COMMUNALISM

Hate speeches triggered Assam violence: report

A fact-finding report on the recent violence in Baksa in Assam, released by the Centre for Policy Analysis on Wednesday, has blamed “hate speeches” by leaders for igniting up ethnic tensions in the State.

“On April 30, six days after the polling, Pramila Rani Brahma, an MLA from the ruling Bodoland Political Front party, made a statement that the BPF would find it hard to win these Lok Sabha elections as Muslims of the Bodoland Territorial Autonomous Districts (BTAD) had not voted for its candidate. She has, however, denied this,” says the report.

It also points out an election speech by BJP prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi in Dhemaji, alleging a conspiracy to eliminate the endangered rhinoceros in Assam to make way for Bangladeshi settlers.

Based on the report, the CPA has recommended a series of measures, including the appointment of a judicial commission for a time-bound probe, to ensure security and rehabilitation of the victims.

The report quotes the victims as saying that that among the attackers were surrendered militants who had been appointed by the BTAD as local forest guards. “The local security personnel also confirmed that some of the bullets on the victims’ bodies were from official forest rifles and others from automatic weapons,” the report says, alleging that the names of the accused had not been included in the FIRs.

The report recounts previous instances of violence fuelled by ethnic and religious hostilities since the 1979 “anti-foreigners” agitation in Assam in February 1983 and 1987. “The situation changed drastically in 1993 when the government signed the Bodo accord. In 1993, Bengali Muslims were killed and their homes looted and burnt,” says the report, adding that similar attacks happened in 2000 and in 2012.

‘Revisit Bodo accord’

Citing the continual violence, the organisation has recommended that the Bodoland Accord be re-visited as it has become a divisive instrument. It also wants statements of the victims recorded under Section 164 of the Criminal Procedure Code and all persons named arrested. “There must be a time-bound programme to confiscate all illegal weapons in the area,” says the report.

Lessons from Assam’s carnage

The killing of over 30 people, most of them Muslim women and children, acrossAssam’s Bodoland Territorial Area District (BTAD) is a deadly reminder of systematic efforts towards ethnic cleansing that is under way in that area. The National Democratic Front of Boroland (Songbijit), fighting for a “Sovereign Boroland” to be carved out of Assam, remains the natural and principal suspect for the carnage: it was behind the violence between the indigenous ethnic Bodo community and the erstwhile East Bengal-origin Muslims who generally speak Assamese and certain Bengali dialects that erupted in July-August 2012, leading to the killing of more than a hundred people and the displacement of about 4.85 lakh. But the difference this time is that the atmosphere has been vitiated seriously in the context of elections. In a manifesto released for Assam in April, the State BJP unit made a potentially incendiary promise that it would identify and expel all illegal immigrants staying in Assam — but with a caveat. It promised to protect Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and members of the Scheduled Castes who have come there from Bangladesh following “religious, political and social persecution”, and not to treat them as illegal migrants. In such a context, it is hardly surprising that oblique and not-so-oblique statements have been made by different political leaders linking the BJP’s stance on such a sensitive topic, and the recrudescence of violence in the BTAD.

The Assam Police have put the blame on the NDFB (Songbijit). Meanwhile, survivors claimed to have identified some of the attackers as surrendered militants of the erstwhile Bodo Liberation Tigers (BLT). The Bodoland People’s Front (BPF), formed by former leaders of the BLT, that holds the reins of the Bodoland Territorial Council, is also a coalition partner of the Congress in Assam but has indicated it might team up with the BJP, post-election. Significantly, BPF legislator Pramila Rani Brahma had alleged that its candidate for the Kokrajhar constituency was likely to lose as a majority of Muslims did not vote for him. The constituency has about six lakh Bodo voters, nine lakh non-Bodo voters, and four lakh Muslim voters. Narrow election-related interests have complicated the situation, yet it is important that the investigating agencies are able to identify the culprits and reassure the migrant communities of the safety of their lives and property. Urgent steps are needed to ensure their security and protection. Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi’s government should be held to account for the repeated failure in checking the violence, even as it remains under the cloud of militancy that looms over the State. For a start, the government should initiate a process of vulnerability mapping in areas that could see further trouble down the line.

Where everyone is a minority

The grim and bloody incidents in the Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC), that narrow wedge of land in western Assam where everyone is a minority — or rather a non- majority since their numbers don’t have it — have been aggravated by the verbal violence of our politicians, the blame game and the total incapacity of the State government to deal with existing conditions.

For the second time in less than two years, thousands of Muslims and smaller numbers of Bodos are fleeing their homes, frightened by their complete vulnerability to gun-wielding terrorists, the nightmare of seeing loved ones, ranging from infants to elders, butchered in front of them and, perhaps worse still, the fearful knowledge that the government can’t protect them.

Today, the capacity of the Congress-led government in Assam to ensure the protection of minorities is being gravely questioned. For in every major communal clash or bout of violence in the Bodo areas — 1993, 2008, 2012 and now — a Congress Party government has ruled Dispur.

Complex play of factors

The State government’s seeming failure may be a tipping point for the last round of the Lok Sabha election elsewhere in the country. Ironically, the greatest violence in the country during an otherwise seemingly flawless massive election exercise has been, ironically, in the home area of one of the country’s Election Commissioners, H.S. Brahma, who is incidentally a Bodo.

There is a larger failure here too, of “us,” of civil society, researchers and scholars, the media, despite the courageous and silent role of dedicated activists and groups which have tried for years to reduce the tension between Bodos, Muslims and other ethnic groups in western Assam.

While the State government has directly blamed the shadowy Songbijit faction of the National Democratic Front of Boroland for the massacres, there is, as always, a complex play of factors here.

One is the fact that the militants were under tremendous pressure from security forces since they killed an Additional Superintendent of Police in Sonitpur district. The police went after them with a vengeance, taking down several cadres; one police official believes it is this pressure that forced the faction to hit vulnerable targets, to take the heat off, get time to regroup while also stoking communal fears and exposing the shortcomings of the State government.

In addition, a statement by a prominent Bodo leader, Pramila Rani Brahma of the Bodoland People’s Front (BPF), complicated matters and triggered outrage even from the Congress, the BPF’s coalition partner at the State level. She said (without revealing the basis of her information) that since Muslims had voted against the party’s Lok Sabha candidate, he was unlikely to do well. This has led to calls for her arrest.

Yet, the trail of blood goes back, unlike many other events and challenges in the region — barely 20 years. Before 1993, there had been few clashes involving Muslims and Bodos. Later, an armed group, the Bodo Liberation Tigers (BLT), attacked Santhals as well as Muslims. For their own safety, they were placed in relief camps, which again came under attack. Accounts say that not less than 50 were killed in those incidents.

In 2002, there were a series of attacks; in one, non-Bodo passengers were pulled out of a bus and shot. Soon after this, the BLT decided to come to the negotiating table.

The BPF is the party in power in the BTC, which rules the “Bodo” districts. But there’s a major flaw in the system — the BPF doesn’t have control over law and order: the State government has jurisdiction of the police. This is because the BTC was formed under the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution, which enables small tribes in four States of the north-east to run their own affairs in the manner of an expanded Panchayati Raj system, instead of being completely dependent on the whims of the State government.

The Sixth Schedule aims to protect tribal rights from encroachment by larger non-tribe groups and is in place in parts of Assam, all of Meghalaya, Mizoram and a part of Tripura.

In 2003, the Schedule was extended to the western Assam plains to create the BTC as part of an agreement between the Centre, the State government and the BLT. The BLT was virtually given an amnesty and morphed into a legal, “democratic” political entity: after some changes, the Bodoland People’s Front was born. The idea was an effort to resolve a bloody armed movement that had taken a toll of hundreds of lives. But to do so, without taking into consideration the overall realities of the region, was a recipe for disaster.

Another major outbreak occurred in 2008 in which both Bodos and non-Bodos including Muslims were rendered homeless and placed in camps. In 2008 again, bomb blasts across the State killed over 100 persons including 80 in Guwahati, the commercial and political heart of Assam; these were attributed to the National Democratic Front of Bodoland, led by Ranjan Daimary, which sought independence from India.

Fallout of manufactured consent

The worst outbreak of violence, in 2012, when over 100 died and about 4.5 lakh were displaced in rioting and killings, was described as the most extensive internal displacement since Partition. A majority of victims and homeless were Muslim; the involvement of the BPF turned up in the arrest of one of its council members, who was accused by witnesses of leading the attacks.

The area’s demography is one reason why trouble will fester rather than abate: it has nothing to do with illegal migration, Bangladeshis, etc. It has everything to do with the fact of how a minority of the population (the Bodos are some 30 per cent of the BTC area) controls the lives and destinies of the others. From an armed group, the BLT became a political party within a larger political process, with access to Central and State funds, power, land and resources. A number of its leaders were once wanted for their role in alleged killings and explosions; when they rose to office, their acolytes benefited. Their opponents, even the moderates within the Bodo community, suffered intimidation, pressure and worse.

An opposition movement has grown that sought to protect the rights of the other groups which do not comprise just the Muslims — there are Assamese and Bengali Hindus, Koch Rajbongshis and Adivasis. Together they make up nearly 70 per cent of the population. Any system that does not guarantee some basic rights to them and protect their interests is bound to fail.

The core of the problems in the north-east, be it in Nagaland, Manipur, Assam or elsewhere, lies in the mobilisation of identity over land, territory and natural resources. Many of the disputes between States, communities and even villages can be traced to this. The same is true of the Bodo areas, where Bodo lands have been encroached and settled upon by others.

There are two issues here: If key problems are to be tackled, then all sides need to sit down together to work out the ways that land and resources can be shared without creating further ill-will. The State government and the BTC have failed to do so. They have failed because they have looked for quick-fix solutions without going deep enough and far enough to meet people’s grievances. The fallout that we see today is that of manufactured consent.

If it isn’t, then Delhi should be worried because this volatile region is in danger again of falling back to the times of earlier troubles. At the State and local levels, governments and policy makers need to involve people working in the field and community representatives in search of answers.

Playing politics

There is a second critical point: if such processes are to gain momentum, then there must be a relentless campaign against terrorist groups. What has filled many with frustration and anger, within the north-east and outside, is the way governments proclaim that they will tackle ethnic and communal violence with a “firm hand”; yet, once the bloodshed is over, the displaced go home and the issues vanish from the headlines, it’s back to business as usual with the criminals, extortionists and their partners in politics and the bureaucracy.

Recent history shows how those involved in the violence are “negotiated” with, in State after State. Settlements reward the perpetrators with even more powers, cocooned by security provided by the State. This is described as part of the democratic process.

I doubt if this will wash any longer: too much blood has been spilt these past years.

In this situation, tossing out the mantra of “Bangladeshi” immigrants as being at the heart of the problem would be extremely ill-advised. Nothing could be further from the truth, so insidiously easy to push, so dangerous to stoke. The Bharatiya Janata Party needs to understand these issues in greater depth before asserting positions which could have devastating consequences on a fragile landscape.

(Sanjoy Hazarika is director, Centre for North East Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia.)

Bodo hopes and minority rights

With the gunning down of 44 Muslim villagers, including many children, in a matter of 36 hours between May 1 and 2, the Bodoland debacle has now grown into a bigger issue for policymakers, marked by a continuing failure to contain its descent into an ever deeper abyss of violence. The Bodoland Territorial Area District (BTAD) has emerged as one of the most volatile flashpoints of violence in the country with deadly clashes breaking out repeatedly over a mobilisation of identity, territory and resources being linked to claims on political power. The reason for the enduring political failure to prevent the violence lies in the very political-bureaucratic predispositions with which the government has been addressing the complex ethnic and security challenges in the region. With intensified inter-group competition over resources and the subsequent rise of the “son of the soil” doctrine, the escapist measure of the state in “allowing” selective elite dominance in Bodoland was only bound to explode into periodic violence sooner than later.

Behind a political quagmire

The Bodos, who constitute the largest tribal community out of a total of 34 tribal communities in Assam, have been fighting for greater political autonomy since the early decades following independence; this gathered momentum with the organisation of the Plain Tribals Council of Assam (PTCA) in the 1960s and then matured with the demand for a separate State by the All Bodo Students’ Union (ABSU) in 1987. According to the 2001 Census, the Scheduled Tribe (ST) population of Assam was 12.41 per cent out of which Bodos are about 40 per cent. But within the BTAD, an area of 27,100 square kilometres (or 35 per cent of Assam), the Bodos constitute less than 30 per cent with no other ethnic group (Assamese speakers, Bengali Muslims, Bengali Hindus, Koch-Rajbongshis) having an absolute majority. The Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC) was formed as a special territorial privilege under the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution as in the Memorandum of Settlement of February 2003 between the Government of India, the Government of Assam and the Bodo Liberation Tigers (BLT). The BTC has 12 electorate members with a reserved Scheduled Tribe seat in the Lok Sabha.

The BTC accord is an official recognition of Bodo political aspirations and promises to “fulfil economic, educational and linguistic aspirations and the preservation of land rights, socio-cultural and ethnic identity of the Bodos” — a special status that the Bodo nationalists claim as their historical due and which others term as a gross violation of equality and democratic rights of the nearly 70 per cent non-Bodo population of the area. This debate needs to come under the lens of history.

In the interest of early colonialism, new reservation policies were introduced to restrain “native” access to valuable forests and to stimulate the clearance of fertile “wastelands” for the setting up of tea estates resulting in an increasingly restrictive regime of “boundaries” that curtailed livelihood options. This colonial enterprise for revenue maximising, also accompanied by schemes like “grow more food,” radically altered western Assam’s demography as a large influx of poor peasants and labourers from Chota Nagpur, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Nepal and Maimansing was engineered in the interest of the colonial economy. Forest reservation policies as well as cross-border migration continued heavily in the first decades of independence. One estimate in the mid-1980s had the tribal population in northwest Assam surrounded by a wealthy forest zone of 3,539.95 sq.km — in formal-judicial terms, more than 80 per cent was inaccessible to them. This entrapment is not only of the community from the resources but is also an entrapment of one community from the other. The fear of all political minorities in Bodoland is a replication of the way the Bodo community was once entrapped (and in many ways continues to be so) which might influence the newly empowered Bodo political elites to create a system that would entrap them. Feelings of relative deprivation through an entrenched minority entrapment could spark off new insurgencies in the BTC/BTAD territory.

In this context, what is significant is growing political assertions by sections of Muslims under banners like The All Bodoland Minority Students’ Union (ABMSU) and ‘Sankhyalagu Aikhya Mancha’ (Minorities United Front). ABMSU has even demanded proportionate employment policies for community numbers and reservation for minority students in medical and engineering colleges in the area. It has also asked political parties to reserve at least three seats for the minorities in those constituencies where they are in an absolute majority.

In a sense, the BTC accord justifies that every community with perceived historical roots in a particular place has a right to delineate that “imagined place” and to protect it from perceived “outsiders.” Riots in the Bodoland area have highlighted increasing valorisation of the “son of the soil” doctrine, a doctrine that is the result of powerfully territorialised (ethnic) identities and the enduring but highly selective reaffirmation of “natural” geo-cultural links between ethnic groups and territory. In such an atmosphere, people of Bangladeshi/East Bengal migrant descent bear the brunt of the anger as they are often seen as fake autochthones acting as Indian citizens/locals.

A safety valve that failed

Bodoland is an example where institutions like the autonomous council (as in the Sixth Schedule) have become de-facto tools of political management used to defuse possible dissent against the state. The government invests in group leaders by distributing substantial financial and coercive resources, allowing some form of local autocracy to consolidate power which is aimed at minimising threats to “national security” and “anti-state” violence, even while creating the conditions for the rise of localised violence and corruption. In fact the choice to negotiate with the BLT in 2003 bilaterally and a significant tolerance of BLT ceasefire violations all seem to have been intended to allow the BLT to consolidate local power. Even the interim body created to oversee the first elections to the BTC was headed by former militants. However, observations about the exercise of special political autonomy often show that it has perpetuated local oligarchies and created new elites, often weakening the links between people and political power.

The violent rivalry between Bodo political outfits and gradually emerging non-Bodo political conglomerations is a reflection of this agenda of elite ethnic dominance. It is the proactive defiance and political mobilisation of Muslims against the Bodoland Peoples’ Front (BPF) candidate that had invited the assassin’s bullets. The independent candidate, Naba Saraniya, supported by the Sanmilita Janagostiya Aikkyamancha (SJA), an amalgamation of 20 “non-Bodo” ethnic and linguistic groups based in BTAD, have put up a strong fight against the BPF candidate, Chandan Brahma, while the “Bodo votes” are divided.

Need for radical measures

The first step would be to sweep the region clean by seizing the significant amount of illegal weapons. A more protracted step would be to consider a modification of the BTC agreement. The arrangements now not only give the elites from one ethnic group disproportionate power over the others, but also provide further incentive and a rationale to/for this domination. The alleged involvement of a number of forest guards under the BTC administration along with suspected militants from anti-talks National Democratic Front of Boroland (NDFB-Songbijit) in the recent killings indicates a flocking of forces under a political agenda of elite dominance.

The BTC accord needs be reworked to expand the democratic ambit of its mandate by making it more accommodative with a greater share and proportionate representation to different communities residing in BTAD. Otherwise, a redrawing of BTAD boundaries by removing areas with a substantial non-Bodo majority seems to be a sensitive but an unavoidable option. It is time the government gears itself up for effective and responsible measures before there is another bloodbath in the region.

(Kaustubh Deka, recently a Public Policy Scholar at The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy, is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for Political Studies, School of Social Sciences, JNU, Delhi.)