For the past two weeks we have been witness to ethnic cleansing of Serbian proportions in
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
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.
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