Some Adivasi women come out of their houses hearing gunshots along the road, and witness a group of armed men crossing by, eventually to attack the Muslim villages nearby. The Muslim villagers had already run away sensing trouble, but the mob burnt their empty houses and demolished the critical household infrastructure of tube wells and sanitary plates, so that they cannot come back and settle in the same area easily. This was in 2012, when conflict in Kokrajhar district had fanned out to engulf Muslim and Bodo villages.
The Adivasi settlement is called Sapkata Relief Camp in Gossaigaon sub-division of Kokrajhar district, ironical that the words “relief camp” has come to become part of the name of their settlement, and in many ways part of their emotional and psychological scarring. They fear the sound of the guns erupting every now and then, as it brings back memories of the Bodo-Adivasi conflict of 1996, and they say that they never know whom these gunshots are meant for, it could very well be them the next time around, instead of the Muslim villages. The village has seen some tense moments, with some of them being accused of providing information to the security forces against the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB) rebels operating in the area.
The collective memory of communities in Bodoland Territorial Autonomous District (BTAD) of such repeated violence in the past, dating back to the wave of Bodo-Adivasi clashes in 1996 and 1998, ensures that a sense of fear and insecurity revisits every village, be it Bodo, Adivasi, Koch-Rajbongshi or Bengali-speaking Muslim, when any such incidents happen now. Everybody runs for their lives, collecting whatever little valuables they can, whenever gunshots are heard and fires are seen at a distance across the fields, be it the Adivasis, Muslims or the Bodos, a fear so pervasive in these villages, not knowing which village will be attacked at which point of time. The inter-community divide is growing with every passing conflict, with little confidence in the district administration, territorial council or the state government. The villagers lament that the district administration has minimal presence or cares little for the villages on the other side of the main national highway, which cuts by Kokrajhar, on Chirang and onwards to Bongaigaon.
The killings that took place in Kokrajhar, Chirang and Udalguri districts of BTAD in Assam made national headlines in December 2014, also earlier when the general elections in India were underway, the same was the case during the killings of 2012, and slowly it has acquired political overtones at the national level. The widespread inter-community clashes and killings in 2012 in the Bodoland area were largely based on a similar set of circumstances, simmering for a long time. The political scenario in the Bodoland areas has seen a new shift towards electoral representation with a non-Bodo candidate, Hira Sarania, being elected as an Independent to the present Lok Sabha from the Kokrajhar (ST) reserved seat in the 2014 parliamentary elections, and the political temperature is bound to rise with the Bodoland Territorial Council elections around the corner this year.
Several parts of Northeast India have witnessed violent inter-community clashes in the past, and it is important to address the core issues facing the region in a comprehensive manner. The attention of the central government wavers between incidents of violence in a given area of the Northeast, failing to address the underlying conditions that give rise to such conflict repeatedly. The underlying sense of drift in relations between ethnic communities in Northeast India has been visible for a long time now, and the factors instrumental in this growing divide are the lack of inter-community understanding, the effect of various government policies such as the divide-and-rule strategy to combat the overall insurgency situation in the region, and the democratic deficit in the Indian political system. Simply put, Indian democracy fails to provide an adequate sense of political representation to all ethnicities in Northeast India.
This conflict zone is riddled with borders of various kinds and at various levels, taken regular advantage of by the militant groups operating here to be able to strike at will. A careful analysis of the dynamics of the various layers of social, political, economic and environmental borders in this region is important to bring solutions for peace in the region, going beyond the counter-insurgency options at hand. This region sits in a maze of conflicts over resources, land and environment, and community aspirations, which if not addressed politically, will lead to such recurring episodes of conflict. The need is for a robust social and administrative infrastructure to address the conflict which the people suffer in their everyday lives in these areas, the fear in which they live, the post-conflict trauma, especially of the women and children, and not to leave them with ad-hoc post-conflict relief mechanisms, which have not been effective in the past.
The active political participation of the communities in the region is of critical importance, which cannot be achieved in a meaningful manner in an atmosphere of conflict and when “relief camps” are seen more as a norm than an aberration. Bodoland seems to be in a perpetual “relief camp” mode, given the various waves of conflict over the past two decades. Only the people, who have lived in relief camps long enough that their village space is termed “Sapkata Relief Camp”, can describe the social and community costs of living in a relief camp forever.
Bodoland and many other parts of Northeast India have seen conflict and also seen conflict monitoring committees submitting recommendations over the years, but little has moved on the ground to be able to make the communities prepare and have adequate social support infrastructure to tackle such conflict. There needs to be an adequate understanding of borders and spaces in Northeast India beyond the counter-insurgency narrative, based on meaningful political participation towards addressing the prevailing democratic deficit in the region.
The author is a doctoral candidate at the department of humanities and social sciences, IIT Guwahati.
Email: mirzalibra10@gmail.com