Manashi Hazarika
Volume-XIV, Issue-IV, JULY 2026
Volume-XIV, Issue-IV, July 2026 | ||
Received: 01.06. 2026 | Accepted: 15.06.2026 | |||
Published Online: 31.07.2026 | Page No: | |||
DOI: 10.64031/pratidhwanitheecho.vol.14.issue.04W. | ||||
Women
and Insurgency in Assam: Between Resistance and Survival
Manashi Hazarika , Research Scholar, Deptt. of Political
Science, USTM, Ri-Bhoi, Meghalaya, India | |
The long arc of armed
insurgency in Assam, stretching from the rise of the United Liberation Front of
Asom (ULFA) in 1979 through the Bodoland movement to the tripartite peace
accord of December 2023, has been narrated overwhelmingly as a story of men with
guns and the State that hunted them. Women rarely appear, and when they do,
they are flattened into either silent victims or anomalous gun-bearers. This
paper attempts a corrective reading. Drawing on a qualitative review of
academic scholarship, memoir, fiction, commission reports and press accounts,
it argues that women’s relationship with insurgency in Assam is best understood
as a continuous negotiation between resistance and survival. As combatants and
cadres they exercised a constrained agency, recruited and trained yet seldom
permitted to lead or to fight; as wives, widows and kin of militants they bore
the disproportionate burden of counter-insurgency, from the ‘secret killings’
of 1998–2001 to sexual violence under the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act;
and as peace-makers, from the mediation of Indira Goswami to the marches of
Bodo women’s organisations, they reframed their suffering into political voice.
The study finds that insurgency simultaneously opened spaces of agency for
women and deepened the patriarchal hierarchies that confined them. It concludes
that the post-accord moment demands a gender-sensitive approach to
rehabilitation, reintegration and peace-building, in keeping with the wider
Women, Peace and Security agenda.
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