Multiple memorials for 11 “language martyrs” remind Silchar, the epicentre of southern Assam’s Bengali-dominated Barak Valley, of a massacre on May 19, 1961. Many more dot the valley beyond. The primary memorial, Shahid Minar or Martyrs’ Tomb, is at Gandhibag, a popular park at the centre of Silchar. Eleven columns stand in their memory at the town’s crematorium, where the last rites of the martyrs were performed.

But the memorial that moves the townspeople the most is a brownish sculpture at the Silchar Railway Station, where the State police personnel gunned down 11 people, including 16-year-old Kamala Bhattacharya, who had gathered to protest the Assam government’s decision to impose Assamese as the only official language.

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On Kalimohan Road, about 200 metres from the railway station memorial, stands the expansive house of former Union Minister Santosh Mohan Dev, one of the most influential politicians to emerge from India’s northeast, comprising eight States. The house of the Congress leader was the power centre of the valley — adjoining Tripura too — for three decades, before it shifted to that of Kabindra Purkayastha at Nutanpatty, about 1.5 km from the memorial.

One of the founder-members of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the northeast in 1980, Purkayastha did not become as influential as Dev, but initiated the saffron surge in Assam by wresting the Silchar Lok Sabha seat from Dev in 1991 and ensuring 10 Assembly seats, including nine from the Barak Valley, that year.

United by a language

Divided by ideology, the two houses have been united by a demand to rename Silchar Railway Station as the Bhasha Shahid (Language Martyrs) Railway Station. Dev championed this demand, and so did Purkayastha in Parliament. The latter’s son, Rajya Sabha member Kanad Purkayastha, refreshed this demand in Delhi in December 2025. Leaders of the Left Front, which briefly called the shots in Barak Valley in the 1970s, were on the same page too.

“Barak Valley was untouched by the violence that swept other parts of Assam after the Babri Masjid demolition in December 1992. This was because Hindus and Muslims identified themselves as Bengali first. Unfortunately, the bonding over language is loosening due to the BJP brand of polarisation,” says Pradip Dutta Roy, an advocate and chief convenor of the regional Barak Democratic Front party. He adds that the BJP no longer produces strong leaders in Barak Valley who can stand up to Dispur’s (Assam’s seat of power in the Assamese-dominated Brahmaputra Valley) “bulldozing decisions”.

“After the 1961 incident, the Assam government withdrew its controversial circular to make Bengali the official language in Barak Valley, now comprising Cachar, Hailakandi, and Sribhumi districts. But it tried to push similar circulars in 1972, 1986, and 2013. In 1986, a year after the Assam Agitation, primarily targeting Bengalis, ended, two more protestors were killed in police firing,” he says. Whether it was the Congress (1961, 1972, and 2013), the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP, 1986), or the BJP now, he feels the attitude of the Assam government toward the Barak Valley and its people has not changed. He points to the BJP-led State government’s “reluctance” to give shape to a ₹8-crore Language Martyrs’ Memorial Museum announced in 2017.

Faith over tongue

The sentiments associated with the 1961 killing are evident in a flex signboard put up by locals at the Silchar Railway Station. The signboard reads “Bhasha Sahid Railway Station Silchar” in Bengali, Hindi, and English. Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma stirred a debate when he said in 2025 that a no-objection certificate (NOC) sent to the Centre regarding the railway station renaming was pending due to alternative proposals and feedback from other groups.

The Bhasha Shahid Station Shahid Smaran Committee, an organisation seeking justice for the language martyrs, accused him of speaking a “half-truth” and slammed a bid to rename the railway station after a Dimasa tribal freedom fighter “without a direct link to the station”. The organisation’s general secretary, Rajib Kar, said that the Ministry of Home Affairs acted on a proposal of the Tarun Gogoi-led Congress government in 2016 and issued an NOC in November 2017 and directed the Assam government to process the renaming through a gazette notification. The organisation “fails to understand” why a BJP-led government, which claims the support of Bengali Hindu voters in Assam, has been delaying the notification for nine years.

The neglect of Barak Valley is not only about a railway station or the Bengali language, says Atanu Bhattacharjee, the Silchar Town Congress Committee president. “Bengali Hindus and Muslims continue to be second-class citizens despite comprising more than 40% of Assam’s population. In Barak Valley at least, the two communities enjoyed camaraderie until the BJP sowed the seeds of division on religious lines. Still, we hope things will change for the better when the regime changes,” he says. The Assam elections are to be held in April.

“Our region receives a step-motherly treatment from the mainstream Assam leadership. We have had to fight for higher education and healthcare institutions, various developmental projects, and even the East-West Corridor project, linking Saurashtra to Silchar is getting delayed,” he says. He adds that syndicates controlling businesses and natural resources are being encouraged. “All these are being done behind the Hindu-Muslim narrative to keep the people divided.”

He accuses the BJP of resorting to “gutter-level” politics, citing his case as an example. “I was suspended as the Cachar District Sports Association general secretary and locked out of my office just because I lauded the elevation of Gaurav Gogoi as the Assam Congress president and hoped he would become the Chief Minister,” he says.

Ataur Rahman Mazarbhuiya, a former MLA who represented the Badruddin Ajmal-led All India United Democratic Front, agrees with Bhattacharjee. “There was a time when the tongue, not faith, mattered more in Barak Valley. The bid to keep Muslims in check under the present regime seems to have been a factor behind the delimitation exercise, which has reduced the number of Assembly seats in Barak Valley from 15 to 13,” he says. “Going by population, Barak Valley should have had three more Assembly seats,” he adds. According to the 2011 Census, Muslims are roughly 51% of the population of Barak Valley. The Hindu count is about 47%.

Erosion of representation

Allegedly designed by Chief Minister Sarma, the 2023 delimitation exercise saw Barak Valley losing two Assembly seats. Critics said it was designed to weaken the political influence of Muslims and consolidate Hindu votes. The Hailakandi and Sribhumi (formerly Karimganj) districts, where Muslims accounted for 60.31% and 56.36% of the population in 2011, lost a seat each. For instance, the Muslim-dominated Algapur and Katlicherra seats were merged into a single entity, altering the electoral dynamics for minorities in the region.

Rupam Saha, the BJP’s Cachar district president, defends the move. “We believe in the quality of candidates, not quantity. We are confident of winning at least 10 seats in Barak Valley, and the right representatives will have a stronger voice in Dispur than numerically stronger MLAs who cannot make much of a difference,” he says. The confidence stems from the general perception that a large section of Muslims in the valley has been packed into three constituencies: Algapur-Katlicherra, Karimganj South, and Sonai.

Delimitation did not only affect the Muslim-dominated areas, Bhattacharjee says. “Predominantly Hindu areas have also been transferred haphazardly from one constituency to another. Take the case of Malogram, one of the oldest four municipal wards of Silchar. The entire ward of about 30,000 people was attached to the rural Udharbond constituency. This was nothing but an insult to the people of Silchar and to Bengalis in general,” he says.

Some in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), whose groundwork since the 1950s helped turn Barak Valley into a saffron bastion, are not convinced by the idea of electing fewer Muslims to the 126-member Assam Assembly. “Our fight is not against the Muslims, but Islamic radicalism and everything associated with it. At the end of the day, the region needs more voices to fight for its needs. And when the number of seats is reduced, the area loses out on constituency-based development funds,” says an RSS pracharak, associated with a Maharashtra-based top-rung BJP leader.

Dutta Roy sees in the Assembly seat reduction a long-term plan by people from the Brahmaputra Valley to take over the Barak Valley linguistically. “The BJP overtly acknowledged Barak Valley and the Bengalis for giving it the space to grow from in Assam and the rest of the northeast, but it is far from Bengali-friendly. Many Bengalis from our valley got jobs during the Congress rule. They account for only 8% of the government employees, down from 60% during the Congress government headed by Hiteswar Saikia,” he says, adding that if Bengalis constitute 30% of Assam’s population, 30,000 of them should have got jobs out of 1,00,000 provided by successive BJP governments. “Only 2,100 from Barak Valley got jobs, and most posts in our region are being filled up by people from Brahmaputra Valley, who do not give the Bengali language the respect it deserves,” he says.

Saha says that the BJP-led NDA has been on a mission to address regional imbalances, as evidenced by a slew of projects, including a flyover to ease traffic congestion in Silchar and an agriculture institution in Sribhumi, both at various stages of implementation. “By giving Kabindra Purkayastha a Padma Shri, the first Barak Valley local to receive the award, albeit posthumously, the BJP has shown it respects Bengalis. As for Silchar Railway Station, we want it renamed too, but some things take time,” Saha says.

While the BJP seeks another five years to fulfil its promises, the opposition — fragmented on the surface — believes it is high time others got a chance to do what the saffron brigade could not. “People in the valley are revolting, but quietly. We hope it reflects in the April 9 results,” Mazarbhuiya says.

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