M. BURHANUDDIN QASMI brings to light the sad story of ethnic conflicts and massacres in Assam, which have led to permanent displacement of a large population especially of Muslims.
Ethnic violence, which has become endemic to the states of postcolonial Northeast India, has often targeted populations of migrant origin as foreigners or illegal immigrants to be sent back to their lands of origin. The Nepalis from the neighbouring kingdom of Nepal, Bengalis or say precisely Bengali Muslims from undivided East Bengal, who have migrated to Northeast India – present West Bengal, Assam and Tripura during colonial times have long integrated into the multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society of the region. Some of the Bengali Muslims were made to migrate from Mymensingh, Noakhali, Chittagong and Sylhet districts of present Bangladesh to parts of present West Bengal and Tripura states of India and to Kokrajhar, Goalpara, Dhubri and Barpeta districts of present Assam at the time of Nawab Sirajuddaulah (1733-1757) and later by the East India Company and British government too during 1757-1947. For, they were skilled farmers, capable to clean and make deep forestland cultivable, fishermen thus better in coping with riverside situations, and above all they were suffering from famine, flood and drought in the areas they were living in then. The uninterrupted emigration continued till as late as 1975 and in the post-independence India majority of emigrants from East Pakistan or present Bangladesh were Bengali Hindus. On the contrary a major portion of indigenous Sylhati speaking Muslims from districts like present Cachar, Karimganj and Hailakandi migrated from India to Bangladesh after partition.
These emigrants Muslims have, in recent times, been frequently identified as foreigners as their so-called growing numbers have caused worry for the politically motivated indigenous people of Assam, as well as the seemingly deliberate attempts of the ethnic movements to loosely define the term ‘foreigner’. These people have suffered large-scale evictions and internal displacement. Undoubtedly all the post colonial governments and political parties in the Northeast found the issue a cheap source to politicking and thus agony of the suffering people strikes no conscious willpower to a permanent solution in national or international arena.
SITUATION IN NORTHEAST INDIA
In a well written paper by Lopita Nath: Peace and Democracy in South Asia: Migrants in Flight: in January 2005, the post-1947 Northeast India is beautifully described.
Northeast India today consists of eight states: Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura and Sikkim. The region is ethnically and linguistically more diverse than the rest of India; of the 430 recognised tribes in India, some 200 make their home in the Northeast and an estimated 25 per cent of the Northeast’s 31 million inhabitants belong to tribal groups. The colonial British practice of settling ethnic outsiders in the various industries as cheap labour or as farmers to sow the enormous fallow fields of the Brahmaputra valley or as clerks in the lower echelons of the bureaucracy, added the migrant-native dimension to ethnic relations in the region. The colonial province soon evolved into a shared homeland of Asamiyas, tribals and migrants resulting in marked changes in the demographic composition of the land.
In the postcolonial period, a new dimension was added to the already growing complex scenario as the strategic location of India’s Northeastern region in South Asia made it prone to undocumented immigration from across porous, land and river borders. In the past century the region had received immigrants as refugees, economic migrants and ecological victims from the neighbouring countries of Nepal and Bangladesh (erstwhile East Pakistan) primarily and also Chins, Nagas and Burmese from Myanmar. This has caused the Northeast’s population to swell from around one million to more than 20 million. The increase in population led to a competition for resources and jobs, as both land and opportunities ceased to be abundant and soon such competition singled out migrant communities as people to be sent back to their countries of origin. Almost all the states of Northeast India have, at some time or the other, experienced political mobilisation and organised violence against migrants, anti-outsider movements leading to victimisation and expulsion of the communities of migrant origin and at times even ethnic cleansing of the non-indigenous groups. This ‘identity politics’, which became the defining theme of postcolonial Northeast Indian political agenda, laid an exclusive claim to a land that had emerged as a shared homeland since the earliest times.
The anti-outsider politics came sharply into focus by the ‘son of the soil’ agitation in Assam (the Assam Movement, (1979-85), which became a point of reference for many of the subsequent nativist movements in the rest of the Northeastern region. These tensions, overtly organised against illegal immigrants, also spilled over to some Indian citizens because the categories were never clearly defined and perhaps intentionally left hazy, and these soon came to include tribals and descendants of migrants in the various states of Northeast India. What began as ethnic strife between `indigenous’ and ‘foreign’ groups turned into ethnic clashes between populations that had essentially become local to the area. In most cases, the violence has often been directed against civilians, as the rebels and secessionist groups attack villages, massacre residents and burn houses to compel other ethnic groups to vacate disputed territory and move to ill-equipped and inadequately defended displacement camps.
There have been at least five major cases of conflict-induced internal displacement in Northeast India in the last fifty years of independence.
These are: the displacement of the (a) Na-Asamiya or the New Assamese Muslims, Bengalis, Santhals and Nepalis in Assam; (b) the Bengalis from Tripura, (c) the Reangs from Mizoram; (d) the Nagas, Paite and Kukis from Manipur, (e) Chakmas from Arunachal Pradesh and Mizoram. The following statistics gives an overview of internal displacement of Muslims in Assam alone. The figures are approximate and computed from various sources, but verifiable, cross checkable and factual
(to be continued)