Assam Riots

7/30/2019 Assam Riots

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Assam riots

Kokrajhar: The situation in violence-torn Assamcontinues to be tense as the death toll touched 44 but CMTarun Gogoi claims the situation is 'improving'.

According to latest reports, more than 170,000 peoplehave fled their homes since July 19 after fighting between

indigenous Bodo tribes and Muslim settlers in Kokrajharand Chirang. Security forces have been given shoot-on-sight orders by the Assam government to confront withany unexpected incident.

Also, a curfew has been imposed in the riot-hitareas.Indefinite curfew and shoot-at-sight orders were inforce in worst-affected Kokrajhar district, while nightcurfew was on in Chirang and Dhubri districts.

Notably, there has been severe tension between

indigenous groups and Muslim Bengali migrants in Assamfor many years.


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In a high-level meeting held on Tuesday, BodolandTerritorial Council (BTC) Chief Executive MemberHagrama Mohilary has blamed Assam government for the

ongoing violence in the state.

What is Bodoland Territorial Council?

The Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC) is a territorialprivilege established according to the Memorandum ofSettlement of February 10, 2003. BTC came into existenceimmediately after surrender of BLTF (Bodo LiberationTigers Force) cadres.

The BLTF laid down their weapons on December 6, 2003under the leadership of Hagrama Mohilary and Hagramawas sworn in as the Chief Executive Member (CEM) onDecember 7, 2003.

The BTC has 12 electorate members each looking after aspecific area of control called somisthi. The area under theBTC jurisdiction is called the Bodo TerritorialAutonomous District (BTAD).


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The BTAD is to consist of four contiguous districts

Kokrajhar, Baska, Udalguri and Chirang

carved out ofeight existing districts Dhubri, Kokrajhar, Bongaigaon,Barpeta, Nalbari, Kamrup, Darrang and Sonitpur anarea of 27,100 km (35% of Assam).

That the BTAD is created under the sixth schedule of theConstitution of India has been opposed by someorganizations.

How current ethnic clashes began in Kokrajhar?

According to Police and other sources, clashes began whenunidentified men killed four youths on Friday night inKokrajhar, an area dominated by the Bodo tribe.

There are reports claiming that armed Bodos attackedMuslims in retaliation, suspecting they were behind thekillings.


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Soon afterwards unidentified groups set houses, schools

and vehicles on fire and started firing indiscriminatelyfrom automatic weapons in populated areas.

Bodoland demand gaining momentum

The demand for a separate state of Bodoland is slowlygaining momentum, especially in view of possible talksbetween the Centre and the two factions of NDFB(National Democratic Front of Boroland).

However, Assam's main Opposition party AIUDF hasurged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to dissolve theBodoland Territorial Council (BTC) and place the districtswitnessing violent clashes under Governor's rule.

All India United Democratic Front chief and MPBadruddin Ajmal has also demanded scrapping of theBodoland Autonomous Treaty as it was against the interestof the non-Bodos in trouble-torn Bodoland TerritorialAdministered District (BTAD).


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What is the 'actual' reason behind the violence?

Analysts say that the main cause of the present clashbetween Bodo tribals and immigrant Muslims is controlover land. Kokrajhar and Chirang were predominantly aBodo tribal majority areas till nineties.

But there were migration of immigrant Muslims to theGossaigaon sub division areas in Kokrajhar district sincebeginning of nineties.

Immigrant Muslim population has increased exponentiallyin Gossaigaon sub division in last two decades.

Immigrant Muslims procured lands from many Bodos in

Gossaigaon areas and outnumbered Bodos in manyvillages. Over a period of time, there were migrations ofimmigrant Muslims to Kokrajhar town areas. Theseimmigrant Muslims are mainly agricultural labourers anddaily wage earners.


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The control over land by immigrant Muslims in Bodo

heartland and increasing population of immigrantMuslims in Kokrajhar and other districts of BTC createdfear psychosis among Bodos.

With more than 40 people reported dead and over 1.5 lakhdisplaced in a week, the Kokrajhar riots between Bodos and

Muslims have again brought into focus certain issues that are notlimited to Kokrajhar district, or for that matter to Assam. There willbe the usual game of getting as much mileage from the dead andthe displaced. There will be a lot of talk of Assam becominganother Bangladesh or even Pakistan, with careless fearmongering thrown in for good measure. There will be others whowill sell the absurd fiction that almost no illegal migrants from

Bangladesh exist in Assam.

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If one looks at a special kind of map of the world, the type wheredifferent population densities are marked with different colours,something sticks out. The part of the world with one of the biggestcontinuous stretches of the highest range population density isBengal East and West. Now incompletely split along religiouslines, the Bengals are pressure cookers with millions of

desperately poor people looking to migrate to any area withslightly better opportunities. With this in mind, let us come to

Assam.

Todays Assam state is the successor to the much larger provincethat included the huge Muslim-majority district of Sylhet, much of


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it now in Bangladesh. When Sylhet was a part of Assam beforePartition, Muslims were an important contending power bloc.

Sylhet was also partitioned in 1947 on the basis of a referendum.

The largely non-Muslim Congressites in Assam did not evencampaign seriously for the referendum, for they were only toohappy to see Sylhet go, so that they could have a complete gripover the legislature minus the Sylheti Muslim threat to power. Theorigin of the feeling of being slowly outnumbered and besiegedalso has a certain past. This feeling never died out. The post-Partition demographic shift of Assam has again started slidingback. The presence of Bengali-speaking migrants from

Bangladesh has led to a slow growth in this siege mentality. Thereluctance to fulfill the terms of 1985 Assam Accord has addedfuel to fire.

The Bengali population bomb is not only Muslim. To the east andnortheast of Bengal are territories that tribes have inhabited forcenturies. Due to the post-Partition influx of refugees, some ofthese zones have become Bengali-Hindu majority homelands.

One prominent example is Tripura. This tribal majority kingdom,inhabited by many tribal groups, most notably the Riyangs, is nowa Bengali-Hindu majority state. There is the same kind of tribalson-of-the-soil versus settler-Bengali conflict as in Assam with acrucial difference. Here the Bengalis are the clear victors. Thefuture of the tribal groups possibly lies in tenacious identity-preservation in Bantustans called autonomous councils or slowcultural assimilation into the Bengali mainstream.

A similarly sad saga is unfolding in Bangladesh where thegovernment, in its immense wisdom, settled large groups ofdesperately poor landless Muslim Bengalis in the hill tracts ofChittagong. The Chittagong Hill Tracts, one of those anomaliesof partition, had a solid tribal-Buddhist majority, all through the


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Pakistan period. After active state-supported migration schemes,now the Chittagong Hill Tracts are Bengali Muslim majority,except on paper. The army is stationed there largely to protectsettler colonies as they expand. Clashes between the indigenous

tribes and the settlers are common, with the military backing thesettlers to hilt. Human rights violations of the worst kind, includingkillings, rapes, village-burnings and forced conversions, havehappened, aided and abetted by the state. Like Assam, there hasbeen an accord in response to insurgency by the tribes. It remainsunimplemented.

All of this is happening in a global context, where the questions ofspecial indigenous rights are being raised. Some of it takes theform of racial politics of the majority as in certain Europeannations. There are the interesting cases of cosmopolitan citieslike Mumbai and Karachi with sons-of-the-soil in and out ofpower respectively, but both with a strong undercurrent for rightsof the local. It is easy to label these as xenophobic orprejudiced, especially in the 21

stcentury interconnected world.But this, too, is dissidence and of a primal variety that dare not tellits name in these times. I am not talking of nationalism but a

variety of ethnocentrism which has known and lived in a territoryand now finds too many outsiders in that space, playing bydifferent rules, making their own area less recognisable, all toosudden. The reaction to this loss of familiarity and challenge toposition from outside groups constitutes a strain that cannot beshouted down for its supposed political incorrectness. Often, suchmigrations happen in spurts and successive waves, where kinshipties are crucial. Such settlers have more in common with co-

settlers than the indigenous. Often, the settlers have a perilousexistence, partly due to the animosity of the indigenous. Thisleads to huddling with the known rather than with the unknown.This inhibits the kind of integrative processes that in the past ledto the formation of new communities. The host communities need


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special rights. We need creative and serious devolution of powerto local bodies.

Assam Riots

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