Mani Hazarika with a copy of her memoir.
| Photo Credit: Rahul Karmakar
Mosquitoes almost succeeded in doing what mortars could not — kill Mani Hazarika during a military operation in December 2003 to flush out extremists of Assam from their hideouts in Bhutan.
She regained consciousness in a Bhutanese Army hospital after a bout of malaria she had contracted from drinking water squeezed out of plantain leaves while on the run. The Bhutanese troops were firing mortar shells as they moved up a hill where the banned United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) had built its general headquarters across Assam’s Baksa district.
“There were 48 women and 20 children in the general headquarters and other ULFA camps in southern Bhutan. We decided to give ourselves up when the shelling started so that the men could escape to fight another day,” she told The Hindu.
As the soldiers approached them in the jungles, Ms. Hazarika asked the children to cry at the top of their voices. The strategy worked; the shelling stopped, the soldiers guided the female ULFA cadres and the children to a military hospital from where they were to be handed over to the security forces in India manning the international border.
Ms. Hazarika, a member of the ULFA’s first female fighting unit recruited in 1989, recounted her journey as an extremist in Light Down, her memoir in Assamese published by The Reads Factory, a multilingual initiative that blends artificial intelligence (AI) with storytelling.
“I had to exert my memory cells to jot down what happened more than 20 years ago. Many of my comrades in arms and places the revolution (extremism) took me to are missing from my account because I could not remember them,” said the former extremist who became the ULFA’s first female combat trainer ahead of Operation Bajrang, the military offensive against the outfit launched in November 1990.
However, she did not forget Ashanta Baghphukan, Bening Rabha and Rabin Neog — three of the most dreaded ULFA combatants marked missing since the 2003 operation — whispering in her ears as she lay in the Bhutan military hospital.
“They advised me to insist on being handed over to the Red Cross or any human rights body and not to the Indian Army in Assam. Our demand was accepted but in order to ensure none of us would be killed in custody, we used a trick to smuggle out a list of all our names to the local media,” she said.
The ‘trick’ is narrated in the book, she added.
Ms. Hazarika used her pet name, Pratibha Gogoi, for the security forces to record. “This name was used in all the cases against me, disposed of in May this year, and not Ritumoni Gogoi, my original name or the one in the book,” she said.
Pankaj Kumar Dutta, the regional managing editor of The Reads Factory justified Ms. Hazarika’s memoir under the initiative that intends to focus on children’s literature in four languages — Assamese, Bengali, English and Hindi.
“Ours is also a platform for women to tell their stories and the role of women in extremist movements cannot be ignored. Three of our first six books are women-specific, including one by Nobin Buragohain whose Ahom Jugor Nari says women played a far greater role than men during the 600-year Ahom rule in Assam,” he said.
The books include a set of three rebranded books by award-winning Assamese writer Rita Choudhury.
“This is not an initiative for profit but for making books with AI-enhanced illustration as attractive for children as computer or mobile phone screens,” musician-turned-publisher Abhiruk Patowary, The Read Factory’s head, said.