As the sun was about to set on the forested low hills and paddy fields of Assam on December 23, 2014, armed Bodo militants in army fatigues with their faces covered walked into small remote hamlets of Adivasi cultivators, and, in a chilling coordinated attack at five locations in Kokrajhar and Sonitpur districts, opened fire on the hapless residents with automatic weapons killing more than 70 people, including at least 18 children and 21 women. They also burned down and ransacked several of their mud hutments, before retreating into the jungles. Later at least five Bodos were murdered by mobs in retaliatory attacks, and three protesting Adivasis were killed by police firing.
Adivasis, comprising almost a fifth of Assam’s mosaic of diverse ethnic groups, are descendants of indentured tea garden workers. They were imported from the Chotanagpur plateau since the middle of the 19th century to labour in extremely exploitative conditions in tea gardens. They survive with many of the poorest human development indicators among the many communities in the state.
The misfortunes of this oppressed and deprived people were compounded following the creation of the Bodoland Autonomous Council in 1993. In this Bodo homeland, indigenous tribal Bodos, the Bengali Muslims and the tea-tribes each constituted roughly 30 per cent of the population. Armed Bodo militants unleashed successive waves of violence targeting Bengali Muslims and Adivasis to drive them out of the Bodo homeland. The most brutal attacks on Adivasis were mounted in 1996 and 1997, at the peak of which 300,000 Adivasis escaped to relief camps. Some of these camps have not been disbanded even nearly two decades later, as the state government has not helped the Adivasis return to their original homes.
I joined a fact-finding team of the Delhi Forum, also comprising senior journalists Seema Mustafa and Sukumar Muralidharan, to visit the villages ravaged by this latest round of killings. We found the defenceless populations still deeply traumatised and profoundly insecure.
The armed attackers chose deeply forested hamlets close to borders of Bhutan and Arunachal. To reach the hamlet in Biswanath Chariali, Sonitpur, in which the largest number of killings occurred, we had to walk around five kilometres further into the forests after the last road ended. We found residents camping under thin plastic sheets just in front of a camp of paramilitary soldiers who had been rushed to extend them protection.
The villages we visited, we were told, were settled some 15 to 20 years earlier, where their elders had laboured hard to fashion paddy fields after clearing the thick forest cover. Some settlers came because there was no work for them in the tea gardens of the area; others reported fleeing their earlier villages in Kokrajhar because they were fed up of the extortion by armed Bodo militants. Sonitpur district falls outside the boundaries of the Bodoland Autonomous Council; therefore they hoped they would be safer here.
Many Bodo families also settled in the same forests around the same time. They had cordial ties with their Bodo neighbours prior to the attack, and both invited each other for weddings and funerals. However, in recent years, some local Bodo militants had begun to extort informal ‘taxes’ from them, even for every head-load or bicycle-load of firewood gathered from the forests. But there was no violence; this was the first attack on them, which is why it has left them even more shaken and frightened. Adivasis in Kokrajhar, by contrast, have endured periodic waves of attacks in the last quarter century.
In all the villages, the accounts of the recent raids were similar. Armed young men, their faces covered revealing only their eyes, arrived and first asked for water to drink. After they were served, they opened fire suddenly and without any warning, killing whoever they saw — children, women and men. They chased the victims down as they fled in terror. The survivors hid behind trees, and watched as many of their homes were set on fire and their few belongings vandalised. Eye-witnesses reported that they danced in celebration as they left after the slaughter, unhurried and unafraid that the police would catch up with them.
Their student union leaders came in after nightfall, offering solace, calling in the police, helping with the last rites, and shifting them to safer locations. The local administration later established makeshift camps, as thousands of Adivasi settlers, and often their Bodo neighbours, fled separately in panic to the security of camps. At the peak, there were 300,000 people in makeshift camps, battling trauma, fear and the cold. They felt safe only when trucks packed with large deployments of paramilitary soldiers drove into these forest interiors. In some places, student leaders and volunteers marched with the villagers to the local police outposts, shouting anguished slogans and parading the corpses. Police personnel in some outposts panicked and fired at the peacefully protesting crowds. It is officially learnt that three Adivasi protestors were killed during police firings.
In Sonitpur, student leaders and village elders also took care to reassure their Bodo neighbours that they had nothing to fear from them. There were no retaliatory attacks on the Bodos in this district. But in Kokrajhar, although similar precautions were taken by Adivasi student leaders and elders, at least three Bodos were killed in revenge. Bodo student leaders joined the protests against the firing, and tried to assist with relief for the affected Adivasi people.
The bewildered displaced villagers we spoke to said repeatedly, “We have had no problem, no confrontation’ we don’t know why they just came and attacked us.” There were no threats or warning although the local police chief said that they had intelligence information of the attack but not the precise location.
In these villages, we met an extremely impoverished people. The team notes: “The forest hamlets belong in a different age. Very little is perceptible in terms of what could be called the markers of ‘development’ … There are no schools, no roads, no health centres, just utter, unrelieved penury… and there is no sign of governance.” The Adivasis owned almost nothing, and had no titles to the small paddy plots that they had cleared and cultivated. Among the families we spoke to, we met a young teenaged girl who had been sent to Gurgaon near Delhi to work as a domestic help. We met many migrants who worked in factories and construction sites in places as distant as Gujarat and Chennai.
In these forested villages, indigenous tribal Bodos live side by side with Adivasis, Bengali Muslims and people of many other communities. Each brutal attack by armed militants opens fresh wounds in the deeply fractured social fabric of the region. The tragedy of each of these peoples is that they are desperately impoverished, denied even elementary state support for education, livelihoods and health care. But rogue armed militants from these communities only push them into greater penury, fear and mutual distrust with each attack. A hapless cynical state is unable or unwilling to effectively disarm the militants, bring the communities together in peace, and find ways to address the legitimate anxieties of each of these communities for the most elementary assurances of peace, security and development.
The views expressed in this column are that of the author’s and do not represent those of the newspaper.
