Bodos: Crisis of unresolved grievances

Sanjoy Hazarika

Why is this little pocket of land in western Assam so explosive, such a tinderbox of unresolved grievances and bitternesses? It is a stinging commentary on the state government that those living in shelters still do not find conditions safe enough to return home.

Bodo villagers move to a safer place after their houses were attacked and set alight in Gossaigaon, in district Kokrajhar, Assam. 

Cost of conflict

The Adivasis have remained largely poor and underprivileged, their villages still lack basic facilities. their HDI is as low as are education levels.

The lack of communications — in this case proper roads — which enabled the killers to hit and virtually walk away unimpeded is a damning indictment of the state government’s inability to meet basic needs.

Increasingly, automatic weapons have been used by the Bodo groups.

The problems of internal conflict will remain unless ground work continues to mend fences and bridges.

An official committee of social scientists and civil society organisations working in the field, in association with knowledgeable officials, should be quickly constituted to review the land situation in this fragmented land and suggest ways to reduce the confrontation.

It’s that time of the year again when one is flooded with media requests for interviews and columns to explain something brutally horrific that has taken place in the North-eastern wedge of the country. For decades, my contemporaries, friends and I have been called upon to explain and make sense of this to fellow Indians, on television and in print, on radio and on social media, of what was once “isolated and disturbed,” to use two cliches where Delhi and even the state capitals still remain “distant”, peopled by communities with a deep sense of being discriminated against, of injustice.

It is getting more and more difficult to explain the growing complexity and extraordinary range of emotions that these events raise: from anger to perplexity, from suspicion and frustration to despair, from doubt and horror to seeking a fast and furious response against those who are responsible. We too go through this cyclorama of feelings. It is wearying to see this cycle of murder begetting hatred, violence, more bloodshed and hatred repeating itself in ever shorter cycles.

Violent outrages

This is a time of the year when one should be — as were the victims of the latest barbaric assault — be spending time with family and friends and preparing for a better year. But this is not to be; year after year, season after season, violent outrages take away the innocent and the most vulnerable. In most cases, some political justification is trotted out but in the latest, there can be none for there is none. 

If anything, the latest incidents have further buried the romance of insurgency. There are few genuine “insurgencies’ in the North-east any longer: the romance of fighting for a people’s rights, of trekking against difficult terrain to Burma and Bangladesh and even China is a thing of the past, to base and train there. This has happened although armed groups continue to trickle into Myanmar and slip in and out of Bangladesh. This is the more correct description — armed groups, with little in terms of ideology but whose cadres know little else but the power of the gun and the terror it commands, which enables extortion, intimidation, kidnapping and ransom.

Crime against humanity

Groups of armed men, in uniform, who shoot up villagers in a spray of gunfire cannot be called by any stretch of the imagination as fighters for a political ideology. They are simply terrorists who have committed crimes against humanity. They follow a long list of fellow violators of human rights in the North-East and Jammu and Kashmir or in Pakistan; surely, there is little to distinguish them from those as the Taliban and the IS who slaughter with impunity.

But why is this little pocket of land in western Assam so explosive, such a tinder box of unresolved grievances and bitternesses? Of course, there are land concerns: In fact, most issues in the North-East, not just in this part of it, start with historic questions over land allocation to different groups and much of this began from the colonial days of the Raj, with the British parcelling out large segments of land, drawing lines and forming borders of districts and provinces (states). Many of the current land and territorial conflicts in the region stem from over a century back including the Naga demand for a homeland that includes parts of current-day Assam, Arunachal Pradesh as well as the hills of Manipur.

Special land rights

As far as the current situation is concerned, the Bodo — seen as the major indigenous community of parts of western Assam — have been privileged with special land rights and laws that are supposed to prevent alienation of those entitlements. However, these land control rules have been violated over time and a large settlement of non-Bodos has taken place with the connivance of revenue staff and local politicians.

These have included other tribes as well as non-tribals such as Assamese speakers, Muslims of Bengali (not necessarily Bangladeshi) origin. Groups such as the Koch-Rajboingshi have also lived in these areas for generations while the Adivasis, who are at the heart of the horrific assaults and fightback as of today, were settlers brought during the colonial dispensation largely to work on the tea plantations started by the British.

 

The Adivasis have remained largely poor and underprivileged, their villages still lack basic facilities, their HDI is low as are education levels. The lack of communications — in this case proper roads — which enabled the killers to hit and virtually walk away unimpeded is a damning indictment of the state government's failure over decades to establish basic services to meet basic needs.

Bridge rural road gaps

In this light, one would have thought that the Central Government, which has announced its plans to build a major highway along Arunachal Pradesh, would be well served if it pressured the Assam government to bridge its rural road gaps for a start. The trans-Arunachal highway is a response to massive Chinese infrastructure building in Tibet, just to its north, with a network of dams, road and high-speed railways. The cycle of violence has been rotating incessantly, especially since 1994 when the first major riots involving Bodos, Santhals and Adivasis in Kokrajhar took place. Later, the attacks and counterattacks involved the Muslim settlers, many of whom have been there for decades although Bodo radicals claim there are many Bangladeshis who have also come in.

The latter remains an accusation that is bandied about with ease and with frightening results across the North-East. For 20 years, a large number of all communities continue to live in relief camps, among the lakhs of internally displaced in the North-East who are rarely counted statistically and who barely count politically — except when it comes to a tragedy of this scale. Increasingly, automatic weapons have been used by the Bodo groups.

The worst incident, it could be argued, was in 2012, when a set of incidents led to large-scale attacks by Bodos on Muslim settlements and retaliatory attacks in which nearly half a million people, (the largest such figure since Independence), fled their homes and lived in temporary relief camps. Less than a hundred died, it is reported, but the aim was to drive people away from their villages and torch their homes. It is a stinging commentary on the state government that those in these shelters still do not find conditions safe enough to return home. 

In May this year, over 40 Muslim men, women and children were shot down by the same NDFB group, triggering public anger which was reflected in theoverwhelming victory of a non-Bodo candidate in the Kokrakhar Lok Sabha constituency. My mind goes back to the February 1983, Lok Sabha and state assembly elections in which violence was reported in almost every district of Assam as a state-wide boycott of the elections called by the then powerful All-Assam Students Union under Prafulla Mahanta and Brighu Phukan drew popular support. 

Areas exploded in bloodshed, with virtually every ethnic group arising against Muslim settlers although in some areas tribes and non-tribals battled each other as in Gohpur where Bodos and Assamese farmers clashed, with the former being driven to the Arunachal border. In almost every flash point, the core issue was land.

That old and grim reality cannot obfuscate the unacceptability of the murders of the past days. Land will always be a contentious issue, especially its control and use in a narrow valley barely 90 km wide in places where the population is packed into flood plains and its neighbourhood, buffeted by floods for three to four months of the year, losing homes, farms, livestock, health and capital. 

Thus, land is precious, almost priceless, and will always be at the heart of a rallying cry for those seeking greater homelands or seeking to rid the “outsiders” or justifying violence. But if it is used as a weapon to carry out senseless attacks and to drive out the “other”, it only stresses what has come to be another grim reality: the failure of the State and of local leaders to help bring about mutual understanding and accord.

Civil society activists and village leaders have struggled against impossible odds to help bring about accommodation. The task is too great to be left to them, to pick up the pieces when administrations and politicians fail.

The situation obviously calls for tough, sustained and unforgiving action, against the NDFB (S) group, across state boundaries. Anything less than that would be a betrayal of the public interest. Let us beware of quick- fix solutions where the Army and paramilitary rush in. They can be used effectively only for short stints.

Strengthen the police

The key lies in strengthening the Assam Police, increasing their numbers, better equipping them and deploy them rapidly. The use of drones as surveillance techniques in the thickly forested hills where many of the armed groups shelter is also important.

After all, what can bows and arrows do against an AK-56? These new weapons have turned the entire security situation on its head, with extensive violence and mayhem easier to create.

 

Even groups which are in peace talks, refuse to be disarmed and hold on to their automatic weapons. These weapons are easily available in the illegal small arms markets and new technology and better connectivity enable them to move seamlessly over long distances. 

Problems of internal conflict will, however, remain unless ground work continues to mend fences and bridges. In addition, a official committee of social scientists and civil society organisations working in the field, in association with knowledgeable officials, should be quickly constituted to review the land situation in this fragmented land and suggest ways to reduce confrontation. Images of Adivasis fighting with bows and arrows takes me back to the dark days of 1983, where I saw groups gathering and marching to points of battle, almost like in some primordial conflict. It is an image that has never left me. 

In those few days, lakhs were displaced and no one really knows how many died. Assam has long been teetering on a knife edge. It cannot be allowed to fall back into the lost years of an earlier time. Some of the suggestions above are a pointer to what can and must be done. 

The writer is a commentator, writer and researcher on the NE & Director, Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.