'I'm a Muslim & I'm not Bangladeshi'

For the past two weeks we have been witness to ethnic cleansing of Serbian proportions in India. The riots in Assam, if we can call these targeted killings riots, have been among the worst that the country has witnessed. So far, it is estimated that 100 persons have lost their lives and around 500 villages have been torched to the ground. Nearly 400,000 people mainly belonging to the  Muslim communitiy have been forced to move to 273 temporary refugee camps. The magnitude of this human tragedy is overwhelming considering the short span of two weeks in which it occurred.

What is surprising is that rather than focusing on the immediate need for a humanitarian call to stop the killings and the violence, leaders of the Bodo community, large sections of mainstream Assamese society, and a section of the media and the political class took it upon themselves to allege and prove that the responsibility for this human tragedy lies squarely on “illegal Bangladeshi migrants” and that the undifferentiated Muslim masses inhabiting western Assam are “Bangladeshis”.

It cannot be simply assumed that the BTAD leadership and the mainstream Assamese society are innocently mistaken in believing that all Muslims inhabiting this area are illegal migrants from Bangladesh. Rather it is a conscious “mistake” laced with communal undertones. The rhetoric of “illegal” migrants flooding the region that appears to be fuelling the attacks is backed largely by what seems to be paranoia about the perceived growing numbers of Muslims in the area, all of whom are assumed to be “illegal” migrants.

It has been claimed by various people, including the Bodo leadership, that the Bangladeshi population in Kokrajhar district — where the violence erupted first and which is also the political seat of power in BTAD — has increased by leaps and bounds in the last decades. Contrary to what popular perception might hold, even a cursory glance at the census data gives a different picture. There has been no alarming increase in Kokrajhar district of the Muslim population in decades. In 1971, the Muslim population in Kokrajhar stood at 17 per cent. It stood at 19.3 per cent in 1991 and, in 2001, it stood at 20.4 per cent.

It is clear that simplistic propositions like ‘Bangladeshi illegal migrants are the root cause of the violence’ not only prevent us from understanding the complex reality of the situation but also reek of communal propaganda. The demographic reality of western Assam is a mosaic of different ethnicities with their own claims of identity and territorial aspirations.

In the light of this, some glaring questions stare us in the face. What informs this fear of the growing number of Muslims? How are these fears of the swamping of the ethnic and cultural identity of the Bodos being fuelled, and by whom? How and when did all Muslims in the area get classified in the public mind as “illegal migrants from Bangladesh?” Looking for answers to questions like these, rather than raising the bogey of numbers and formulaic xenophobic explanations might make the difference, literally, between life and death in this region today.