26 aug 2012
Ground Zero report: In Kokrajhar, the foreigner debate revisited?
Kokrajhar: Just when it seems that the troubled parts of
lower Assam would finally get back its normal routine, hopes are belied.
Last evening, when a group of people were returning to their village,
they were waylaid and five people lost their lives. The local
administration went by the easiest option in a bureaucrat's rulebook and
imposed "indefinite curfew."
People once again worrying, from the confined safety of their homes, how long will their rations last? Or the promised peace?
Two
days back, I ventured out in Kokrajhar to ask the same question to
Hagrama Mohillary, the chief of the Bodo Territorial Council. "Whatever
Ajmal has said is not true. What happened in Chirang and Kokrajhar is
the fight against illegal Bangladeshi immigrants. We have no fight with
our original Muslim brothers. It's not a fight between Bodos and
Muslims. It is a foreigner's issue," says the reclusive chief of the
Bodo Territorial Council, trying to dispel the impression that Kokrajhar
witnessed communal clashes.
Bodo leaders claim the fight is between indigenous
people and migrants who have may have sneaked in from Bangladesh and
settled on government land.
To furnish their claims, the Bodo
leadership is now preparing a dossier that they will submit to the Home
Ministry on Monday. The document talks of encroachment of the government
land in the Bodo districts.
The dossier, accessed by NDTV, says
about 78,000 hectares have been encroached out of a total of 2.5 lakh
hectares of land in the Bodo areas.
This is an allegation that's outrightly rejected by settlers.
35-year-old
P R Ali, an inmate the Bhotgaon relief camp in Kokrajhar, says they can
prove their citizenship. "We have all permanent documents. Our
forefathers have lived here for generations. All this talk of Ajmal is
false."
Their family, claims Ali, has been in Assam for over 5 generations.
Historically,
farmers from Mymensingh district of erstwhile East Bengal use to come
as cultivators and share-croppers. Large-scale migration happened during
British rule in 1930s under the 'Grow More Food' campaign. Farmers from
East Bengal, now Bangladesh, were considered experts in wet paddy
cultivation.
Even now, economic activity drives settlement. In
2003, Bodos got themselves a territorial council and the power to build
roads, schools, hospitals and other developmental work.
All this
meant a sudden surge in the demand for labour and a huge supply gap, a
gap that was met by the Bengali-speaking settlers who had already proven
themselves as efficient daily wage labourers, masons, carpenters,
rickshaw pullers apart from vegetable growers.
With increasing
economic prosperity comes political status. The settlers have now
started demanding better political status, an idea that's made minority
leader Badruddin Ajmal, an important rallying point.
Muqaddas
Abdul Bhuiyan had come to visit his in-laws but got caught in the web of
violence and displacement. Many of us including me view the current
conflict through fixed stereotypes: ethnic clash with communal
overtones, anti-foreigner movement and so on.
"This is not about
Hindu-Muslim sir. We hear that our numbers have gone up and the Bodos
are coming down. That's why we are being targeted. And they are making
this a foreigner issue to take along the other communities like Rabha,
Santhals, Assamese," says Bhuiyan.
His explanation made perfect
sense to me: Bodos got their territorial council under the 6th schedule
of the constitution. Except police, they control all major developmental
rights including land rights in the Bodoland Territorial Administered
Districts (BTAD).And the basis for BTAD was their dominance, both
political as well as numerical.
But according to the estimates of
the Bodo leadership, these numbers are changing. A Bodo leader of the
ruling party, Bodo People's Front, showed me an estimate that he claims
has been drawn up by the local police. "Bengali-speaking settlers have
increased from 15 per cent to 25 per cent between 2001 and 2012. And
for the same period, Bodos have come down from 40 per cent to 30 per
cent," said the leader who did not want to be quoted.
I had no
way of verifying these figures but knew that such a discourse will
certainly add to the angst and fear among locals that there has been a
silent invasion. Some though still can't believe the hostility.
Gopinath
Basumatary, a farmer in Bamungaon village near the Dhubri, Ajmal's
constituency, says: "We never thought we would be attacked. We used to
live in great harmony."
But as attacks and counter attacks go on
in these troubled parts, once again the state is witnessing revival of
migration politics. For nearly 40 years, the dominant theme in Assam
politics has been illegal immigration. The late 70s and early 80s saw
the Assam agitation and the anti-foreigner movement resulting in the
Assam Accord of 1985. Many believe though that the core issue has not
yet been addressed. Now, the recent events have rekindled the debate.
