Behind Assam's ethnic violence

The number of people displaced by Assam's ethnic violence since July 20 is about to cross the 5-lakh mark, making this India's largest internal migration, comparable to the cross-border influx during Partition or the Bangladesh War.
Thousands from the Northeast who migrated to mainland cities, especially Bangalore, have fled to their home states, causing one of India's greatest humanitarian crises.
This panic migration was triggered by rumours of impending hate attacks conveyed through bulk SMSs and emails based on morphed images. Some of these depict Muslims being targeted in Burma or by people presumed to be from India's Northeast because of their physical features, racially stereotyped as "Mongoloid."
The SMSs' purveyors are cynically capitalising on ignorance in mainland India about numerous different ethnic-linguistic groups like the Bodos and Mizos, Khasis and Assamese, and Meiteis and Nagas. The motive is to instigate physical attacks on them.
Equally pernicious are attempts to falsely equate Hyderabad (Sindh) with Hyderabad (Deccan). A mass mailing accuses Congress-ruled Andhra of permitting "Muslims to celebrate Pakistan's 65th independence day" in the second Hyderabad, bringing ignominy to India.
Some Pakistani extremists could well be behind this SMS campaign, hyperbolically termed "cyber-war" or "psy-jihad." But according to Indian security agencies, a large majority of the 300-odd suspect websites/pages are India-based.
More important, mails such as that quoted above suggest the involvement of Hindutva groups. This is borne out by the inflammatory statements issued daily by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Bharatiya Janata Party and their student-union associate Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad on Assam's clashes, with the Indian state looking on passively.
Here's manufacture of panic through easily accessible communication means and tools like Photoshop, which can be effortlessly manipulated to morph pictures. The worst culprits are probably not social media websites, accessed by a relatively small minority, but SMSs which can be widely disseminated.
Groups like the RSS are past-masters at using whisper campaigns, rumours and disinformation to provoke communal violence. The Sangh is clearly trying to expand its relatively small base in the Northeast and promote communal-religious polarisation in India.
In the present case, state governments abjectly failed to protect Northeastern migrants against chauvinist and racist attacks. Instead, to their shame, they put people en-masse on trains leaving Bangalore.
The engineering of this migration showed that the authorities abdicated their responsibility towards vulnerable citizens, and that many Indians don't trust the government to defend their life and limb against hate crimes.
In BJP-ruled Karnataka, the RSS is on a rampage. Recently, many Northeastern people were targeted in racist attacks and sexual harassment in Bangalore.
However, what about the violence in Assam? The death toll in the Bodo-Muslim clashes in the Bodoland Territorial Autonomous Districts (BTAD) area of Kokrajhar, Bongaingaon and Chirang, and in adjoining Dhubri, is nearing 80 amidst massive displacement.
There's very little clarity about the proximate causes of the conflict, barring a tussle over a sectional Muslim attempt to permanently occupy land near Kokrajhar for Eid prayers. The national media has not bothered to report in depth on the situation. Reportedly, none of Assam's numerous TV channels has an Outdoor Broadcasting van.
This speaks of colossal callousness within the mainstream towards a region that every government and national party claims belongs irrevocably to India, even more integrally than Jammu and Kashmir.
Few in India comprehend the absurdity of claiming such territorial ownership when they minimise the injustices, violence and bloodshed heaped upon the Northeast, not least through draconian laws like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which gives impunity for outright murder.
This monumental incomprehension hasn't prevented self-appointed "experts" -- who lack even nominal acquaintance with the Northeast -- from attributing the BTAD clashes to the supposedly "increasing influx" of illegal migrants from Bangladesh, and the Bodos' fears of being swamped under it
The standard theology runs thus. Bangladeshi Muslims, termed "infiltrators," as distinct from Bengali-speaking illegal Hindu "migrants" or "refugees," are pouring into Assam just as they did in the early 20th century. They are grabbing the Bodos' land and changing BTAD's demography, causing the violent clashes.
According to the theology's extreme versions, such as the RSS's, Muslim migration is driven by communalism: creation of a "Greater Bangladesh" or conspiracy to spread radical Islamicism.
This is the BJP's "default" or knee-jerk position, which sees everything through a narrow, parochial Islamophobic prism. Yet, benign versions too attribute the violence to rising illegal Muslim migration from "dirt-poor" Bangladesh.
However, this runs against facts. For one, Bangladesh has recently recorded higher human development indices than India, thus weakening the "push factor" for migration to one of India's poorer pockets. For another, better border fencing has reduced the influx of Bangladeshis to a trickle.
For a third, Kokrajhar's Muslim population only increased from 17 to 20% of the total between 1971 and 2001. This isn't alarming. The provisional 2011 census figures, which don't contain a religion-wise break-up, put the decadal growth in the district's entire population at a mere 5.2%, compared to 14.5% in 1991-2001 (and 16.9% for Assam in 2001-2011).
Considering that the Bodos have a political monopoly over BTAD and therefore no motive to move out, this relative decrease can only be explained by non-Bodo out-migration, especially Bengali-speaking Muslims'.
Underway in BTAD is competition between two production systems: the Bodos's subsistence single-crop economy, and the Muslims' hard-work-based commercially-oriented multi-crop economy. This is allowing the Muslims to buy land.
Another source of conflict is over political representation in the larger Western Assam region, where Muslims have made gains using democratic instruments. The Bodos drove them out forcibly -- in 1992-92, 1996 and 2010, but failed this time around. The Bodos form only 20% of BTAD's population and don't enjoy social-economic hegemony.
In the last analysis, the culprit here is the Indian government's misguided policy of creating "homelands" for groups of Northeastern tribals even when they are a small proportion of an area's population. Rectifying this approach demands a broad vision, which is missing.

The writer is an eminent Indian columnist.
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