NORTHEAST BURNING

At 5 lakh, Assam India’s biggest internal exodus?

Dark Conspiracy Theories Stoke Fear In Camps

Anand Soondas TNN

Kokrajhar: There are just three people in Salam Choudhury’s house. He, his wife of eight years and a little daughter who he says drives him to despair with her tantrums. “But,” he adds, forcing a smile on a face that puts him at perhaps 30-35 years, “We can’t think of a single day without her.” In the third week of July, though, he sent her
away for two weeks to a relative’s place for safety. “That killed me,” he adds, suddenly frowning, as a few others at a refugee camp in Kokrajhar crowd around him to find out if his story is worse than theirs. Then, looking at the men sitting on their haunches nearby, he says knowingly in Bengali, “Kismote chhilo (It was destined).”
    What Choudhury doesn’t understand, however, is how so many people materialized almost overnight in refugee protection centres that have popped up all across Assam’s three districts hit recently by communal violence—Kokrajhar, Chirang and Dhubri.
    A little east from there and 10km further ahead, Raju Daimary, also sitting on his haunches—a preferred way of resting in these parts—says the numbers boggled his mind, too. “It seemed people, like rats, were pouring out of holes. So many of us,” he sighs.
    The unprecedented magnitude of displacement—4,85,921, to be precise, by the government’s own reckoning—is the largest exodus within India’s borders.
    It has not only taken people aback, but triggered a host of dark, insidious conspiracy theories. After all, even the post-Godhra riots accounted for only 2.50 lakh refugees. The Kandhamal attacks of 2008 threw 25,000 out of their homes and the anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984 saw 50,000 on the roads.  

NORTHEAST BURNING Assam land row: Govt sitting on a time bomb
    Though 2,000 people were killed in the infamous Nellie massacre of 1983, again in Assam, there are no displacement figures. If the estimate of 5 lakh is indeed correct, we could be staring at one of the biggest refugee movements within the country in modern India. Certainly, the flood of refugees in 1947 and 1971 would have been larger, but that marked a human flow across, not within, the country’s borders.
    “The large number of inmates in camps has been mainly due to panic fleeing by villagers,” says Assam CM Tarun Gogoi. “The past clashes were even bigger in terms of death toll but this time we are seeing, relatively, a greater number of people taking shelter in relief camps. This is because there was a strong sense of insecurity following rumours that triggered the panic. People felt too afraid to stay back at their homes.” They must be. A staggering 2.86 lakh are still in the camps, and it’s been a month they are there now.
    Superintendent of police in Kokrajhar Sunil Kumar seems to agree. “It’s possible the numbers are not incorrect,” he says. “These are three populous districts we are talking about. Why would anyone want to exaggerate the figures? Even those who were not really hit by the violence directly have piled on in the relief camps— relatives, friends. Maybe they don’t want to stay alone.”
    Shyamal Dey, a local resident who accompanied a TOI team around on Sunday to the refugee camps, has a theory. “It’s the cellphones,” he says, pleased at his own conclusion. “As the first batch of people fled their homes they called up others even as they themselves were running. Soon, everybody was running. Those who wouldn’t have been touched by the turmoil left their homes, too, and landed up in the camps.”
    But 5 lakh people leaving their dwellings and gathering at the camps is a staggering bit of statistic in itself, something that almost defies logic. That’s where the conspiracy theories kick in. “It’s not surprising at all,” says a local Bodo leader, convinced by what he is about to say but unwilling to be quoted. “Many more Muslims from Bangladesh who were living here without any papers have made their way to the camps, swelling their numbers. Now they can all say their documents got burnt in the arson. It suits them.”
    Many, of course, say that the fear is genuine. “There hasn't been any alarming rise in illegal influx from Bangladesh in BTAD (Bodo Territorial Autonomous Districts) because if we look at the 2011 census figures, there isn’t any substantial increase in population in these areas,” says Dr Monirul Hussain, professor of political science and sociology at Gauhati University. “So, the real reason of conflict is not just influx but other factors like complete Bodo domination in BTAD. Extortion by former militants is a huge problem in these areas and they still haven’t surrendered their arms. The Centre, too, is at fault; it never rehabilitated these militants as promised and left them to fend for themselves. They have arms but no means to earn, so they start extorting money.”
    Whatever the reasons, what everyone agrees on is that the government, both New Delhi and in Guwahati, has to act now, and act quickly. With sporadic attacks being recorded across the country, the fight for land, which is at the heart of the Bodo-Muslim strife, may just turn into a larger struggle for identity and faith. And that’s something which scares Salam. “I don’t want another day without my daughter,” he says. 

-TOI

How politics and paranoia led to the North East ‘exodus’

It is hard to comprehend how, in an age of advanced communication facilities, rumours of attacks on (or threats to) people from the north-eastern states in some of India’s biggest cities could have triggered such widespread panic as to set off such a large-scale migration.

More than 36 hours after the rumours began to circulate, waves of panic-stricken people are still clambering onto trains headed for what they perceive as the safety of their “home”. Even if the scale of the “exodus” appears to have diminished from the first day, it continues to spread in geographical terms to newer cities.  Although Bangalore,  Pune and Hyderabad were among the cities that witnessed the largest number of people fleeing, reports from Chennai indicate that a similar scramble was under way on Thursday in the towns of Coimbatore and Madurai in Tamil Nadu.

Curiously, there have been virtually no instances of violent attacks – except for one incident in Mysore. To that extent, the stampede that we’re witnessing today is a colossal overreaction to rumours and fears of planned attacks.

But there’s a reason why rumours gain such monstrous traction even in this day and age of 24×7 hypermedia and vastly enhanced communication facilities that have put mobile phones in virtually every urban Indian’s hand. Apart from the obvious reason – that the profusion of these communication devices has amplified the echo chamber effect of rumours – lie a couple of uncomfortable truths.

The first is that the entire rumour-mongering exercise, and the planting of the seeds of discord, is manifestly part of a grander political project, the precise nature of which it is not easy to fathom just yet.

The riots in Assam of recent weeks have provided plenty of scope for political mobilisation by parties across the spectrum. For the Congress, whose failure to pre-empt the riots despite early warning signals and whose reluctance to even contemplate illegal Bangladeshi migration as one potential source of conflict in the north-east has invited much criticism, the panic attacks elsewhere in India offer a way of changing the narrative from its own failings.

But, in equal measure, radical Muslim leaders like Asaduddin Owaisi are fishing in the troubled waters of the Brahmaputra and using it as a bait for a large political project of feeding victimhood among Muslims. Owaisi warned in Parliament of a “third wave of radicalisation” of Muslims; almost as if on cue, we’ve seen  events  in recent days that validate that threat. We saw it in Mumbai last week, and we see it in the alleged threats to people from the north-eastern states in Bangalore, Pune and elsewhere to leave before Ramzan or face attacks.

The BJP too has muddied the waters with its monomaniacal focus on illegal immigration as the only source of conflict in Assam, a political stand that ignores some of the complexities that underlie ethnic insecurities in Assam.

All this politicking has provided a fertile ground for rumours to shamefully breed and hold sway, which even the earnest appeals for calm from our leaders have failed to discredit.

This points, in a larger sense, to a crisis of credibility of our leaders. Past instances of a colossal failure of the state to provide the most fundamental responsibility of security has meant that in politically surcharged times such as these, people don’t trust governments – at both the central and state levels – to protect them. When madness holds sway – be it 1984 or 2002 – it’s each man for himself, while the political spitfest will rage for years over the corpses of innocent victims.

Just last week, when a radical Muslim group ran riot in Mumbai, political parties criticised the police failure to pre-empt the violence. But, as this columnist points out, this isn’t exactly the first time that Mumbai has witnessed mob violence. The MNS and the Shiv Sena too have in the past held Mumbai to ransom – and targeted “outsiders” (be they south Indians or Biharis) for attack – and have gotten away with it. So, there’s plenty of blame to go around for the insecurities that ordinary people, particularly “outsiders” in any state, face.

Which may account for why the people from north-eastern states who had moved to cities and towns  across India in search of gainful employment have, in this instance, come to rely on their own judgement based on their instincts – and are voting with their feet.

It is a manifestation of their fear that even if the rumours of planned attacks on them come true, petty politics will triumph over good sense. It’s a tragic commentary on India’s slow evolution as a modern nation-state: 66 years ago, it was born amidst enormous bloodshed – and the largest forced exodus in human history. To this day, we live in dread of more bloodshed, and are witnessing another large-scale exodus.

 

 -First Post