(Note: paragraph six contains graphic language)

When in Assam, sing like the Assamese do. That was the message from the separatist group United Liberation Front of Assam to singer Zubeen Garg. The 40-year-old singer, born in Jorhat in Assam, irked ULFA last week when he sang Hindi songs at a Bihu festival.

That’s a poke in the eye for the rebel group. Bihu is a major cultural festival in Assam, taking place three times a year. It’s a big deal for the most populous largest state in northeast India, and ULFA didn’t like Garg’s decision to sing in Hindi (check his song “Ya Ali” here) because its leaders consider doing that an erosion of Assamese culture.

“Zubeen is a talented singer but that does not mean he should consider himself an ambassador of Hindi and go all out to promote it. If he continues to do so, we shall not be responsible for any consequences,” the group wrote in a letter to the Press Trust of India wire service.

As a reply, on his Facebook fan page, Garg wrote, “i think assam is a wrong place for creative people. anyway i m gonna skipp all the bihu shows from next year.” (sic) Adding, “no power can dictate an artist.we have our own freedom……my music spoke only love n brotherhood.but some people never understood that.but i will live with my own freedom ….always.” (sic)

As a result, Garg ended up receiving state government security – two bodyguards and a vehicle (not quite what billionaire Mukesh Ambani is getting these days from the government).

He followed this with another update – “ulfa has banned me before in the 90′s.its nothing new forme.i always wrote songs against terrorism n violence.as an artist i cant support these bullshit. Assam is heaven. we only destroying it .it’s a call for everybody.” (sic)

For people unfamiliar with India’s many languages, Assamese is the easternmost Indo-European language, a large family that includes English, the Romance and Gothic languages, the Gaelic languages and the major northern Indian languages including Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, Marathi, Oriya and Bengali. Assam’s history as part of post-independence India has been a troubled one, however, and the people of Assam – ethnically a mix of ancestors that makes them culturally quite distinct from the rest of India – have chafed under what they see as Delhi’s distant, uncaring rule.

ULFA, which has sought an independent state, has fought against the rest of India’s cultural hegemony, before. In the late nineties, it tried to ban the screening of Hindi movies in Assam, but Bollywood’s popularity bulldozed that attempt.

Reaction from other Assamese people has tended to side with Garg, who was born in Jorhat, Assam, in 1972. “Music transcends barriers of caste, creed or religion. It should be allowed to flourish. Music can make the world a better place to live in,” Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi wrote on Twitter.

Dipjyoti Talukdar, a 27-year-old journalist from Assam, wrote: “In the first place an outlawed outfit doesn’t have the right to proclaim or give a mandate. Secondly, it’s an artist whose freedom of expression is at stake here. He can and should undoubtedly sing whatever he wants. Thirdly, singing Assamese on stage or banning Hindi movies guarantee that popularity and viewership will increase… Culture can’t be protected through the views of a fraction that does not connect with the majority of Assamese society anymore. Moreover, they (the ULFA) haven’t come up with any plausible solution for the imminent troubles facing the state and its people.”

Then there was Diganta Choudhury, a 27-year-old Assamese software engineer based in Bangalore: “I feel the ULFA should concentrate more on resolving the various political and social issues in Assam rather than hijacking an artist’s freedom… Language should not be a barrier in music….I’m with Zubeen in this one.”

The dispute appears to have ended on Sunday, according to this message on Garg’s Facebook page: “I m happy that th dispute between ulfa n me got settled. We have the same healthy relation like before. Thanks poreshda fr The understanding n tolerence.” (sic) <http://www.facebook.com/ZUBEENsOFFICIAL?fref=ts>

“Poreshda,” using the Assamese term “-da” as a respectful and affectionate way to say “older brother,” refers to Paresh Baruah, ULFA’s commander in chief. It might be just as well for Garg. ULFA has been implicated in a number of assassinations, railway bombings and other actions, and in the 80′s and 90′s in particular, was a fearsome presence that caused some Assamese families to flee the state. The threat of such violence shows the kind of price that a singer might pay for trying to sing a song.

Rumours have been circulating that people from northeast India who live in Bangalore — nearly 2,000 miles (3,000 kilometres) — to the south, are about to be attacked en masse. This is because of violence that flared between Bodo tribes and Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants in Assam in July.

About 75 people have been killed, and more than 400,000 people are crowded into filthy refugee camps. This fear was based largely on an August 11 protest organised by Muslim groups in Mumbai against the attacks.

Two people were killed and more than 50 injured in the protest. After that, the nearby city of Pune, known for its colleges, witnessed attacks against students and professionals from the Northeast as retaliation for the perceived violence against the Muslim community. It was people from Manipur, a state near Assam, who seemed to have borne the brunt of the attacks. Why?

The attackers apparently thought that Manipuris — many of whom have facial features that more closely resemble their neighbours in Myanmar and southeast Asia — were Assamese. In Bangalore, there is uneasiness among the many workers who have come to India’s information technology capital from the Northeast. Thousands of them have reportedly tried to flee the city, fearing violence against them.

On Wednesday, almost 6,000 people had booked tickets to Guwahati.”I am really scared seeing today’s newspapers,” said Deepa Medhi, 26, an Assamese woman who works at a public relations company in Bangalore.

“My parents (back home) are also scared, and are asking me to come (home) … As of now, I haven’t heard (of) any attack on (a) fellow northeasterner … I know it’s all rumours, but it’s better to play safe. You never know, riot and violence start from some minor spark.”

“I still feel it’s safe here,” said Diganta Choudhury, a 27-year-old Assamese software engineer in Bangalore, “I’ve heard some rumours, but no one has experienced any untoward incident that I know of. There are some MMS (text messages) doing rounds, but most of them are fake.”

This isn’t the first time that people have felt like aliens in their own land. In the 1960s, Maharashtra politician Bal Thackeray’s Marmik became a mouthpiece for a campaign against the growing influence of non-Marathis in Mumbai.

Thackeray built his political career threatening to drive south Indians out Maharashtra, home to Mumbai and the Marathis.

A few decades later, his nephew Raj Thackeray took aim at people from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, whom he said were taking away jobs from Marathis. There were sporadic attacks in 2008 against the migrant population in Mumbai.

On October 27, 2008, a Bihari man, Rahul Raj, hijacked a bus in Mumbai and held 12 passengers hostage, protesting the attacks. The police shot and killed him.

Assam has also seen ethnic clashes in the past. In 2003, the banned separatist group United Liberation Front of Assam passed a diktat for all Biharis to leave the state. In the violence that followed, many Biharis were killed in Assam. In retaliation, Biharis attacked train passengers from Assam.

TV stations and networks in India, similar to broadcast TV channels in the United States, remove objectionable content (sex scenes, nudity, some foul language and violence) from movies and other programming (see this recent Reuters story about how it works). This is thanks to the Indian Broadcasting Federation’s Broadcasting Content Complaint Council. The idea is to make sure that public airwaves remain friendly enough for the ears of children and sensitive adults, though it can result in unintentional bloopers like the breast cancer example.

Apply that to film, and it can be an editing massacre. Look for odd leaps forward in the film’s plot and you can see where the chopping happened. It wasn’t always this way. Channels such as Star Movies and HBO made minimal cuts or none at all until the BCCC was established in 2011. Hindi films fare little better. The lovemaking scene between Saif Ali Khan and Preity Zinta in “Salaam Namaste” was removed from the televised version of the movie. “The Dirty Picture,” the film about softcore actress Silk Smitha that starred Vidya Balan, came in for 59 cuts, but still couldn’t make the cut for television.

Just in case you missed the message about naughty content, messages flash on English channels every once in a while, asking viewers to report objectionable content to the complaint council. After a while, the question presents itself: is this nanny state protection or is it the more ominous “censorship”? Either way, it doesn’t seem to bother anyone.

Maybe people use the TV to “turn off,” while they use the Internet to “turn on”. How else to explain the protesters who showed up (albeit in small numbers) on the streets of India’s cities when the government shut down file-sharing services that some people use to watch pirated movies and listen to pirated music? The government also put a cap on what it defined as objectionable content that people post on Facebook and other social media sites. That’s a good way to raise some grassroots complaints, but it’s surprising that cutting TV time entertainment hasn’t sparked the same ire.

Maybe TV is like all the other curtailments to freedom of expression that Indians have dealt with. Who spoke up when the importation of Salman Rushdie’s bestselling novel “The Satanic Verses” was banned? Or when Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute library was ransacked by extremists protesting James Laine’s book “Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India.” Or when groups operating under their moral codes impose them on university syllabi or school textbooks?

Have people tacitly waived their right toward censorship by not exercising it? Many of us allow our freedom of speech to be curtailed when it comes to books and TV, but when asked to pay to watch movies and music, we lace up our combat boots … at least for now. The longer-term trend in India seems to be for its young people to plot paths to career success rather than thinking about preserving freedom or fighting for anything other than a religious dispute. Maybe there’s no gauntlet to pick up. Sooner or later, we may find ourselves treating Web surfing the same way we treat watching television — passive and without complaint.

(Editing by Robert MacMillan)