TNT Desk | June 3, 2018

A new book on Assam authored by two political activists-cum-researchers associated with a think-tank run by Bharatiya Janata Party leader Ram Madhav has triggered a controversy over its characterisation of the Assamese sub-nationalist identity – or jatiotabad – as anti-Indian and anti-national.

The Last Battle of Saraighat: The Story of the BJP’s Rise in the North-East, by Rajat Sethi and Shubhrastha has agitated public intellectuals in Assam and ordinary Assamese alike, many of whom took to social media to voice their opposition to the book’s formulation.

The authors, who work for the India Foundation, were associated with the BJP’s victorious 2016 election campaign in Assam carried out under the guidance of Madhav, the BJP’s northeast in-charge.

In the chapter ‘Five Decades of Sangh’, which analyses the spread of the BJP’s ideological font, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), in Assam, the authors pit the RSS’s “nationalist ideology” against the “anti-Indian, subnational, subversive idea of Assamese identity” and term jatiotabad “a disservice” to the right-wing outfit’s “unique and undocumented historical phenomenon of decades of physical, ideological and political struggle on ground”.

They further write, “These (meaning the RSS’s work in Assam) were struggles that were challenging, co-opting and moulding the regional into the national in more ways than one.

The above story has been sourced to The Wire and more details can be found here.