New Delhi: It was 15 February, 1983. A message crackled over the wireless from Zahiruddin Ahmed, then Station House Officer (SHO) of Nagaon police station, to senior officers and nearby stations. It was a plea and a clear warning that something terrible was about to unfold:
“Information received that L/Night about one thousand Assamese of surrounding villages of Nellie with deadly weapons assembled at Nellie by beating of drums. Minority people are in a panic and apprehending attack any moment. Submission for immediate action to maintain peace.”
Three days later, on the morning of 18 February, that warning turned into one of the darkest chapters in Assam’s history. Mobs armed with machetes, spears and guns surrounded Nellie and thirteen nearby villages. Within six hours, nearly 3,000 people, mostly migrant Muslim men, women and children were slaughtered. The massacre played out almost unhindered, the intelligence from Zahiruddin Ahmed had been ignored.
As many as 668 FIRs were registered by the Morigaon police, but no one was ever convicted. As ThePrint’s Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta wrote in his First Person Second Draft column in 2023, Ahmed’s wireless message was the first to be covered up. It was the beginning of a systemic erasure of responsibility that would last decades.
Now, over 40 years later, the massacre has returned to the headlines. Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has announced that the long-suppressed Tiwari Commission Report, which investigated the massacre, will finally be tabled in the Assembly next month.
“This report has not been tabled so far because the copy with the Assam Government did not have the signature of the commission’s chairman. We verified it through interviews with officials of that period and forensic checks,” CM Sarma said.
But the timing of this move has raised fresh questions. Why now and why was the report not signed by Tribhuvan Prasad Tewari, the retired IAS officer who headed the commission? Why did successive governments keep it buried for four decades? The report’s tabling comes just months before Assam heads to assembly elections.
ThePrint revisits this violence, the committee formed to probe, and the sequence of events that had unfolded at the peak of the Assam Agitation against ‘illegal migration’ from Bangladesh.
An election, a boycott & 6 hours of slaughter
On 18 February, 1983, Independent India saw one of its most horrifying episodes of communal violence in Nellie, Assam. In a period of six hours, nearly 3,000 people, mostly Bengali-speaking Muslims, were killed mercilessly even as they tried to flee. The violence came in the backdrop of the anti-foreigners movement in Assam that had started in 1979, aimed at ‘illegal Bangladeshi immigrants’. This agitation demanded the identification and expulsion of these alleged immigrants from Bangladesh.
On D-day, Lalung tribals gathered and surrounded the cluster of villages, unleashing terror. “150,000 armed men in uniform were in place to ensure law and order—one army man for 57 voters—turning Assam into a military battleground rather than a political state suitable to democratically elect political representatives,” Makiko Kimura wrote in her book The Nellie Massacre of 1983: Agency of Rioters.
The issue with ‘foreigners’ dates back to the Partition, but in the 1970s, the agitation against ‘wide-spread’ influx of illegal migrants from Bangladesh had begun. In 1985, the Assam Accord was signed by the Central government, the Assam government, and the leaders of the Assam Movement, ending the agitation and 24 March 1971 was held as the cut-off date. Cases registered were also withdrawn.
The immediate trigger to this violence is believed to be the decision to hold the state elections in 1983 despite widespread opposition from the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU) and the All Assam Gana Sangram Parishad (AAGSP, the umbrella body). The then Congress government had refused deletion of the names of ‘foreigners’ from electoral rolls despite violence and warnings. In January that year, top leaders of AASU were arrested.
AASU and other groups boycotted the polls in the volatile atmosphere. Mobilisation had begun, and the talks with the Indira Gandhi government at the Centre remained inconclusive. The groups, including AASU, All Guwahati Student’s Union and the All Kamrup District Student’s Union, went on a large-scale protest and mobilisation, which soon spiralled into violence.
Bridges were burnt, roads to polling booths were blocked among other attempts to stop the polls. Official figures say that between January and March, 545 such attacks had taken place along with around 100 kidnapping cases, 290 incidents of police firing and lathi charge.
Blame, politics, and the long silence over Nellie
“We will kill all these bidheshi miyas. They have made us bideshis in our own country,” journalist Hemendra Narayan, quoted the tribals’ war cry in his report in The Indian Express on 19 February 1983.
Following the massacre, on 14 July 1983, then chief minister of Assam Hiteswar Saikia appointed a commission under retired IAS Tribhuvan Prasad Tewari to look at the circumstances of the violence and also probe the measures taken by the concerned stakeholders.
Fragments of the 547-page report containing interviews of hundreds of witnesses, officials and stakeholders, so far in cold storage, made it to news publications years later. The commission’s report held the AASU and AAGSP accountable for the violence, but noted that it wasn’t entirely communal.
“It is entirely unwarranted to give a communal colour to the incidents under enquiry… In some places, the attackers were Assamese and the victims Bengali-speaking people, both Hindu and Muslim. In certain other places, Muslims were attackers and the Assamese were the victims. In several areas, the clashes took place between various sections of the Assamese themselves. In a few places, Muslims joined hands with others in attacking their co-religionists. In Chowlkhowa, a section of the minority community joined hands in attacking the immigrants,” the commission’s report was quoted by journalist Muzamil Jaleel in The Indian Express in 2012.
The commission also traced the wireless messages. Three officers were questioned about the receipt of the telegram from Zahiruddin Ahmed, the SHO at Nagaon police station. The officers were M.N.A. Kabir, then commandant of Assam Police’s 5th Battalion, also in charge of law and order in Morigaon; Pramode Chetia, subdivisional police officer of Morigaon; and Bhadra Kenta Chetia, officer-in-charge of Jagiroad police station. The three had denied receiving this message; one said that his wife received it, another said it was on his table and the other said it was in his “put up basket”.
Speaking to ThePrint, a former IAS of Assam cadre from the 80s said, “The report wasn’t tabled because it put the blame on leaders of the Assam agitation. Successive governments didn’t want that to happen. By protocol, a copy of the signed report should have been tabled within six months of it being filed. This is being tabled now for politics.”
(Edited by Viny Mishra)
Also read: Blood, bodies and scars: What I saw after the 1983 Nellie massacre in Assam