By Dr Binayak Dutta
While celebration of independence from colonial yoke in India is seven-and-a-half decades old, the story of its struggle has not completely unfolded. Since the transfer of power in 1947, various shades of historians have tried to view this momentous process of anti-colonial struggle from their own perspective, which have often been institutional and elitist.Cutting across ideological frameworks, in practical terms, the discipline has hardly recognised the contribution of common people who were in fact the real movers of the anti-colonial movements beyond a century.
While studies of the dominant leaders of the national movement are significant and their contributions must be acknowledged, it’s also important to record the contribution of the masses and the grassroots leadership beyond mega anti-colonial movements like Swadeshi-Anti Partition (1905) and the Gandhian Movements, wherever possible. Thus, absence of indigenous response and participation in the anti-colonial movements can no longer be normalised.
This is gradually being understood as a major drawback of existing scholarship. Over the years, historians are also waking up to the geographical imbalance reflected in historical narratives and their textual representations about anti-colonial movements. Therefore, the overwhelming silence on exemplars from eastern India and more specifically North East India are aberrations that need correctives.
In the last seven decades, as the independent Indian state celebrated independence with all pomp and pageantry, there was almost a calculated silence on partition and the tragedies of the decolonisation discourse. It can hardly be denied that a major problem historically exists, as the overwhelming predominance of focus in most of the state sponsored history books were on the leaders of the Congress. A bigger oversight is in the reticence of historians to engage with the category ‘undivided India’ as there continues to persist silence on the struggle of leaders who opposed and resisted the partition of India, and subscribed to the ideals of Indian national unity. Until recent times when the state began to recognise grassroots nationalist volunteers as freedom fighters, those struggling against partition were not readily granted this status.
It is important to recognise that while the national leadership of both the Congress and the Muslim League had come to accept partition as a fait accompli by June 1947, leaders at the grassroots in eastern and North East India not only resisted this idea but were also at the forefront of this struggle to resist partition of the country, and ensure its unified passage from colonialism to independence.
Their struggles and sacrifice have not received the attention it deserved.
A Forgotten Hero
One such case is that of the Chakma leader, Sneha Kumar Chakma, who hailed from the Chittagong Hill Tracts, located on the south-eastern part of colonial North East India.
When the Second World War came to a close in 1945, the grassroots leaders of the Chittagong Hill Tracts formed the Chittagong Hill Tracts Peoples’ Association (Parbatya Chattagram Jana Samity – PCJS). Sneha Kumar Chakma was the General Secretary. As the memorandum of the Chittagong Hill Tracts Peoples’ Association pointed out –
Chittagong Hill Tracts was a frontier district of Bengal in the east bounded by native state Hill Tippera on the north, by Arakan on the south, by the Lushai Hills on the east and the district of Chittagong on the west.
Contrary to most popular beliefs, decolonisation was a more complex process in colonial North East India than has been hitherto articulated- the struggles of the Chittagong Hill Tracts are clear pointer to this complexity, which straddled the binaries of religious communalism and ethno-linguistic contradictions at the same time. While the debate on Pakistan centred around securing Muslim majority areas under a single nation-state in the Indian subcontinent, the inclusion of the Chittagong Hill Tracts in it was indeed an aberration. Out of the total population of 2,47,053, the tribal indigenous non-Muslim population numbered 2,33,392 that was 97 per cent of the population.
When discussions on decolonisation picked up in right earnest post Second World War, Sneha Kumar Chakma was sent by PCJS to confer with the leaders of the Indian National Congress that had emerged as the dominant non-Muslim nationalist voice in Indian politics.
He had elaborate discussions with the nationalist leaders, and as per the demand of the PCJS, was included in the All-India Excluded Areas Sub-Committee of the Constituent Assembly for the Chittagong Hill Tracts. When the Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, constituted the Boundary Commission on June 30, 1947, he (Chakma) opposed the move on the ground that the Commission had no jurisdiction over the Chittagong Hill Tracts (hereinafter referred to as CHT). After a stout defence of his position at the hearing of the Boundary Commission, Chakma rushed back to Rangamati to ‘declare CHT as India’ and raise the Tri Colour. In his own words, “On myself fell the active responsibility of protecting the interests of Chittagong Hill Tracts in an Indian Partition.”
As he reported, “Our veteran leader, Kamini Mohan Dewan, declining all our requests to do the job, the Action Committee forced me to hoist our National Flag at sunrise on the 15th of August, 1947.”
For two full days, the people and leaders of the CHT remained under the impression that they were in Indian dominion. But when the Radcliffe Award was made public on August 17, Chittagong Hill Tracts found itself within East Pakistan. The Action Committee convened an emergency meeting and resolved to oppose the Radcliffe Award and launch a resistance struggle against the integration of the CHT with Pakistan. Chakma came to India through Hill Tipperah and met the Indian leaders, including Jawaharlal Nehru, who refused to support their cause. Despite his best efforts, CHT merged with Pakistan.
Sneha Kumar Chakma passed away as a heartbroken hero of a betrayed cause.
Conclusion
While the Chakmas continued to suffer as Buddhists in a Muslim homeland, the atrocities against them only increased leaps and bounds over the years, acquiring various forms. An obvious mode was the eviction of the indigenous population of the CHT through the construction of the Kaptai Hydel Project. The Chakmas had no choice but to migrate to India as the only means to escape state persecution in the then East Pakistan and even Bangladesh.
They first migrated to Assam in 1964 and were subsequently relocated to Arunachal Pradesh.
Today the settlement of citizenship of the Chakmas in Arunachal Pradesh is a contested issue. It is, therefore, important to recover this story of Chittagong Hill Tracts and Sneha Kumar Chakma within the larger Indian historical narrative of anti-partition resistance movements in order to have a better historical understanding of the national movement and the effects of decolonisation of North East India. This is something that we are yet to wake up to.
(The author is the Assistant Professor, Department of History, NEHU, Shillong)