A troubled paradise votes

Assam’s capital Guwahati glitters with malls, multinational stores and flyovers; in stark contrast, the capital of Assam’s autonomous Bodoland Territorial Area Districts (BTAD), Kokrajhar appears like a town lost in time. A lone main road snakes through the town, the tiny shops lining it not more than single-storeyed. By 9pm, the wooden shutters are down and the streets empty out. In the decade since the Bodoland Territorial Council assumed power, the inhabitants, especially in rural areas, acknowledge there have been serious attempts to build infrastructure — mainly roads and bridges, and bring development to the region. But strikes, curfews and violence have marred all efforts, hitting common people the hardest and steadily bleeding businesses.

It’s peace that everyone here yearns for, especially the adivasis, who were brought over by the British more than 100 years ago to work in tea gardens and logging. Their long-pending demand for scheduled tribe status denies them the opportunity to contest the 30 seats reserved for STs in the 40-member council. As Shibu Hasda, a young adivasi boy from Pakhriguri, who lost his mother and brother to bullets on December 23, put it ahead of the just-concluded polls, “We only have Bodo candidates to choose from.”

He has no choice but to accept the newly elected representatives to the local council of the BTAD, one of the country’s most volatile regions over the past three years.

It was a narrow victory for the ruling Bodoland People’s Front (BPF), which won 20 seats to emerge as the single largest party but remained one short of a simple majority. Since the council elections were first held in 2005, the BPF has been in power.

Militant groups had for years battled the Indian state for an independent Bodoland, leaving thousands dead, until a ceasefire was reached under an accord signed with the Central government in March 2003.

Nevertheless, this tiny corner of Assam continues to be wracked by killings and displacement. In 2012, clashes between the Bodo tribe and Bengali Muslims left at least 77 dead and uprooted more than four lakh people; the following two years saw Bodoland erupt with greater violence and displacement.

Flying netas create a flutter

Three-fourth of the 40 council seats are reserved for scheduled tribe candidates, Bodos (the largest plains tribe of Assam), Rabhas, Dimasas and smaller tribes, even though they make up less than a third of the population.

The more than 20 lakh voters in BTAD have consistently defied national trends. In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, they chose an independent candidate, Heera Sarania; the former United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) militant contested against Bodo candidates on a reserved seat and won by a huge margin of 3.47 lakh votes. As he gave voice to the alienation that non-Bodos feel, Sarania — described by the media as a ‘dreaded’ ULFA member — was rewarded handsomely by voters.

In a similar attempt to cash in on the non-Bodos’ resistance to the 2003 Bodo accord (under which the minority rules over the majority), the national parties, Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party, made non-Bodos the focus of their campaign, but it fetched no dividends. The Congress drew a blank and the BJP mustered a single seat.

The BJP flew in Kiren Rijiju, Minister of State (Home), Union Sports Minister Sarbananda Sonowal and Tribal Affairs Minister Jual Oram to address multiple rallies. The crowds at these rallies were more enamoured by the helicopters ferrying the leaders than in hearing them speak. On April 3, a 5,000-strong crowd circled the chopper of Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi at Bijni, Chirang district, as he ate lunch nearby. Barely minutes after he flew off, the venue was empty, with only scattered pieces of paper and plastic to indicate that a political rally had taken place here.

Glue and bridges

A day after the results were announced, we met Hagrama Mohilary, the chief of the Bodoland Territorial Council, at the Aie-Afa (mother-father in the Bodo language) strawberry and potato farm. Dressed casually in a striped, polo-neck t-shirt, he had a relaxed air about him and stood up to briskly clear from the table the plates of paan and water bottle to make space for my notebook.

With his shaven head, soft-spoken manner and easy smile, he looked more a monk than politician. There is very little to indicate his militant past, as the chief of the dreaded Bodoland Liberation Tigers, which waged a brutal decade-long insurgency against the Indian state after the 2003 accord with the centre. The plough is his party symbol — far removed from the gun.

The previous day, as we waited to meet him at his party office, he was watching the results unfold on local news channels. His party workers and supporters erupted into loud cheers as the leads turned into definite wins.

Mohilary is literally the glue holding Bodoland together. For the Bodos, he is a hero, the revolutionary who fought the army to bring them their long-sought autonomy; to the non-Bodos, who are the majority in the region, he is the one Bodo leader they support. The Bengalis, Biharis and the Marwaris, who own almost all the shops in the region, see him as someone who can speak for them and treat non-Bodos fairly. “If he loses, Bodoland will go back 10 years,” said a shop owner in Kokrajhar, who then sent me multiple messages, begging me not to quote him. “You will go back after the results, I have to stay for life, please,” his message screamed in capital letters.

With the BPF barely scraping through, Mohilary will have to build more bridges, literally and figuratively, with non-Bodos. “I want a Bodoland where everyone is together,” he said. “Our dream of Bodoland can only be realised when all communities here support it.”

Barely-contained violence

Many people blamed the local government for the violent incidents, but these were committed by the militant faction National Democratic Front for Bodoland-Songbijit (NDFB-S), which is opposed to talks with the government. Since December 24, 2014, when defence forces resumed operations, more than 230 militants have been captured or killed. In the run-up to the election there were multiple incidents of violence, two people were killed and many injured as party workers clashed.

Heavy security presence, including 50 companies of central paramilitary forces backing the Assam police and armed counter-insurgency operations, kept the pot from boiling over during the elections. The NDFB-S members are holed up in the jungles bordering Bhutan. “There is an 800km-long border with Bhutan and the forest is dense and vast, so thick with trees that it is impossible to see far, let alone police,” explained Sunil Kumar, the Superintendent of Police in Kokrajhar.

Fuelling resentment and the militant cause in Bodoland, as also Assam in general, is the unchecked migration from neighbouring Bangladesh and other parts of India.

The Bodos fear they will soon be outnumbered by outsiders and deprived of their land. Like most tribes in the region, the Bodos for long practised shifting agriculture and never bothered with land documents. Now they feel threatened as reserve forests are cleared and ‘outsiders’ (Bengalis and adivasis) settle permanently in what used to be ancestral Bodo lands and forests.

Barely two weeks ago, on March 31, the Supreme Court slammed the Assam government for “dragging its feet” and rejected its “vague” and “highly unsatisfactory” steps taken to stop the influx of illegal Bangladeshi nationals through the porous international border.

In Baksa, 200km from Kokrajhar, we visited NK Khagrabari and Narayanguri villages. In May 2014, a settlement of Bengalis here was attacked by armed militants, who killed 32, mostly women and children, and burned down homes.

The villages can be reached only by crossing the fast-flowing Beki river in a leaky wooden boat, the 40-minute ride powered by a smoke-belching diesel generator. A small police picket currently watches over the camp, made up of canvas tents covered in mould. Many of the 300-plus people who lived in the targetted villages are currently scattered across the country as migrant workers.

The ones who could not leave cling to their memories, and fading photos, of loved ones killed by militant bullets. They cut wood or gather stones from the riverbanks and these are carted away for construction, leaving gaping holes in the tree cover and deep pits in the riverbed.

A hellish paradise

When I asked Mohilary about his biggest achievements, he listed the Central Institute of Technology, Kokrajhar, and other educational institutions the council has set up in the last 10 years.

“I want to set up an IT park, and attract businesses here to generate employment for people,” he said. The project is listed as awaiting sanction from the Union government for want of State approval.

“There is no major industry in Assam, except oil and tea, and there are only three tea estates in this area,” SP Sunil Kumar had pointed out.

On election day, April 8, our vehicle got stuck in the wet mud on our way to Lungsung, about 20km from the highway. In January, we had met the adivasis there after automatic-weapon wielding militants attacked and killed eight people on December 23, 2014. In all, 72 were killed in co-ordinated attacks at different locations in the region.

The settlement at Lungsung has been expanding into the jungle towards the Indo-Bhutan border; the residents cut and sell the wood after paying a ‘tax’ to the militants hiding in the forest. As we drive into forest settlements, our driver, Kashi, repeats over and over, “this used to be a huge sal forest, with more than 100-year-old trees” — now it is only tree stumps and gaping wounds in the earth.

Elephants and other local wildlife are increasingly boxed into smaller pockets of forestland. Two days before the elections, on our way back from Sorolpara, on the Indo-Bhutan border, we see a large troop of golden langurs swinging across the road to treetops more than 10m away. Native to this small part of western Assam and the foothills of the Black Mountains of Bhutan, they are listed as an endangered species. We were very fortunate, Kashi told us, as he had never seen a troop as large as this one in the 42 years he has lived here. It felt like these amazing athletes were putting on a show for us, to remind us that they too belonged here.

The beauty of nature contrasts sharply with the cruelty inflicted by humans in this verdant paradise. Rohul Ameen’s words, shouted across the Beki river in Baksa, ring in my ears: “Come and see our situation next year, we will still be living in this hell.”

( Saurabh Yadav and Vivek Singh are an independent writer-photographer duo based out of Delhi, working on indepth reportage projects )

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