It was the summer of 1983. The assembly elections bugle had sounded in Jammu and Kashmir. I was returning home from school in my hometown Sopore when I saw a gentleman addressing a gathering at Iqbal Park, near the town center, i.e., Main Chowk. The residents of Sopore were accustomed to hearing passionate speeches, but this speaker seemed different. He was a young lawyer, Muzaffar Hussain Baig. Although he would later become the deputy chief minister twenty years later, he was not a well-known political figure at that time. He was presenting arguments in the style of lawyers, waving the central pages of a magazine to show the audience. The magazine, possibly the weekly Sunday and India Today, contained pictures of corpses scattered in the paddy fields of Assam. The images of the corpses of innocent children, whose shirt buttons were still intact, and women, whose dead bodies were covered with paddy plants, were from the Nellie massacre in Assam, which had occurred just three months prior. This incident, thousands of kilometers away, would become a central theme in the Kashmir elections, as a metaphor. At first, there was silence in the crowd, then an unknown fear began to stir, as if someone had drilled a hole in their minds. Baig's question was initially directed at Sopore, then it became the voice of the entire valley. Sayed Ali Shah Geelani, the leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami, immediately turned the Nellie images into a political symbol. A slogan emerged that would shake the grounds of rallies. In Kashmiri, "Yina yete banavani Asam?" ("Will we become another Assam?") became an election slogan. Within a few weeks, the National Conference also adopted this slogan. Chief Minister Dr. Farooq Abdullah directly turned this slogan towards Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and made it a weapon against the Congress. He accused Indira Gandhi of being indifferent to Muslim lives, whether in the Brahmaputra Valley or the Kashmir Valley. Thus, Nellie entered Kashmir not as news but as an election weapon, in the form of a metaphor. Recently, when the Assam government presented two investigative reports related to the 1983 massacre in the assembly, the events of forty years ago passed before my eyes like a film. One of the reports was prepared by retired IAS officer T.P. Tiwari in May 1984. The yellowed pages, filled with typed text on soft paper, still hurt like wounds today. On page 312, it is stated that 2,072 people were killed in just four hours, from the morning to noon of February 18, 1983. All of them were Bengali-speaking Muslims. However, the survivors always claimed that the actual number was much higher. According to the report, fourteen locations in the Nagaon district were affected, including Alisinga, Khulapathar, Basundhuri, Bagdoba Bheel, Bagdoba Habi, Borjula, Batuni, Dongabari, Andermari, Matipath, Mooladhari, Silbheta, Barburi, and Nellie itself. Years later, when I entered the field of journalism and visited Assam several times, local people told me that the death toll was over ten thousand. Thousands of people went missing. The survivors, mostly teenagers, told me that on the morning of February 18, 1983, life was normal in Nellie. Cattle were grazing in the paddy fields, stoves were burning in homes, and children were chasing chickens. A few hours later, these fields were filled with corpses. Mothers were fleeing with children on their backs. Villages were set on fire. The report confirms that the attackers came from several directions, armed with daos, spears, guns, and inflammable materials. Escape routes were blocked, and the attack was well-planned. An old woman from Alisinga said, "First, we heard the sound of whistles, then the flash of a torch appeared from the direction of the river, and then they arrived." That day, Nellie stopped breathing. Before sunrise, organized groups surrounded the Muslim population. Some came from the river side, some from the Brahmaputra Road, some from within the rows of banana trees, and some from the side of the hills. The report states that the attackers had a system of signals using whistles. When to advance, when to stop. On page 157 of the report, it is mentioned that many houses were already marked. Women were dragged out, and infants were slaughtered. Huts were locked from inside and set on fire. The statements included in the report describe how pregnant women had their bellies slit open, children running away were shot in the paddy fields, and many newborns were thrown into ponds. In many villages, no child above the age of ten survived. Corpses were scattered like harvested grain. The river water turned red. The report states that the police deployment was inadequate, despite prior intelligence reports that the situation could deteriorate. When the police arrived at Nellie, the villages were reduced to ashes. Corpses were piled up on the riverbanks, and the survivors were traumatized. Most of the survivors were teenagers who themselves did not fully understand what they had witnessed. Government convoys continued to load corpses onto tractors and bamboo cots. Lists of the dead and missing were compiled. Relief announcements were made, and relief camps were set up. The Tiwari Commission did not directly point fingers at political officials, but it left no room for ambiguity. The report states that the massacre occurred in the backdrop of the Assam Students' Union (AASU) and the Assam Gana Parishad (AGP) agitation and the call to boycott the elections. The state registered 688 FIRs. Hundreds of names were included. 2,091 witnesses testified, including women who had lost their entire families. However, not a single person was punished. After the Assam Accord was signed between Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and the Assam Gana Parishad in 1985, almost all cases were quietly withdrawn in the name of "peace and reconciliation." The report clearly states that the withdrawal of cases due to political expediency eliminated the possibility of legal justice. No judicial report was presented, no punishment was meted out. Hundreds of FIRs were registered, but no case reached its final stage. After the Assam Accord, almost all cases were withdrawn, and the accused roamed free. There was national condemnation, but no judicial commission was set up by the government in Delhi. The task of investigation was left to a bureaucrat, whose report has reached the public only after forty years. Alongside this, a non-governmental investigative commission was set up by the Assam Rajiyak Freedom Fighters' Association, headed by Justice T.U. Mehta, the former Chief Justice of the Himachal Pradesh High Court. The Mehta commission included G.C. Phukan, a retired IAS officer, and Professor Rehana Shah. The Mehta commission visited the burnt villages, saw the signs of mass graves, collected lists of relief camps, recorded over 600 oral testimonies, and received more than six thousand memoranda. Villagers told the commission that Assamese and Bengali-speaking people had lived together for years, sharing farming and festivals, but with mutual respect, no enmity, and no hatred. The rift occurred when the 1983 election was announced. At that time, when there was an anti-foreigner movement in Assam and a call to boycott the elections, the government encouraged the Bengali population to vote. This was equivalent to igniting gunpowder. The government encouraged them to vote but did not make arrangements for their security. The report records two attacks on February 13 and 15, 1983, in which Muslim and Assamese settlements were set on fire, cattle were looted, and women and children were displaced to Makrabhat. However, the police force was not increased, and the government did not sense the danger. According to the Mehta commission, in the early morning, armed groups surrounded the Muslim-majority villages. The attackers were armed with spears, daos, guns, kerosene, and sharp bamboo sticks. First, houses were set on fire to force women and children out, and then they were slaughtered on the roads. Those who tried to escape fell into ponds and paddy fields filled with water. Many children were thrown into the air with sharp bamboo sticks. The commission visited a place where 585 people were buried in a mass grave, identified by clothes, bangles, and teeth. However, many names were lost forever. Among the witnesses is a woman named Rehana Khatoon, who was just thirteen years old at the time of the massacre. She said she lay in a paddy field filled with water for hours, surrounded by dead bodies. When she came out, she found her mother dead nearby, with one arm cut off, and her brother was nowhere to be seen. Rehana never married. Another witness, Abdul Ghafur, lost his wife, father, and three daughters. He said, "First, the fire started, then the screams, and then only silence remained." He still lives in a bamboo hut at the same place where his house once stood. The Mehta report also includes statements from Assamese witnesses. Witness number 254, Jogeshwar Nath, said he saw the entire neighborhood burning. Neither the school nor the mosque was spared. Revenge had made human faces unrecognizable. The killing was not in the name of religion or nationality but as a collective madness. Many of the accused lived in the same area, and some even contested elections. Both the Tiwari report and the Mehta commission reached the same conclusion that the 1983 election should not have been held without a political process. The warning was ignored, and the electoral process fueled the riots. Forty years later, Nellie is no longer anonymous. The reports of both commissions are now before the public. The testimonies are preserved. But justice is still missing. The survivors not only lost their loved ones but were also burdened with silence. Cases were withdrawn, files disappeared, and evidence was destroyed. The truth is out, the crime is established, but justice is still elusive. When Baig showed the pictures of Nellie in Sopore and when Farooq Abdullah used it as a political weapon against the Congress, Nellie was no longer just news. It had become a warning for the valley, a mirror in which Kashmir saw its possible future. Assam was not a distant land; it was a possibility, a fear that could become a reality tomorrow. The cover-up of the Nellie massacre and the attempt to distance itself from the National Conference led Indira Gandhi to launch a vigorous election campaign in the Jammu region during the 1983 assembly elections. She repeatedly created the impression that the "influx of Muslims" could alter the demographic balance. She cited the National Conference's approved resettlement bill, which allowed those who had migrated to Pakistan before 1954 to return and reclaim their properties. This strategy was successful. The Congress benefited greatly in Hindu-majority constituencies, winning 26 seats, while the National Conference dominated Muslim-majority areas, winning 46 seats. The 1983 election thus became a template for the political alignment in Kashmir and Jammu for the decades to come. Nellie changed the election campaign, changed memories, and left a stamp of discredit. Forty years later, the question is no longer what happened in Nellie but what India will do with this open truth. If the perpetrators of Nellie had been punished, perhaps the anti-Sikh massacre of 1984 would not have occurred. And if the perpetrators of the Sikh massacre had been punished promptly, perhaps the Muslim-killing riots in Gujarat in 2002 would not have happened. This is not just history but a lesson.
