India's North-East: Bodo Count

Quoted in the Economist, October 9, 2008

http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12380901&fsrc=rss
INDIA’S north-east is “an anthropologist’s delight and an administrator’s nightmare”, notes Sanjoy Hazarika, author of several books about the region. Its 39m people divide into 350 ethnic groups, many of whom feel estranged from the Indian “mainland” and uneasy about each other. This unease can quickly turn to violence. From October 3rd to 7th, members of Assam’s largest tribe, the Bodo (pronounced Boro), fought bitterly with local Muslims, before troops and paramilitaries sent by the central government quelled the violence. By then, 53 people had died, 25 of them shot by the police, and 150,000 people had sought shelter in camps.
The motives behind the attacks are disputed. Most press accounts blamed anti-immigrant sentiment, which runs deep in Assamese politics. The state’s border with overcrowded Bangladesh is impossible to police. Illegal migrants, who find jobs as rickshaw-pullers, brickmakers and house-servants, may number as many as 2m in Assam, thinks Mr Hazarika.
Under the Assam Accord of 1985, the government promised to identify and deport people who had crossed the border since the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. But the government lacks the ability to fulfil this pledge; it may also lack the inclination. Assam’s employers benefit from Bangladeshi labour and its political parties court their votes. In July the north-east’s High Court ordered the removal of 49 Bangladeshis, some of whom had registered to vote in the state. An intemperate judge described the influx of migrants as a “cancerous growth” and called for “political will” and “public activism” to fight it.
It is tempting to view the latest violence as an example of such activism run amok. But the Bodos’ antagonists were not principally Bangladeshis, points out Bibhu Prasad Routray of the Institute for Conflict Management, a think-tank in Delhi. They were instead Indian Muslims settled in the state before 1971, who were ready to fight back. The Bodos, among the earliest settlers in the Assamese plains, resent any outsider who encroaches on their tribal homelands. They do not make subtle legal distinctions between them.
The bloodshed may serve larger political ambitions, Mr Routray argues. In four districts where the Bodos are in the majority the tribe is governed by the Bodoland Territorial Council, which enjoys considerable autonomy under India’s supple constitution. Some members of the tribe may be keen to create more Bodo-majority areas, by driving everyone else out. These territories might then be allowed to fall under the authority of the council.
This autonomy was the fruit of a 2003 peace deal between India’s government and the Bodo Liberation Tigers, who had waged a seven-year insurgency demanding a state of their own. Their leaders were quick to blame the four days of violence on a rival guerrilla group called the National Democratic Front of Bodoland, which has yet to make peace. But Mr Routray doubts the Front had much to do with it. Since it agreed to a ceasefire in 2005, many of its rank-and-file members have moved to camps, closely supervised by the government. And the group’s leadership has no quarrel with Muslims. Indeed, they have found sanctuary in Bangladesh.