What is happening in the current politics of North East India is a broader narrative created and propagated by the state, often shaped by the monopoly and interests of corporate power. Assam today stands on the verge of a deep ethnic distress among its communities. This raises a pressing question: Are we moving towards the path of Manipur, where a failed state was created through political negligence and where the rights of every living being are shattered by the dominant politics of the state?
This is a tough time. We have to recall the tribal harmony that once was in our land, the time when we all stayed together and built united lives. But as the history repeats itself, the old strategy of divide-and-rule again reveals itself, entering our daily lives and silencing our unity.
I hail from the Ahom community, which has been demanding tribal identity for the last three decades – a demand that emerged as a byproduct of the elitism within the Assamese nationalist movement. Many leaders of that movement have now shifted toward tribal identity politics, which is not new in the region. But the demand for ST status by six communities has triggered a chain reaction and created political distress among the already-recognized tribal groups. The situation we see today–be it in the Bodoland Territorial Council or in the recent campus protests—or the violence in Karbi Anglong is not new. It echoes the long history of conflicts in the state
Can we rebuild the harmony that once shone in our history?
The trajectory of tribal autonomy and independence in Assam and the Northeast does not start with the demand for Bodoland or the Bodo movement, although majoritarian narratives often start from there. To truly understand tribal rights, we must go back to a different moment—when a man in Dighelia raised a black flag and declared, “Yeh azadi jhootha hai.”
That man was Comrade Bishnu Rabha.
From there, we have to go back to the days of the declaration of the Group C, where the Muslim League under Jinnah wanted Assam and the Northeast to be a part of Pakistan. In Delhi, Bhimbor Deori confronts Jinnah and opposes this plan fearlessly. Deori is one of the foundational figures whose courage shaped the region we have today but is now almost forgotten in the political memory of the Northeast. His ideas can explain our distress today:
The controversies over ST status for six communities, tensions among the existing tribal groups, the Manipur crisis and the inter-state conflicts continuing in the Northeast— whether between Nagaland and Assam or others. All these crises are outcomes of our own failures and the success of century-old divide-and-rule tactics.
We have forgotten the words of Deori and other tribal leaders of the time. We have allowed the state to erase them from our memory. Were Bhimbor Deori alive today, he would surely be on the streets, urging us to unite to save our land, forests, mountains, and rivers.
When students recently broke barricades and stormed the BTC Council, I asked myself again: Are we going down the same path as Manipur? Ultimately, it is not the politicians in air-conditioned rooms who suffer. It is the common people.
For a month, I have been asking myself whether I should consider myself tribal or not and for more than that time, I’ve faced that question from others: the answer is no longer simple. These issues need honest evaluation and structural solutions, not state-manufactured conflicts designed to distract us from the serious threats to our land, mountains, and rivers.
Why Recall Bhimbor Deori?
I did not come to Bhimbor Deori through archives first. I came to him through unease. Through the recurring discomfort of being asked, again and again, to define myself neatly in a region where identity has never been neat, but is now violently demanded to be so. Over the last month, I have been asked – online, in private conversations, and in political discussions- whether I consider myself a tribal. The question is never neutral. It is asked with suspicion, sometimes ridicule, sometimes with bureaucratic authority disguised as common sense. Each time, it pulls me back to a larger, unresolved crisis in the Northeast: who gets to belong, who gets to claim land, and who gets erased in the process.
I am a Tai Ahom. I call myself indigenous, and I do so consciously, politically, and with historical grounding. My people are not a monolith. Ahoms are a composite community, an interweaving of caste and tribal histories originating from the larger Tai world. Our kinship stretches to Tai Phake, Tai Khamyang, Aiton, Khamti, Turung communities. Many of us still carry fragments of Theravada Buddhism; many families continue ancestral rituals like Mitukot. We eat meat during our last rites—an ending ritual now deemed embarrassing or inconvenient by those who want to sanitize us into acceptable Hindu Savarna subjects. We celebrate Poi Sang Ken, the water festival, in Buddhist monasteries, even as our language, land rights, and cosmologies are steadily erased under the pressure of radical Brahminism and state-sponsored cultural homogenization.
I am told I do not look tribal enough. That tribal identity today is something to be proven through documents issued by elites, rather than lived practices, histories, or land-based memory. I am not Hindu enough for the regime, but whether I am tribal enough is the question thrown at my indigenous self—the khilonjiya me—every day. This is not personal confusion alone; it is structural violence. And it is here that Bhimbor Deori enters my political consciousness—not abruptly, not as a historical ornament, but as a lens through which these contradictions become legible.
A small convo for the Ahoms by Deori:
In 1942, when the British Empire stood shaken by the Second World War, Sir Stafford Cripps arrived in India with what history would later call the one-man mission. Assam, too, entered this imperial theatre of negotiation. Like other political formations, the Tribal League submitted its memorandum to the Mission. The delegation was led by Bhimbor Deori — a figure rooted not merely in politics, but in the civilizational memory of this land.
During the discussion, Cripps attempted a familiar colonial conspiracy: delegitimizing indigenous claims by flattening history. He remarked that the Ahoms themselves were not indigenous to Assam, having migrated from Burma. “We are English because we come from England,” he argued. “If the Ahoms are foreigners and we are foreigners, then why do you accept them and not us? They conquered you, and so did we. Where, then, lies the difference?”
It was a moment where empire expected silence, confusion, or submission. Instead, Bhimbor Deori responded with historical clarity and moral precision.
Yes, he conceded, the Ahoms were migrants. Yes, they had arrived through conquest. And yes, they had ruled Assam. But history does not end at the battlefield. The Ahoms did not remain conquerors. They dissolved themselves into the soil of Assam—abandoning their language, reshaping their culture, adopting local religions, customs, and ways of life. They ceased to exist as outsiders and became part of the collective self of Assam. Power, in their case, transformed into belonging.
The British, Deori argued, followed a very different path. They conquered, but never assimilated. They ruled, but never belonged. They extracted, exploited, and restructured society only to serve imperial interests. They did not learn to be Assamese; instead, they taught Assam how to be subservient. I think its sounds very familiar – like Delhi colonialism…….
“Become like us,” Deori told Cripps in essence, “live with us, not above us; share our burdens, not our resources alone; dissolve into our lives rather than dominate them—and only then could acceptance even be imagined.”
This exchange was not merely a rebuttal to colonial arrogance. It was a profound articulation of the difference between rule and relationship, between conquest and coexistence, between empire and community. It asserted that indigeneity is not frozen in origin myths but forged through ethical living, shared culture, and historical responsibility.
In that moment, Bhimbor Deori did not just answer Cripps— he exposed the moral bankruptcy of colonial rule itself. Sadly, now the Tribal League has become a spokesperson of the Hindutva project.
The person behind our land
Bhimbor Deori was not merely a leader; he was a product of plains tribal consciousness in colonial Assam, shaped by land alienation, administrative exclusion, and cultural marginalization. Born into the Deori community, a riverine plains tribe inhabiting present-day Jorhat, Sivasagar, Dibrugarh, Lakhimpur, and Sonitpur, he emerged at a moment when tribal societies were being pushed to the margins of the colonial economy while simultaneously being denied political representation. The Deoris themselves were already experiencing linguistic erosion, with only the Dibangia subgroup preserving the Deori language, others having shifted to Assamese. Yet Deori understood that assimilation without justice was simply another form of dispossession.
By the early twentieth century, an educated tribal middle class had begun to articulate questions of rights, representation, and emancipation. Associations among Kacharis, Mikirs (Karbis), Miris (Mishings), Rabhas, and Deoris culminated in the formation of the Assam Backward Plains Tribal League on 17 April 1933 at Raha, Nagaon. Bhimbor Deori became its General Secretary. This was not symbolic leadership. The League marked the first sustained attempt to build political unity among plains tribes, cutting across linguistic and cultural differences, grounded in shared material concerns—land, education, dignity, and self-rule.
He spoke emotively on the issue of land pattas for indigenous people, criticizing the government for discontinuing the remittances of land revenues that had served to protect vulnerable communities. Where many were satisfied with tokenism, Deori would contend that independence itself would be futile for tribal people without land. It is due to such kind of views that he faced backlash from the traditional, tokenistic political groups.
Another episode in his life that needs commendation is his opposition to the Muslim League’s proposal to include Assam in Pakistan. During the crucial moments of political negotiation, Bhimbor Deori confronted Jinnah in Delhi and rejected any plan that sought to wrest control of the Northeast. The intervention was crucial in saving the territorial integrity of Bor Oxom. Yet today, this chapter is being overridden by a single heroic narrative about Gopinath Bordoloi promoted by the state. Even Bordoloi, however, has publicly acknowledged that Bhimbor Deori was a leader of the common cause, not merely a representative of tribal interests. But today, that acknowledgment survives only in fragments because of their corporate interest and Brahminical narratives.
Ironically, Assam celebrates its first Chief Minister, Gopinath Bordoloi, as the sole hero who saved the Northeast along with Gandhi from the Muslim League—a comfortable narrative for the ruling class and its Brahminical politics.
Listening to Deori’s words today, one hears an uncanny echo in our present crisis. We are trapped in a fascist dilemma—constant, rapid contradictions manufactured by the state.
Deori’s commitment to justice was lifelong and deeply practical. When the British government refused remission of land revenue and failed to allot land pattas to indigenous cultivators, Deori raised the issue relentlessly. He argued that a people without secure land ownership could never be politically free. He opposed policies that allowed waste lands to be transferred to outsiders while indigenous peasants were forced to pay premiums they could not afford. In the Assam Legislative Council, he questioned why tribal boys in hostels were denied access to common dining halls, exposing everyday casteist humiliations hidden within institutions. He criticized mass literacy campaigns that existed only on paper, pointing out that education without primary schools in villages was a hollow promise.
This vision reached its most radical articulation in spaces like the Khasi Darbar Hall meetings of March 1945. These meetings were not ceremonial gatherings; they were sites where an alternative political imagination was articulated. In the Khasi Darbar Hall, Deori spoke of autonomy not as secession, but as the right of indigenous communities to control land, resources, and governance systems rooted in local realities. He argued that land was not merely property but the basis of cultural survival. He warned that without protective mechanisms- tribal belts, blocks, and community ownership – the plains tribes would be reduced to tenants on their own soil. His insistence was clear: political freedom without economic and territorial control was meaningless.
Listening to Deori’s words today, one hears an uncanny echo in our present crisis. We are trapped in a fascist dilemma—constant, rapid contradictions manufactured by the state. We are encouraged to fight each other over identity labels while land is sold like garments in a Sunday market. History is erased, then repackaged to serve power. During the recent visit of the Prime Minister, century-old Congress-era lies were repeated—that Bordoloi saved Assam— one savarna man saved the Northeast, while the region walks dangerously close to the path of Manipur. Divide-and-rule remains the governing logic. Population politics dominate discourse, but people themselves are never consulted.
Deori understood this tactic well. In 1941, when Maulana Bhasani campaigned aggressively for the abolition of the Line System, Deori recognized that the survival of Assamese nationality and tribal peoples depended on its existence. He opposed the revocation of the Line System by the Saadulla ministry, seeing clearly that unchecked settlement would accelerate land alienation. He observed how markets were controlled by outsiders, how peasants remained disunited, how traders profited while cultivators starved. His answer was not isolationism, but solidarity—among peasants, among tribes, among all demanding communities.
This solidarity became decisive during the Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946. When the British and the Muslim League attempted to include Assam in Group C and merge it with Pakistan, Bhimbor Deori confronted both the British Mission and Muhammad Ali Jinnah in Delhi. His words were unambiguous: Assam is neither Hindu nor Muslim; it is the motherland of indigenous peoples who cleared forests and lived there for centuries. He warned that if the Congress failed to support this position, indigenous peoples would launch their own movement. His intervention unsettled the colonial calculus. Assam was ultimately allowed to join India, not Pakistan.
Beyond this, the Tribal League demanded constitutional safeguards and equal rights for tribal communities in independent India. Bhimbor Deuri personally approached Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, urging him to incorporate special provisions for the backward classes of Assam in the Constitution even before independence was achieved. Bhimbor Deuri’s contributions to Assam and to the broader Indian freedom struggle stand on par with those of Dr. Ambedkar.
This brings us to his view of independence itself. For Bhimbor Deori, Indian independence was incomplete without tribal autonomy. He believed that if tribal people merely replaced one form of domination with another-from British rule to upper-caste Assamese control-then independence was hollow. His idea of swadhinata was expansive: it meant freedom from caste discrimination, from administrative neglect, from land alienation, and from cultural erasure. In many ways, his vision was far ahead of the mainstream nationalist imagination. That’s why he is forgotten by the current political dispensation – they are very afraid of talking about his true radical formulations of Indigeneity
This migration has opened the door for corporate land-grabbing, ecocide, and resource exploitation in the Northeast. Giants—whether Ambani or Adani—are acquiring huge tracts of land at prices cheaper than a cup of tea.
Furthermore, Deori’s vision of land ownership stands in sharp contrast to contemporary crony capitalism, where corporations eye the Northeast for its riches —water, forests, rivers, mountains—treating them as extractable assets rather than living ecosystems. When two people died in Karbi Anglong and the internet was shut down, when ecosystems collapsed and tensions rose among communities, I found myself asking the same question Deori asked decades ago: are we being pushed toward internal conflict so that dispossession can proceed quietly? Writing about all this is quite painful because I remember the Naga and Axomoya conflict in my childhood, and the recent Karbi Anglong incident shook me from the inside. Diphu is in my neighbourhood, where part of my childhood was spent – now I am not safe in the Karbi Anglong. The KARBI CHINESE GO BACK slogan offends not only our Karbi brothers, it was an attack on us. It is a shame on us that we misunderstand the meaning of indigenous.
Following Deori’s life taught me that indigenous politics is not about purity tests. It is about responsibility—to land, to history, to each other. His teachings urge us to dig back into history, to refuse state sponsored amnesia, to recognize our common enemies rather than fighting among ourselves. Khasi Darbar Hall was not a waste of time; it was ahead of its time. Actually, Deori was ahead of his time.
I write this not as a detached observer but as someone deeply implicated. When Ahom figures like Sukapha or Lachit Borphukan are turned into Hindutva tools, something inside me breaks. Our histories are weaponized against us. I cry and grieve because what is being erased is not just culture, but the possibility of a just future.
Bhimbor Deori’s politics offers no easy comfort. It demands courage, unity, and an unflinching commitment to justice. It reminds us that indigenous identity is not granted by papers, nor revoked by slurs. It is lived, defended, and renewed through struggle. And it asks us, even now: will we fight each other, or will we finally stand together to protect what is ours—land, rivers, forests, and dignity?
It is in this point of distress that the recalling of Bhimbor Deori becomes important, as his life and struggle mark one of the earliest articulations of who is indigenous in the Northeast.
From the Treaty of Yandabo in 1826 to 2026 , the meaning of citizenship has dramatically changed in this region, particularly since the CAA in 2019 and the implementation of draconian policies that blur the definition of citizen and indigenous in this land.
Deori’s perception of swadhinata – true freedom- did not imply the circumscribed autonomy of the councils of today where tribal rights remain curtailed. The situation in Assam is even more fragile. The declaration clauses of ST status for six communities does threaten the century-old hope of recognizing Assam as a tribal state, which positions the Northeast as a fully tribal zone.
But today, the threat is different. It is not only demographic changes like in pre-independence Assam. Since the 1980s, a new wave of migration from other parts of India has reshaped the region. This migration has opened the door for corporate land-grabbing, ecocide, and resource exploitation in the Northeast. Giants—whether Ambani or Adani—are acquiring huge tracts of land at prices cheaper than a cup of tea.
He just wanted harmony in Bor Oxom – a united North East
Again, as over the last two months, I have been asked, time and again, if I think of myself as tribal. I sensed that this question has taken on a political charge. Identity has stopped being purely cultural; it has been weaponized. Rather than being confronted with structural issues such as landlessness, corporate extraction, environmental devastation, or dispossession, the state continues to reduce communities to conflict with one another. It is a tried-and-tested tactic: while people are fighting over their identities, they have ceased to fight against those structures that actually run their lives. Yet, the Northeast has always been a region of extraordinary diversity—linguistic, cultural, ecological, and political. The ethnic identity movements that swept across the region were once an assertion of dignity. But today, these identities are being distorted, diluted, or selectively silenced by the state. A harmony that once defined the region now falters before policies pitting communities against each other, enabling resource extraction at an unprecedented scale.
This is why remembering Bhimbor Deori is no longer optional. His life offers a way out of the fragmented politics of the present. He imagined a Northeast where tribes did not compete for scraps of recognition but stood in solidarity. He believed that autonomy was not an administrative arrangement but a lived practice of justice, dignity, and shared land. He knew that forgetting history was the quickest path to losing freedom.
Today, Assam sorely needs the clarity of his voice. The harmony we once knew cannot be rebuilt through committees or state categories; this has to be rebuilt through memory, through political courage, and through the refusal to accept division as destiny. The erasure of leaders like Bhimbor Deori is a political act. Remembering him must therefore also be a political act-one that allows us to imagine a more just and united future for the Northeast.
References
- The Genesis And Development Of Tribal Sentiment: Role Of Bhimbar Deori’s PoliticalActivities In Assam — Miss Smirti Priya Das, Dibrugarh university
- Contribution of Bhimbor Deuri to the Upliftment of Tribal People in Assam – Dr. Juri Saikia Assistant Professor in History, D.D.R. College, Chabua, Dibrugarh, Assam
- World War II: Bhimbor Deori and Cripps Mission – Dr Anil Bharali
- Deori Sampradai, Tribal league , Brownor Deori Chutiya Byakaran – Dr Anil Bharali
- More Oxom Jiye Kun – Rita Chowdhury
- Oxom Andulon – Pratishruti and Foloshruti – Dr Hiren Gohain , Dr Dilip Bora
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