Bibhu Prasad Routray
Geopolitics, September 2012, page.64-66
As the day broke on 29 May, Kokrajhar town in western Assam became a theatre of intense agitation. The local Muslim youth group, the All Bodoland Minority Students’ Union (ABMSU) started enforcing a bandh, in protest against the removal of a signboard erected on a plot of land for building a mosque. The land, according to the administration was a forest land and hence, any construction activity was illegal. Moreover, the protest centred on the removal of the sign board appeared absurd. The sign board was still in place, although had been dislodged from one side. The administration and police ruled out any mischief and insisted that this could have been due to a storm in the previous days. The local Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC) administration prevented the protesters from forcing shops and offices to close, which resulted in a fracas and injuries to some people. Precautionary fire from the police dispersed the mob.
Trouble, however, restarted on 6 July, with the killing of two Muslim youths by unidentified gunmen in the Muslimpara village in Kokrajhar district. The government claimed that the gunmen belonged to the extremist outfit Kamtapur Liberation Organisation (KLO), which has been on a reorganisation spree in the area. A KLO cadre responsible for the attack was arrested. However, the claim was rejected by the Muslim organisations, who blamed the Bodos for the attack.
Thirteen days later, on 19 July, two ABMSU leaders were killed by unknown motorcycle borne attackers in Magurmari village in the same district. On 20 July, a retaliatory attack by a Muslim mob killed four former Bodo Liberation Tigers (BLT) cadres at Jaipur. The incident sparked off a series of attacks and counter-attacks the same night and later, blew up into full-scale conflict. Rioters indulged in both pre-planned as well as opportunistic violence in Kokrajhar district to begin with and later in the adjoining Dhubri, Chirang, and Bongaingaon district. Violence subsided on 24 July, only to restart on 5 August. Till 8 August 2012, according to Home Ministry's accounts, 77 people had lost their lives, 5367 houses had been burnt and 47,936 families had been affected. Men, women and children from 244 villages filled in the 340 temporary relief camps.
This episode of blood, fire, gory and displacement of 400,000 people in western Assam has brought back focus on several factors - gargantuan administrative and governance paralysis, deep seated communal politics, availability of small arms, centre-state relations and inter-ethnic relations etc. Questions have been raised on both the capacities of the autonomous councils as instruments of effective governance and also, the nature of peace deals with the extremist organisations which perpetuates the violence potential of the former militants.
This piece, within its limited ambit, focuses on the aspect of illegal migration and examines the impact of population flow from neighbouring Bangladesh on Assam's land and resources, accentuating the division in the popular psyche and precipitating violence. While refraining from categorising the Muslim population in the Bodoland as migrants, a job best left to the investigators and the courts, the article argues that prospects of violence veering around the same issues may not be limited to Bodoland alone in coming days.
Settlers or Immigrants?
Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi's 7 August statement, "Assam is just like a volcano. You don’t know what happens where", was an abject expression of helplessness. For his government, which has been accused of a delayed response to the crisis in Bodoland, it was also a predisposed portrayal of the entire situation. Mr. Gogoi is a protagonist of the theory that illegal migration from Bangladesh to Assam is no longer a valid proposition. For him, the recent violence amounts to a communal clash between two religious communities, the Bodos and the "Muslim settlers", who are natives of the Assam state and are cohabitants with the Bodo and other communities in the Bodoland area. Gogoi stands at one end of the spectrum.
The other end, quite crowded with a host of political parties and organisations from Assam and outside jostling to prove a point, is of the opinion that the clashes are the direct consequence of unabated migration from Bangladesh. Such migration, they allege, is not only changing the demography of Assam, making the indigenous Assamese minorities in their own land, but is also responsible for the battle over depleting resources and political rights. The recent case of violence, for this group, is between Indians and foreigners.
The truth is somewhere in between. To authoritatively term the Muslim population in the Bodoland area either as Indians or foreigners is an impossibility. However, given that illegal migration from Bangladesh is a reality in the entire state exerting immense pressure on its depleting resources, it is natural that Bodoland would not have remained immune to such a phenomenon. This area where governance remains a casualty under a skewed territorial council system, such demographic changes and consequent pressures are bound to erupt in regular intervals.
The Kamaluddin Syndrome
Amid claims both by New Delhi and the government in Dispur that they are doing their best to prevent illegal migration from Bangladesh, through a gamut of legal as well as capacity building exercises among the border guarding forces, the following case in 2008 came as a shocker.
On 23 July that year, the Gauhati High Court, sat in judgement over the fate of Mohammad Kamruddin alias Kamaluddin. 52-year old Kamaluddin, holding a Pakistani passport was believed to have entered Assam through Bangladesh. He not only lived in Moirajhar village in Nagaon district long enough to father six kids, but went on to contest the State Assembly elections in 1996 from Jamunamukh constituency. Kamaluddin had been deported to Bangladesh twice but returned with little difficulty to his wife Dilwara Begum.
The Court inquired how a man who possessed a Pakistani passport could contest elections in Assam. It went on to observe that Bangladeshis would soon become kingmakers in Assam and that the State government had failed to solve the problem of illegal migration. Within few days of the judgment, on 4 August, authorities in Assam rounded up Kamaluddin, handed him over to the Border Security Force (BSF) personnel who pushed him back to Bangladesh under the cover of darkness through the border along village Maishashan in Karimganj district.
Irrespective of whether Kamaluddin made a third come back into Assam or not, the court's observation was crucial and reiterated what many in Assam believe: 'political power has slipped away from the hands of the ethnic Assamese over the years and no political party can ever hope to win an election in the state without the support from the migrants lobby'. In fact, illegal migrants have already turned into kingmakers in Assam. Quite predictably, their growing political clout is demonstrated in the meek statements of the ruling regime in Assam which makes little distinction between the indigenous Muslims and the immigrants.
Politics of Migration
Demographic movements are almost a fait accompli with Assam situated in close proximity of a country that offers nothing to its own population in terms of economic opportunities. However, while the push factor behind migration is almost beyond Assam's capacity to resist, the governments both in Dispur and New Delhi have failed miserably in erecting protective barriers not only to make the very act of crossing over the international border difficult, but also to ensure that such people do end up acquiring citizenship in the country rather effortlessly.
According to reports, 'language schools' have flourished across Bangladesh converting the Bengali speaking migrants into Assamese speaking natives. On the international border, apart from the porosity that allows insurgents, smugglers and migrants alike to ingress, corrupt border guarding personnel let in people for a meagre tip. Once inside Assam, government offices issue ration cards and voter identity documents, in return for more money, erasing the illegality on the migrant's identity for all time to come. Migrants then move into the established clusters, mingle with the native population and continue to move within the state seeking greener pastures and economic opportunities. This vicious circle has flourished under the eyes of the very regimes, who tend to use these migrants as vote banks.
Muslims constitute 31 per cent of the Assam's population, and their support has had defining impact on electoral outcomes in the past. According to an estimate by an NGO, the Assam Public Works, over 40 lakh illegal migrants from Bangladesh had got their names entered into the electoral rolls. While there is no way to substantiate the claim, estimates do indicate that Muslims dominate at least 40 of the State’s 126 Assembly Constituencies.
Not surprisingly, all the political parties in Assam have felt the necessity to use this 'vote bank' for their necessary advantage. Be it the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) which claims to have an avowed policy of protecting the Assamese from the onslaught of the illegal migrants, or the Congress party, which is seen by many as having benefited from the presence of the migrants, have erred seriously in terms of tackling the presence of the Bangladeshis in Assam. Statistics show that between 1985 and 2005, a total of 12,846 persons were declared as foreigners by the tribunals under the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act. Of these, only 1,547 could be deported. In 2005, the Supreme Court repealed the controversial Illegal Migrants (Determination of Tribunals) [IM(DT)] Act. Subsequently, between July 2005 and March 2008, a total of 1,205 persons were declared as foreigners. Only one of them was actually deported.
In fact, the previously cited Kamaluddin case provides an insight into the attitude of the state which intermittently awakens to such assaults on its existence, before relapsing into slumber. The Kamaluddin case in 2008 was the source of intense agitations all over Assam, spearheaded by the known students' organisations. However, within months, the issue vanished from popular memory. Not surprisingly, the Congress party, even with a "protector of the migrants" image has been re-elected consecutively thrice to state legislative assembly. The trend to fall in line and exploit the new demographic realities to its advantages even caught up with the militant group United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) which, in its formative years, had protested against illegal Bangladeshi migration. ULFA, in the early 1990s, urged the people of Assam to recognise the contributions mad by the immigrants.
Governance & Demographic Pressure
What is true about Assam, can only be a fact in the Bodoland. As migration from Bangladesh alters demography in the entire state, it is unimaginable that this stretch of land would remain immune to such changes. Moreover, Bodoland is plagued with additional drawbacks, making it perhaps the most vulnerable region in the entire state.
In the Bodoland area, as per the official estimation, Bodos are about 35 percent of the population, Muslims are 20 percent, Adivasis about 15 percent and the rest 30 percent is made up of Assamese and Bengali Hindus and non-Bodo tribes. This makes the 2003 BTC a skewed experiment, which seeks to protect the interests of the Bodos in an area where their numerical strength significantly lower than the non-Bodos. Non-Bodos argue that political power at the hands of Bodos altered the dynamics on the ground. Bodos, on the other hand, fear that their political power linked to their numerical strength is becoming even more vulnerable as a result of rise in the number of non-Bodos, i.e. the Muslims.
Such fear has combined disastrously with the absolute lack of governance in the area where the Bodo Leaders, former militants of the BLT and now members of the Political party, the Bodoland People's Front (BPF), are more keen to enjoy the benefits that the BTC experiment brings along with it, rather than providing effective governance. The net result is a sure shot recipe for disaster. Rivalry over scarce land and depleting resources have led to regular flare ups in the past years, each of them veering around the same issue and each resulting in the large number of deaths and displacements of thousands. Availability of small arms, mostly those of the former militants, add to the violence potential of the people involved.
The current phase of violence would subside. However, prospect of peace in the future will always remain grim, unless measures are taken to address the divisive tendencies and the factors that regularly lead to these flare ups. The migration issue is one of the, if not the only, challenges. The Chief Minister's statement, however, does not inspire much confidence.
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