When the Assamese militant outfit, United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), abducted social-environmental activist, Sanjoy Ghose, in July 1997, they did not what they were dealing with. There was an uproar. Protests, appeals and condemnations poured in from the world over. The ULFA panicked. It kept issuing contradictory statements - that he was safe and sound, and that he had died. Finally, the Indian Army intercepted an ULFA message indicating that he had died in the neighbouring mountainous state of Arunachal Pradesh.
The ULFA admitted as much, but the family refused to accept it on face value. They wanted proof of Sanjoy's death - they still are. What happened in the bargain was that the man whose only claim to fame in the state of Assam was his undoubtedly commendable work to save the world's largest riverine island from being eroded away for good by the mighty Brahmaputra, became an icon overnight. Pegging on Sanjoy Ghose, opinion started building up against the terror tactics and senseless violence indulged in by the ULFA.
Ghose, who had friends and well-wishers in all the right places, was increasingly seen as a nonviolent man taking on an out-and-out terrorist organisation all by himself, and becoming a glorified martyr in the process. His wife started collating his writings, letters and diaries and stitched them together as this book. It traces Sanjoy's journey as an activist which first found expression in his pursuit of rural management studies at the Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA), and led to his setting up the Uttar Rajasthan Milk Union limited (URMUL) in Bikaner.
After nine years in the state of Rajasthan, in April 1996, he moved with his family and colleagues to live and work in Majuli island in Upper Assam. It was here that he drew the ULFA's ire. He started speaking his mind out and paid for it. The book conveys a message - it is an indictment of the use of terrorism as a means to achieve social justice.
What it does not is why Ghose was hell-bent in taking on an enemy far more powerful than he could ever be. He was not drawn into any vortex, he himself mixed up social priorities and political prejudices, giving one the impression that perhaps he was more keen on becoming a martyr. Who won and who lost? Not his organisation, Association of Voluntary Agencies for Rural Development -Northeast (AVARD-NE), which left the island the work unfinished.
Not the people of Majuli who made a determined but vain effort, working more on emotion than on purpose, to carry on his good work. Not the other nongovernmental organisations which too fled fearing similar reprisals by the ULFA. And certainly not his near and dear ones, for whom the loss was immense.
If it achieved anything, it made the ULFA more hated than ever before. But then, was it what he was there in Majuli for, in the first place?
