Accord and it was done. We explained that position to the other leaders,’ said Biraj Sarma in their defence.
Recollecting the conversations of that night, Zoinath Sarma told me, ‘The deliberations went on for some time; there were some serious objections to the final draft, mainly on the issues of not getting even 1966 as the cut-off year and constitutional safeguards akin to Jammu and Kashmir, about which some of us were very keen. I also had a tiff with Nagen Sarma that night. While I kept opposing the 1971 year to decide who is a foreigner and who is not in Assam, Sarma, to calm me, said, as per the Accord, the government had agreed to institute an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Guwahati and a central university. I retorted sharply, “Did we agitate for six years for an IIT and a central university?”’
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While three batches of agitation leaders were hurriedly called to Delhi between 9 August and 14 August, the central government seemed to have pre-decided the date when the Accord would be signed. Both Mahanta and Biraj Sarma told me in separate conversations that Union home secretary R.D. Pradhan, then Cabinet secretary P.N. Kaul and G. Parthasarathy, the retired diplomat who played a role in the Accord, among other home ministry officials, ‘kept putting pressure’ on them throughout the day on 14 August to somehow arrive at an agreement since prime minister Gandhi had decided to announce the Accord in his Independence Day speech at the Red Fort the next morning. This is particularly interesting if you take into account the other peace accord in the North-east that the Rajiv Gandhi government signed—the Mizo Accord. The man who administered it was also the Gandhi loyalist, Pradhan, who gave only three hours’ time on 29 June 1986, to Pu Laldenga, the chief of the Mizo National Front (MNF), to consult with fellow leaders and return to North Block, on what was Pradhan’s last day at work. The Mizo Accord was also a late evening accord, achieved by hastening the leaders of the movement. On the evening of 29 June, the prime minister gave Pradhan an extension of service till midnight to enable him to complete negotiations with MNF leaders after office hours.
Like the people of Mizoram, the people of Assam too got the news of the Accord the next day through All India Radio and Doordarshan news bulletins broadcast from Delhi.
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Days before the Assam Accord was signed, then Assam chief minister Hiteswar Saikia set up camp in New Delhi to keep a close watch on the proceedings. After all, the signing of the Accord would mean the fall of his government. Pradhan and gang, however, maintained absolute secrecy about the negotiations and kept both the chief minister and the state’s governor, Bhisma Narain Singh, away from it. According to Pradhan, he was left to his ‘own ways’ by Rajiv Gandhi and ‘restrained himself [Gandhi] and other ministers, including high level busybodies from interfering in the talks with the student leaders’. Pradhan further wrote in his book, My Days with Rajiv and Sonia: ‘In fact, he himself [Gandhi] came on the scene to meet the AASU delegation only when I took the final documents for his approval late on the night of August 14, 1985. Politicians of different hues were all the time pumping me for information. I did not share anything with anyone except the prime minister and S.B. Chavan, the home minister. Bhisma Narain Singh, the governor of Assam, and the chief minister (Hiteswar Saikia) tried their best to find out the details of my discussions with AASU and whether we had reached any agreement.’
Pradhan wrote that their discussions ‘were all verbal till the final day’ to maintain secrecy to reach ‘a mutually satisfactory agreement’.
After signing the Accord, by the time the group reached their guesthouse, it was nearly 4 a.m. The mood was certainly buoyant. Biraj Sarma recalled, ‘It was akin to the moment of [India] gaining independence; as if we got for the Assamese people freedom and rights over their homeland when they were sleeping past that midnight hour. People woke up the next day to the news.’
This excerpt has been published from Assam: The Accord, The Discord by Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty, with permission from Penguin Random House India.
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