Opinion
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| | A blot on Nation’s brow | | | MERCIFULLY, the savage sweep of violence and arson in the Bodo areas of Assam has abated, and there are welcome signs of a slow return to normalcy in the ravaged region. This is due partly to Prime minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to the spot, preceded by his firm instructions to the state government to bring the situation under control. But it would be a delusion to believe that peace has returned and the agony will end soon. The bitter truth is that the trust deficit between the two sides to the seemingly endless conflict is huge, and the sense of deprivation among the people in the Bodo-controlled districts around Kokrajhar acute. As in other tribal societies the call for vengeance there is compelling.
Even so, the Prime Minister was right to emphasize that the first priority at present must be the rehabilitation of the hapless victims of the storm that are languishing in make-shift relief camps, and he has given Assam a package of Rs. 300 crores for this purpose. Yet even this initial task is stupendous for several reasons. In the first place, the number of those rendered homeless is officially said to be 200,000; actually it is much more. Secondly, not only their homes but also all their worldly possessions have been razed to the ground. Every eyewitness account or subsequent investigative report is chilling. In many villages, the Bodos that are Hindus or Christians and the Muslims, whether indigenous or illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, were living lived on opposite sides of a road. At present no one lives there. To rebuild burnt down houses would take time.
Dr. Singh who visited two relief camps – one for the Bodos and the other for Muslims – has promised that after the restoration of normalcy “in a few days”, he would order a probe into the “trigger” for the clashes. “If the conflict has been instigated, the guilty must be punished”. The question, however, is how long would the inquiry take and whether its findings would not meet the same fate as the reports of other such inquiry commissions, including the Srikrishna Commission that investigated the 1993 serial blasts in Bombay after the demolition of the Babri masjid, did.
It is against this backdrop that some painful questions about the failure of state and central governments to foresee and forestall the latest outrage arise. Disturbances of this magnitude do not take place in a vacuum or as a result of a stray incident. Those hell-bent on sparking them, for whatever reason take care to make the prevailing atmosphere combustible. Rumour mongering and vile whispering campaigns are their effective instruments.
An impressive number of observers of the Assam scene have asserted repeatedly in recent days that almost everyone knew what was cooking in the Bodoland cauldron and that riots were coming. Only the state government and chief minister Tarun Gogoi seemed to be unaware. Even if this charge is dismissed as unfair, as Mr. Gogoi has done, there is no satisfactory explanation for the dangerous delay in taking corrective measures even after trouble had erupted. At the beginning of July, two Muslims were murdered one day and two others a day later. As was only to be expected, four Bodos, all of them members of the militant and banned Bodo Liberation Tigers (BLT) were done to death on July 6. Yet, until July 20th when the reign of violence and arson assumed alarming proportions nothing was done to avoid it.
For this the chief minister’s apologia is worse than his failure to do his duty. For he said publicly that the Centre had taken away a large part of the para-military forces stationed in the state and New Delhi had also delayed the dispatch of the Army after he had asked for it. Around the same time the Prime Minister had telephoned him to give him specific instructions, while spokespersons of the Union government had refuted Mr. Gogoi’s complaints. This curious drama – a poor reflection on the relationship between Congress’s Central leadership and the handful of chief ministers belonging to the party – has had a curiouser denouement. When asked about his accusations against the Central government in Dr, Singh’s presence, the Assam chief minister snatched the microphone of one TV channel, and screamed: “I never said so”!
This said the Union government must also squarely face its share of blame for the negligence in Assam, not to put it more strongly than that. It is the duty of the Central intelligence agencies to keep a sharp vigil on all the internal conflicts that are a threat to national security. In the present case, this did not happen. A strange explanation for this is that the agencies concerned concentrate on threats from Naxalites and terrorists, foreign or homegrown, and tend to ignore communal and other threats. One reason for this is that since Gujarat 2002 there has been no major communal violence in the country for a decade, and the agencies have become rather complacent.
A laughable subtext of this is that a lot of time has been wasted in the fatuous debate whether the Assam riots were “communal” or “ethnic”, as if one or the other is less injurious to national unity and security. The truth is that the killings in Bodoland have both communal and ethnic dimensions and therefore should be considered doubly subversive.
Alas, this not how the Congress and the BJP look at the problem. Every problem, whatever it may be immediately becomes a slugfest between the two mainstream parties, each side pronouncing the other worse than itself. Over Assam the BJP holds the Congress complicit in illegal immigration from Bangladesh for the sake of “vote bank” politics. The Congress alleges that the saffron party is misusing the issue to target Indian Muslims. Neither realizes that preventing any further change in Assam’s demography is more important than scoring debating points.
The plethora of small arms in Bodo areas, which no one has done anything about, complicates the problem immensely. So does the relative prosperity of the areas under BTC that has attracted Muslims from adjoining areas like Dhubri to Kokrajhar, thus reducing the Bodos to a minority in the region administered by them.
Finally, the heading of this commentary is the exact translation of the Prime Minister’s remark in Hindi. His duty now is to remove this blot completely and for good. |
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