Freedom by Another Name: 'ULFA' and the Moment of Dissent in Assam

<strong>Centre for Historical Studies School of Social Sciences Jawaharlal Nehru University</strong> a Lecture <strong>'Freedom by Another Name: 'ULFA' and the Moment of Dissent in Assam' </strong> <strong>Dr. Rakhee Kalita</strong> Cotton College (State University), Guwahati <strong>30th March 2016</strong> <strong>Abstract: </strong>Since the late 1960s, India's northeast witnessed various armed conflicts, across the region, creating a rebel country outside the national imaginary. Its strategic geopolitical location apart, this part of India remains underdeveloped and is perceived to be not only marginal, but violent and "disturbed". In Assam the influx of foreigners from across the borders was a reason for heightened anxiety both demographically and culturally, and a mass civil uprising in the late seventies, led by students stirred a political and social unrest that snowballed into an armed struggle in the next two decades. The United Liberation Front of Asom, ULFA, a self-styled guerrilla group declared war against the Indian state and fashioned a movement aimed at retrieving Assam's freedom from an "oppressive" state, and thereby its pre-colonial grandeur and 'sovereignty'. The rhetoric of revolution and the sub-nationalist sentiments spawned in the wake of the revolt led to a climate of dissent in Assam in which a new discourse of protest narratives proliferated. Literatures, pamphlets, political reportage and the media largely expressed a lineage of alienation from the nation-state, the subsequent disenchantment of the Assamese with ULFA notwithstanding. The period remains in the archival memory of the northeast a fractious moment of resistance, and a moment of readjustment with the nation-state. I shall attempt to examine this through some prominent journals and writings of the time to understand the politics of rebellion and the historical significance that ULFA's conversations with the nation assume for Assam, even at this present juncture when it is in peace negotiations with the government of India. Rakhee Kalita is Associate Professor of English at Cotton College (State University), Guwahati and has been a Fellow at Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (2013-2015). Most recently, a Visiting Faculty with the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, JNU, her research for several years now has been on the politics of place and region vis-à-vis conflicts in the northeast of India. Her present engagement with the culture of resistance in Assam through ethnography of women insurgents is soon to be published as a book, Arms and the Woman: ULFA's Female Warriors and the Myth of Power (Routledge). Meanwhile she is also currently authoring an introduction to the insurgency, forthcoming as The ULFA (OUP), apart from having published edited works and several papers in national and international journals.