Worryingly, Assam seems to be sleepwalking into a dangerous zone of sectarian inflammation that has led to full-blown anti-minority violence in the past.

The ghosts of Nellie

Amid the turmoil of the Assam Movement (1979-85), which created a collective paranoia over bidexis (foreigners) inundating the state’s electoral rolls, one single place witnessed a massacre that has no parallels in the history of modern India.

On February 18, 1983, a large mob of Tiwa, Koch and caste Assamese people slaughtered around 2000 Bengali Muslims within just six hours in the village of Nellie – coincidentally, also located in Nagaon district, some 70 kms from Dhing where the ongoing tensions have surfaced. Unofficial estimates claim an even higher body count.

According to some accounts, the mass killings were triggered by a rumour of an alleged rape of four young Tiwa women by Bengali Muslim men. Japanese academic, Makiko Kimura, in her fieldwork-based book, The Nellie Massacre of 1983: Agency of Rioters (2013), notes that unverified allegations of Miya men kidnapping girls from the perpetrator community (and thus, sullying their community’s honour) played a key role in justifying the violence.

Backed by other rumours of an impending attack on “indigenous” communities by the “foreigners”, the kidnapping rumours convinced the Tiwa and Koch that they needed to launch a ‘retaliatory’ attack against the Bengali Muslims. One could see it as a preemptive attack against a non-existent offensive.

Nellie politics redux?

“We will not allow Assam to become Miyaland,” Sarma announced in the state assembly on Tuesday while claiming that the Bengali Muslim community wanted to take over all of Assam by moving from its lower to upper parts. Meanwhile, media reports suggest that some local organisations in Upper Assam have issued threats to Miya Muslims, whom they accuse of being “doubtful citizens”, to leave the administrative division.

These sectarian provocations follow the arrest of a person named Tafazul Islam in the Dhing rape case. Islam, who belongs to the Miya community, mysteriously drowned in a pond in police custody. The police claim that he jumped into the water in a bid to escape. Islam’s arrest seems to have sparked widespread indignation against the Miya community in Assam.

Notably, the anger is tied to a set of 'us-versus-them' narratives that were also deployed right before the Nellie Massacre to incite the local population and justify the violence post-facto. Among them, the belief that Bengali Muslims are taking over land in Assam by displacing native communities has become the most prominent. As Kimura highlighted, the perception of land alienation played a key role in shaping the fear psychosis of the perpetrators (although it was not the only reason behind the violence).

The key difference, however, between 1983 and today is the aiding role of the state government. As a constitutionally mandated guarantor of security and neutral arbiter between communities, the state is supposed to intervene to ease intergroup tensions and not inflame them. The Sarma-led government, however, seems to be doing the opposite by amplifying unverified narratives of land takeover and indirectly flagging the entire Miya community as “outsiders”. In the process, it is offering a sense of impunity for vigilantes on the ground.

There is another key difference between 1983 and 2024: Social media. Because misinformation tends to go around much faster today, the time gap between verbal provocations and actual violence has shrunk. More people are also likely to consume unverified information today than in the past, creating conditions for wider mass violence.

A new context

The communal provocations around the Dhing incident should not be seen in isolation. They are part of a broader political and social framework that continues to frame the Miya Muslims as infiltrators who should be expelled from the Assamese homeland. Some key elements of this regime of otherisation operate in legitimate spaces between politics and law, such as the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the Foreigners Tribunals.

In fact, the NRC updation exercise popularised terms such as “doubtful citizens” that ethnonationalist groups in Assam are now liberally using to not just question the relationship of Miya Muslims to Assam, but also give a whole new tinge to crimes committed by individual members of the community. In doing so, they are able to conflate the very “Miya” identity with a whole range of criminal behaviour, from sexual aggression and territorial invasion. This creates a fertile ground for new waves of violence against them.

The state government must immediately step in to suppress these blanket provocations and also stop giving credence to incendiary misinformation. More importantly, the higher judiciary needs to take note of the disturbing events and intervene to prevent a completely avoidable repeat of 1983.

Angshuman Choudhury is a researcher and writer from Assam, and is currently a joint PhD candidate in Comparative Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore and King’s College London.