feeds from sacw.net
print versionSeptember 22, 2012
The district of Kokrajhar, in Assam, the most populous of India’s northeastern states, is an expansive green of rice paddies, bamboo, banana, and sal trees. Bamboo huts dot its sparsely populated hamlets, ringed by low hills in the distance. Along the narrow roads crisscrossing the area, men and women bend into rain-filled ponds and fields, trying to catch fish in reed baskets.
But then there is the graffiti on the walls of grocery stores and bus stands: “No Kidnapping. No Torture. No Extortion,†written by Bodoland National Council; “Do or Die for Bodoland,†by All Bodo Students Union. In a quiet Kokrajhar village, an enclosure the size of a football field announces itself as Bodoland Martyrs Cemetery. Inside the Martyrs Cemetery, several hundred blocks of black granite are inscribed with names and addresses of men who have fallen for Bodoland. Life-size granite statues of leaders of the Bodo movement and insurgency ring the memorials to the foot soldiers.
Kokrajhar, bordering Bhutan and around fifty miles from the India-Bangladesh border, is the main town of an area of around twenty-seven thousand square kilometres, covering four districts of western Assam, which was christened Bodoland by the state’s Bodo minority, members of a tribe that was among the first to settle the region. For decades after India gained its independence from the United Kingdom, Bodo tribal areas were neglected by the government of Assam and the federal authorities: the area had a single college; medical care was poor; infrastructure projects and job opportunities were few. In the nineteen-sixties, the Bodos and a few other tribes living in the plains of Assam unsuccessfully sought a separate Union Territory, a sort of state directly governed by federal government. In 1987, the Bodos—led by the student politicians of the All Bodo Students Union—began a movement to demand that a separate state of Bodoland to be carved out of Bodo areas of Assam. After a series of failed negotiations, the Bodos took up arms against the Indian government in the early nineties; two militant groups, the Bodoland Liberation Tigers and the National Democratic Front for Bodoland, led the fight. A few thousand people were killed in the resulting insurgency and counter-insurgency.
In 2003, the dominant Bodo insurgent group, Bodo Liberation Tigers, signed a peace accord with the Indian government and were granted a self-governing region, known as Bodoland Territorial Autonomous Districts, within the state of Assam. But the Indian government failed to disarm the former militants, and the presence of larges caches of weapons has enabled waves of ethnic violence in the region over the years.
The Bodos, who constitute twenty-nine per cent of the population in the autonomous districts, fear that the presence of non-Bodos in the area will frustrate their ambitions for a separate state. Over the past few months, that resentment against outsiders grew into an outbreak of ethnic violence between rather poor Bodo tribals and the even poorer immigrant Muslims of Bengali origin, who have settled in the area over the past few generations. By mid-August, seventy-eight people had been killed, four hundred thousand displaced. Hundreds of villages had burned.
Early one August morning, I drove half an hour from Kokrajhar to Dhuramari, one of those burnt and emptied villages. Once home to around two thousand people, Dhuramari announced itself with cinders. The village’s houses—bamboo with tin roofs—had been burnt down in late July; charred textbooks, shoes, and clothes were scattered among the remains. Only cuckoos, calling from the bamboo and the banana groves, broke the silence.
On July 21st, the mostly Bengali Muslim villagers of Dhuramari had woken up around 3:30 A.M. to eat before the dawn that would signal the beginning of the Ramadan fast. Sudden gunfire startled them. Asgar Ali, a teacher in his mid-forties, rushed to the part of the village under attack. The killers had disappeared into the darkness. A farmer, Saadat Ali, had been shot dead; five members of his family were injured. The villagers called the police in Kokrajhar, half an hour away.
Police arrived an hour later; the villagers refused to let them take Saadat’s body for an autopsy, insisting the police stay and protect them. In the evening, a few thousand people gathered in the village school, filling the classrooms, camping on the lawns. A few days of fear and minor attacks by Bodo militants followed. On the evening of July 26th, Asgar Ali, his wife, and their son crashed in a field by the school. Around 11:30 P.M., they were awoken by intense gunfire. The militia had returned. Ali and the villagers lay on the ground and bullets flew overhead for two hours. “Around 1 A.M., the terrorists left and the policemen told us that they had run out of bullets,†Ali told me. He says they said, “Leave and save your lives.â€
The villagers left Dhuramari through the dark, and walked along a river running past their hamlet, aiming to reach Maswa Ghat, a small pier three kilometres downriver, where some boats were anchored. But Bodo militants had a presence there, too, and an elderly woman and her young grandson who were among the last of the Dhuramari to reach the pier were killed.
In the days when the residents of Dhuramari were still trapped in the school, hundreds of people of Bengali origin had fled from adjacent villages. Maalik (who uses only one name), a twenty-eight-year-old mason, was one of them. Originally from Hakaibara, a village of a few thousand people bordering Dhuramari, he had been working for five years in the suburbs of Delhi, helping to build office towers and apartment blocks—the mascots of new India. For this, he made three hundred rupees a day, the equivalent of about six U.S. dollars—considerably more than his brothers, who worked the fields in their home town as subsistence farmers. Maalik had built a small brick house in Hakaibara last year at a cost of roughly two thousand dollars—a sign of arrival for the migrant worker’s family.
Four days after Maalik returned home from a few months of working on a power plant near Gurgaon, the corporate hub bordering New Delhi, Hakaibara came under attack. “The militants surrounded the village and began shooting and burning the houses,†he told me. “We ran out of the village, toward Maswa Ghat, where you could get on a boat.†Maalik was carrying his three-year-old son when he reached the pier. But before he could get there, he saw around twenty armed Bodo militants attacking people. “I saw five people being shot from close range,†he said. Maalik held onto his son and ran through trees and fields until he reached a police camp a few miles away.
***
India’s ruling Congress Party controls the government of Assam as well, but it was slow in responding to the violence there this summer: it was several days before paramilitary and army troops were deployed to the area. (The Indian Army and federal paramilitary forces are often sent to control such violence, as the police are sometimes too enmeshed in local politics and prejudices to be effective.) Tarun Gogoi, the head of Assam’s government, was criticized for doing little to stop the violence, and for comparing Assam to a “volcano that frequently erupts due to ethnic unrest.†But he wasn’t entirely wrong: for decades now, the issue of immigration into the state—mostly by Bengali Muslims coming from the eastern part of Bengal, which became East Pakistan in 1947 and Bangladesh in 1971—has aroused passion and fury that sometimes explodes into violence.
The history of these volcanic eruptions goes back to the British colonial desire for greater profits from Assam, a historic center of tea production. In the nineteen-twenties and thirties, the colonial government settled thousands of landless peasants from crowded Bengal on the wastelands and plains of Assam, with the idea that these immigrants would produce rice and other crops to supply the growing number of workers in the region’s tea plantations. Most of these new arrivals were Bengali Muslims; a small number were Santhals, an animist tribe that had frequently revolted against colonial authorities. The transplants cleared bushes, tilled the land, labored in tea gardens, and embraced their pastoral new world.
In 1947, British India was violently partitioned along religions lines into two nation-states, with the western and eastern halves of Pakistan flanking India itself. Millions of Muslims migrated to the two wings of Pakistan, while millions of Hindus moved to India. Hunger proved to be a greater force than religion for desperately poor Bengali Muslims living in adjoining East Pakistan, and they continued to migrate to Assam to work as subsistence farmers and laborers. Then, in 1971, East Pakistan became Bangladesh when Bengali rebels, with Indian help, won their freedom from West Pakistan. During that war, hundreds of thousands—both Muslim and Hindu—fled to India to escape; many of them went to Assam. Most of the Bangladeshi refugees never returned home, having found relatively better economic opportunities as laborers and subsistence farmers, in their new home. Hindu migrants largely settled in a southern region of Assam known as Barak Valley, which already had a substantial Bengali population, and did so relatively peacefully. But the Muslim migrants mostly found their way to an area in central Assam known as Brahmaputra Valley, which was largely dominated by ethnic Assamese Hindus, and so became far more “visible†to the native population than the Hindu immigrants had.
In 1979, an ethnic Assamese student body, the All Assam Students Union, led a popular campaign against all “outsiders†in the state. It quickly morphed into a movement against Bangladeshi immigration that sought removal of names of suspected Bangladeshi immigrants from the electoral rolls, as well as their deportation. Then, in the elections of 1985, Assam Gana Parishad, a political party formed by the student activists, came to power in the state. Its leader, Prafulla Kumar Mahanta, joined the government in New Delhi of the then Prime Minister Rajeev Gandhi in signing an agreement, known as the Assam Accord, that was aimed at defusing tensions—and severely restricting immigration. The accord drew a cutoff line for citizenship: anyone who had entered Assam after March 21, 1971, was an illegal immigrant. But most Muslims of Bengali/Bangladeshi origin voted for Gandhi’s Congress Party, which repaid their loyalty by blunting the Assam Accord through the 1983 Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act. Under the law, for a person to be judged an illegal immigrant and deported, they first had to be the subject of a complaint lodged by a citizen living within two miles of them, and then tried. Few had the time or energy to file such complaints. In 2005, the Supreme Court of India annulled the I.M.D.T., ruling that it had created insurmountable difficulties in detecting illegal immigrants and encouraged massive illegal immigration from Bangladesh to Assam.
The tensions over immigration and the subsequent competition between ethnic groups for resources and political power have driven politics in Assam since the late nineteen-seventies, but have been exacerbated in recent years, ever since the 2003 peace deal between the Bodo insurgents and the Indian government that created autonomous districts for the Bodos within Assam. The establishment of those districts brought in state and federal funding—the biggest source of revenue in a place with almost no industry—and Kokrajhar, the capital of Bodoland, soon became relatively prosperous. Roads started to replace dirt tracks and cars became a more frequent sight; a state-funded Information Technology institute came to town; multi-story hotels were built. Earlier this year, an English language newspaper, the Bodoland Guardian, began publication.
All of this seemed to provide the Bodos with an incentive to push harder for their own state, which could bring still greater prosperity and power. In 2010, the All Bodo Students Union, which is the most strident voice for Bodo aspirations, renewed their push for a separate state.
One August evening, a few minutes before the nightly curfew in Kokrajhar—imposed due to the ongoing violence—was to begin, I went to the offices of the All Bodo Students Union, and heard from a few leaders of the group the anger still felt by some Bodos. “We are demanding our rights from the Indian government. Why do those people oppose our demands? Let them ask for their own rights,†Dersen Daimari, an intense, bookish man in his early thirties who is the secretary of the All Bodo Students Union, said. “If someone messes with our rights, our Bodoland Territorial Council, then things will happen.â€
The Bodos remain a minority in the area, however, and other groups, especially the Bengali Muslims, have felt neglected by the Bodo political élite that runs the autonomous districts. “Non-Bodos have resisted the 2003 settlement because they fear that it effectively turns them into second-class citizens,†explained Sanjib Baruah, a Professor of Political Studies at Bard College in New York, who is the foremost scholar of politics in northeast India. And, so they have been working to get an equal share of the pie for themselves—and they have been mobilizing against the idea of a separate Bodo state.
This July, the tensions over these issues spilled out of the political arena and began to turn violent. Bodo militants in Kokrajhar shot two Muslim student activists. The next evening, four armed Bodo men, who had been members of Bodo Liberation Tigers, got into an altercation in another mostly-Muslim village in Kokrajhar. A mob lynched them. A few days later, Bodo militants armed with AK-47 assault rifles and hand grenades began attacking Bengali Muslim villages, and things got steadily worse from there.
About a hundred and eighty-seven thousand refugees remained in the camps until last week, including a hundred and sixty-nine thousand Muslims, seventeen thousand Bodos, and eight hundred and thirty-three from other communities, the Times of India reported.
Though the camps may have distinguished Bengali Muslim refugees from Bodo refugees, the real distinction between them seemed minor: the difference between very poor and merely poor. In a college in Kokrajhar that had been turned into housing for Bodo villagers, hurriedly packed clothes and utensils formed small heaps in empty classrooms, which had been closed to students since the violence erupted. Beauty Musahary, a thirty-one-year-old woman, had arrived there a few weeks back with her husband and two-year-old son. She didn’t remember the exact date she had left home. “Muslims burnt two villages near mine. We saw the flames and ran. I walked with the villagers for a long time through forests for a day,†she said. “We reached here the next day, but I am still scared. There are too many Muslims. We want tight security and a border, like India-Pakistan. They are taking our land and the forest, if we don’t go to war with them, then where will we live?â€
That is a question likely to remain on the minds of many of the refugees for a very long time. Thousands of Santhal tribals and Bengali Muslims, displaced after similar violence in 1993 and 1996, are still living in camps or in slums on the margins of towns where they’d originally found shelter. In one such slum, an hour and a half from Kokrajhar, where refugees displaced in 1993 were living, a wrinkled old woman in an orange sari stopped and stared at me as I interviewed her neighbors. She looked me in the eye and then broke into hysterical laughter and clapped her hands. “Go away!†she said. “Go away! We will die here.â€
An Indian serviceman at a relief camp in Butgaon village in Assam, on July 28, 2012. Photograph by Diptendu Dutta/AFP/Getty.
