Assam has seen
little peace in over a century now. The ethnic conflict in Kokrajhar with
serious communal undertones that had erupted in four districts (Kokrajhar,
Dhubri, Chirang and Bongaigaon) of Lower Assam has opened our eyes to the widening
rift in Assam between the two communities. This has been the worst conflict in
the recent history of Assam shocking us with its brutality and wantonness.
Simple causalities have been brought forward to explain this genocide – The
encroachments of Bangladeshis on
local land and the increasing population of these illegal migrants have led to this mayhem. The local media channels
had given fuel to this popular perception by splashing stories of displacement
and violence of mostly the Bodo community. Now all that needed to be done was to
flush them out and we would have a free
Assam again! Almost as simplistic as the ‘Either you are with us or against us’
of the erstwhile Bush regime.
But this
‘politics of perception’ needs a reality check. The history of the Bengali
speaking Muslim in Assam is actually a complex one. Encouraged by the colonial
State and a section of the Assamese-speaking gentry, a large number of landless
Muslim peasants from East Bengal moved to the Brahmaputra Valley in the 19th
century. Since then, time and again, they have had to prove their allegiance to
the state. They have remained at the lower rungs of Assamese society and the
benefits of education and development have never really reached them. A fact
that divisive political factions like the UDF has made ample use of. On the other hand, the Bodo community has
fared no better. Embroiled in a decade of violence, they had only recently
found their bearings when a clever rhetoric of illegal migrants created in them a fear of the ‘other’, of being
outnumbered and rooted out of their own lands. Popular culture and perception
in Assam has created a dark picture – of Bangladeshis
multiplying every minute and finally taking over this blessed land, unaware
that that both Assam and the Bodoland area has shown decreasing trends of
population growth in the last few decades as against the all India growth rate
of population. What we urgently need right now is inter-community dialogue and
a historically informed understanding of what constitutes Assam.
