Why is Assam burning?

Most editors are failed writers, argued T S Eliot. By the same logic, television hosts must be failed politicians and activists, I guess. Every time I watch folks like Bill O’Reilly of Fox News and Arnab Goswami of Times Now, I am reminded of the Spanish Inquisition.

While O’Reilly has spawned around himself an alternative universe of his own where Islam is out to capture the West and America and the shadow of Islamist terror is lurking in every nook and corner, our own answer to Murdoch’s hatchet man likes to think he’s holding his own court every night where he has to tackle the formidable challenges facing the great democracy with his profound wisdom and vision and come up with instant solutions.

With his full court in attendance and the whole nation dutifully watching and listening to him, Arnab is the judge, jury and executioner as he rails and rails against the usual suspects. It’s an endless treat to watch the Times Now host as he addresses the nation from his pulpit with the choir earnestly nodding in agreement, and angrily demands answers from the politicians – usually the prime minister himself, no less.

Forever outraged, our hero truly thinks he is God’s gift to mankind and has been sent down to watch over the national interests. And everyone is accountable to Arnab Goswami. While he finds something or the other to be outraged about every night, nothing gets him going like the never-ending shenanigans of our Western neighbours who are apparently forever plotting against Mother India. If it’s not Pakistan, then it’s Indian Muslims or “international Islamist terrorists,” who deserve his outrage. In any case, as far as he is concerned they are all one and the same!

The latest to provide grist to the Times Now mill is the unfolding mayhem in Assam, the Indian state bordering Bangladesh. Scores have been killed in attacks largely targeting Muslims and hundreds of thousands have fled their homes. While the state government blames both sides-Bodo tribesmen and Bengali-speaking Muslims – for the violence, the majority of the victims are once again Muslims.

Entire villages have been burnt down while the state administration, as is our tradition, remains curiously clueless and indifferent. Delhi insists Assam chief minister Tarun Gogoi is “monitoring the situation” and doing everything possible to restore peace. This is little comfort to the community, though, which increasingly lives in fear, worrying the worst may be yet to come. Gogoi is yet to visit the affected areas. Not even a flying, whirlwind tour for the cloistered satrap.

There are reports of totally deserted villages and total absence of security forces in the troubled areas. While police are patrolling urban areas, it’s free-for-all for marauding mobs in interiors.

Assam has a long history of recurring violence targeting minorities. However, what remains forever seared in public memory is the 1983 Nellie massacre when Indira Gandhi ruled from Delhi with her famous iron fist. The pogrom, carried out with crude weapons in a matter of a few hours, left 1,819 people dead. Independent sources suggest the toll was as high as 5,000. The killers didn’t even spare young babies.

As usual, Muslims were caught in the deadly games of the Congress and assorted separatist groups. Our Hindutva benefactors added fuel to the fire by raising the spectre of invasion by Bangladeshi Muslims. The same drama is being re-enacted today with consequences that could be even deadlier. Yet unlike in the past, this conflict isn’t communal or religious in nature. It’s an economic struggle for the land and dwindling natural resources.

In the end, it’s a humanitarian tragedy, and which is how it should be viewed. People hadn’t even recovered from the havoc wreaked by one of the worst floods in history when they were driven from their homes by people with whom they have lived for decades.

Even Arnab Goswami opening the discussion on Assam began by arguing that no one should “communalise” the issue. Yet, this is precisely what he and his guests ended up doing. Instead of showing some sympathy for the victims and what they have just been through, all Muslims are there condemned as “Bangladeshi infiltrators.” Indeed, the nation is warned of “thousands of international Islamist fundamentalist terrorists with heavy weapons invading from across the border.” Not surprisingly, there was no one to present the other side of the storym except for a state minister who kept mumbling, “I don’t disagree with you.”

In fact, listening to the finger-wagging television pundits you would think the entire Northeast has been taken over by Bangladeshi infiltrators and Pakistani terrorists and Delhi and thousands of its security forces and intelligence agencies haven’t the faintest idea.

Extreme as it is, Times Now – from the Times of India stable – is hardly an exception. There are many out there who routinely tap into this reservoir of hatred and our deep-seated fear of the Other.

Is this how responsible media should function? What’s the difference between this scaremongering and the Nazi demonisation of Jews? As journalism students and rookies, we were told ad nauseam by our teachers and editors that the media’s job is to inform, educate and act as a watchdog of society. A journalist’s job is to speak the truth and report facts as truthfully as possible and let people draw their own conclusions. The media’s job is to stand up for the weak, not join the witch hunt.

Many from my tribe routinely quote C P Scott, the legendary editor of The Guardian, that comment is free but facts are sacred. How many of us really believe in it, though? How many of us pause and ponder before passing off blatant lies, innuendos and our prejudices as facts, endangering lives and putting an entire community in the dock?

If I had been one of those watching that Times Now “debate,” I would have probably rushed to join the bloodthirsty mob rampaging across Assam to teach a lesson to the “international Islamist terrorists,” as Arnab calls those fear-stricken, bruised and battered people running for their lives with their humble belongings.

But all this is in a day’s work for television pundits and journalists. Who gives a damn who killed whom and what havoc your words wreak in an already inflamed land, as long as you have your TRPs up and your audiences suitably agitated. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? So what if Assam has always had a large Muslim population, as much as 30 percent, and most of those being terrorised as “outsiders” have been there for ages, since long before the Partition?

Of course, given the porous and indistinct nature of the India-Bangladesh border, it’s possible some Bangladeshis might have now and then crossed over to this side. But as Congress leader Digvijay Singh points out, there has been a similar movement of migrants from the Indian side as well. With the Bangladeshi economy doing well in recent years, people have been moving to work in Bangladesh. Besides, weren’t we all part of one country not long ago?

The BJP has a point when it claims all this is a result of the Congress’s vote bank politics. Indeed, successive Congress governments have used Assamese Muslims as little more than a vote bank without recognising their rights.

If it were serious about the well-being of Muslims as well as other communities, it would have taken steps to cool down this simmering volcano that erupts from time to time. There’s no peace where there’s no justice. Muslims, or for that matter any other community, need no special treatment. They just need what’s their due. Recognise everyone’s rights and give their due. That’s the only way to lasting peace in Assam.

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Separatist groups add fuel to Assam fire

As the North-East State is rocked by ethnic violence, insurgent groups from across the borders and their allies here must be strongly prevented from fanning the flames.

By all accounts, the law and order situation in Assam has deteriorated to such an extent that governance in accordance with the Constitution of India is in peril. The nation, which was a shocked witness to the unimpeded molestation of a teen-aged girl in one of the main thoroughfares to the State capital, Guwahati, for more than half-an-hour earlier this month, now has to see large-scale rioting, arson and murder ravaging Kokrajhar and Chirang districts, with violence spilling over the neighbouring district of Dhubri. Over 50 people have already been killed and around 2,00,000 have flocked to refugee camps.

The State Government’s utter inability to control crime and large-scale civil disorder, which these two developments underline, is shocking and deplorable enough. What makes the situation most alarming is the fact that Assam and some other States of north-eastern India have a history of insurgency fuelled by Pakistan and Bangladesh under the various military regimes and the Government headed by Begum Khaleda Zia. Things have improved considerably since Bangladesh’s present Awami League Government, headed by Sheikh Hasina, came to power in January, 2009.  She has demolished the camps and sanctuaries that insurgent groups had established in Bangladesh and ended the support and assistance they received from the Government in Dhaka. Pressure from her Government had even driven principal leaders of insurgent groups into positions from where Indian security forces could arrest them easily.

Among those arrested are Arabinda Rajkhowa, chairman and founder of the outlawed United Liberation Front of Asom, the latter’s ‘deputy commander-in-chief’, Raju Baruah, self-styled foreign and finance secretaries, Shashadhar Choudhury and Chitrabon Hazarika respectively, vice-president Pradeep Gogoi, and publicity chief Mithinga Daimaray. The ULFA and other insurgent groups, however, have by no means been crushed. Their foreign patrons continue to be active. The opponents of Ms Sheikh Hasina, routed in the last general election in Bangladesh in December 2008, are once again flexing their political muscles.

There have been reports for quite some time that Islamist fundamentalist groups, several of them linked to the Taliban, Al Qaeda and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, have been active in the State for more than two decades. A report by Surajit Talukdar and Swapan Kumar Paul of Newsfile in The Pioneer of November 6, 2003, listed as many as 15 of them. These included Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami, Muslim United Tigers of Assam, Islamic Liberation Front of Assam, Islamic Sevak Sangh, Muslim Security Force of Assam, Muslim Liberation Front, Muslim Liberation Tigers of Assam, Muslim Security Council of Assam, Muslim Security Force, Muslim Tiger Force, Muslim Volunteer Force, United Reformation Protest of Assam and Adam Sena.

Each of these groups has a distinct role. The Islamic Sevak Sangh helps terrorists and potential terrorists to cross the India-Bangladesh border while the HuJI in Bangladesh organises their training in Bangladesh and Burma. The Muslim United Liberation Front of Assam and the People’s United Liberation Front of Manipur, which is also active in south Assam and which has incorporated the Manipur-based Islamic National Front, have been campaigning to set up an ‘Islamic homeland’ which will be ruled by sharia’h law and Islamic values and enforce the Islamic dress code. It would include parts of north-eastern India, Burma and Bangladesh. Significantly, the MULTA and the PULF have been expanding their activities among the Muslim populations of Nagaland and Meghalaya where tensions have been simmering dangerously for quite some time.

The Taliban-Al Qaeda-ISI link is most clearly manifest in the case of the HuJI, which the US Department of State designated in March 2008 as a ‘Foreign Terrorist Organisation’. The most sinister of all the organisations mentioned above, it has a pan-Islamic network. The unit active in Assam is an extension of the HuJIB. In Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror, Rohan Gunaratna states, “The Bangladeshi authorities now believe that Al Qaeda had founded it.” Most significantly, he further states, “The group also operates in north-eastern India in tandem with several small Islamist groupings. Osama is said to have sent his private secretary to attend a meeting of the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami in Bangladesh to draft a strategy to intensify their violent campaign in that region.”

It is significant that Gunaratna states that the HUJIB was formed in 1992 to recruit volunteers to fight in Kashmir and Afghanistan. Begum Khaldea Zia was then the Prime Minister of Bangladesh. Indeed, the activities of the HUIB and other Islamist groups in that country received massive support from Bangladesh when Begum Khaleda Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party was in power in two stints from 1991-96 and 2001, the second time as the overwhelmingly dominant partner in a coalition Government in which the fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh exercised an influence far in excess of its parliamentary strength. Pathologically anti-Indian, it has been the matrix of all fundamental terrorist organisations in Bangladesh like HUJIB, Hizbut Tawhid, Jamaatul Mujahideen Bangladesh and the Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh.

The Taliban-Al Qaeda-ISI-linked terrorist organisations active in north-eastern India have been active among the region’s Muslim population. The latter has been rapidly growing in number since Independence in 1947 because, more than anything else, of the growing influx from Bangladesh. This is a problem which the Congress Governments at the Centre and Assam have allowed to grow untrammelled largely because of vote-bank politics. In fact, both appear to have connived in the process as evidenced by the enactment of a pathetically weak Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunal) Act of 1983 ,which was set aside by the Supreme Court in 2005.

The first priority in the present instance is obviously the immediate restoration of law and order. This will require firm and scrupulously even-handed action against both Bodos and Muslims engaged in murder, looting, arson and rioting, and their leaders. That done, both the Centre and the State Government will have to unearth and destroy the Taliban-Al Qaeda-linked secessionist terrorist network in north-eastern India.

 Bangladesh’s cooperation will be crucial to the success of the effort both to do this and stanch flow of illegal migrants. Fortunately, Bangladesh has now a Government which is friendly towards India. While securing its assistance, India must also address Dhaka’s concerns. It is a shame that New Delhi has not been able to sign the Teesta water sharing treaty with Bangladesh because of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s opposition.

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INDIA INTENSIFIES BORDER GUARD : Delhi goes slow on land swap deal

While Dhaka presses Delhi for quick ratification of the land swap deal signed between the two countries, the latter instead is going ahead to construct more border outposts and complete the fencing to check cross-border infiltration. 

 

India also failed to stop killing of unarmed Bangladeshi citizens along the border in spite of repeated protests and commitments made from the highest level. Bangladesh shares about 4,095 km border with India.

 

India’s Border Security Force (BSF) has killed 151 Bangladeshi nationals in different frontiers during the current tenure of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government since January 2009, the country’s home minister Shahara Khatun said told the parliament last month.

Meanwhile, the Foreign Office Consultation (FOC) meeting between India and Bangladesh held at the Foreign Secretary level earlier this week in Delhi, Bangladesh underlined the need for India to show some urgency in getting the deal finalised without further delay.

 

The day-long discussion was led by Foreign Secretary, Ranjan Mathai, and his Bangladesh counterpart, Mohamed Mijarul Quayes.

 

According to an Indian press report on Wednesday, Bangladesh was unhappy over the delay in implementation of a number of decisions taken during the meeting of the Prime Ministers of the two countries including the sharing of water of Teesta river.

 

While impressing upon India to ratify the land swap transfer deal, the Bangladesh Foreign Secretary said that it cannot be seen that the agreement is not implemented. This would create mistrust between the two neighbours, he said.

 

The deal has to be ratified by both the Houses of the Parliament in India. While BJP has been opposing the deal since the beginning, the Trinamool Congress, an ally of the Congress Party, too has opposed the deal.

 

New Delhi, meanwhile informed the Bangladesh delegation that the process of internal consultation has begun on the issue. “We are in the process of working out internal consensus,” said the official spokesman of Indian Ministry of External Affairs.

 

Meanwhile, New Delhi has sanctioned construction of 383 additional Border Out Posts (BOPs), besides ordering reduction of distance between outposts to 3.5 Km along the Indo-Bangladesh international border.

 

The additional BOPs were among a total of 509 BOPs sanctioned by the Ministry of Home Affairs, including 126 outposts along Indo-Pakistan Border.

 

The work is targeted to be completed by 2013-2014, Indian Home Minister P Chidambaram said, adding that the BOPs are now provided better communication and infrastructural facilities.

 

The increased number of BOPs will help in effective monitoring of the border, said Chidambaram, addressing a meeting of the Parliamentary Consultative Committee here last Tuesday.

 

Chidambaram, meanwhile, informed the Indin MPs that the Government was exploring the use of modern technology in border management by proper fencing, flood lights and other new technologies available in this field. He further stated that the experiences of advanced countries are also being studied for better border management.

 

The Minister said that adequate resources are being provided and low cost technology and better management is being explored for better management.

 

According to Indian Home Minister, the fencing is helping a lot in checking infiltration but the fence also requires repairs wherever it is damaged.

 

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Should Bangladesh believe Myanmar

Bangladesh once again noted with hope a pledge of Myanmar when the latter recently apprised the former to take back all registered and unregistered Rohingya Muslim refugees from the country. The pledge came through Myanmar’s newly appointed envoy to Dhaka, who in contrast to his country’s president said all Rohingya now staying in Bangladesh would be taken back after proper verification.

A few days back Myanmar President Thein Sein while talking to Mr Antonio Guterres, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Yangon said his country was unwilling to take back the Rohingyas ousted over the past decades. “We have noted the pledge, but wondering how we can believe it, when Myanmar had failed to verify particulars of some 21,000 Rohingya refugees since 1998,” a senior official of the Bangladesh foreign ministry said.

The number of these registered refugees in two camps at Kutupalang and Nayapara under Cox’s Bazar district swelled to more than 30,000 early this year as Myanmar did not take them back despite of repeated pledges and promises. The registered Rohingya refugees at the camps are the remnants of 250,000 Rohingya who had fled into Bangladesh in late 1991 following persecution under the then military regime in Myanmar. Most of the refugees that had crossed into Bangladesh in late 1991 and early 1992 were repatriated from some 20 refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar district until 1998.

Meanwhile the Rohingyas alleging communal persecution continued to cross into Bangladesh and so far nearly 400,000 of them, dubbed as local people as economic refugees, have anchored in squalid shanties scattered in Cox’s Bazar and Bandarban districts. Had Bangladesh authorities not taken adequate steps to seal border during the communal riot in Myanmar’s western Rakhine state in June hundreds of thousands more would have been fled into the country – a traditional safe haven for the Rohingya Muslims. Though the stance of Bangladesh is a bit harsh in humanitarian view, impoverished Bangladesh is really unable to take the burden of more Rohingyas.

The newly appointed Myanmar Ambassador Myo Myint Than while meeting Foreign Minister Dipu Moni on Wednesday once again pledged like his predecessors that all registered and unregistered Rohingya refugees would be taken back after proper verification. A couple of days ago officials said Bangladesh was likely to seek intervention of the United Nations to get rid of the burden of refugees if Myanmar continued to delay in taking back Rohingyas from the country.

The relevant authorities started mulling for the UN intervention as a recent statement of Myanmar President Thein Sein suggested that his country was not willing to take back the Rohingyas ousted over the past decades. Bangladesh hoped that the UN would find a solution acceptable to both the countries and the relevant communities in the restive Rakhine state. Officials further said Bangladesh wanted to live in harmony with all its neighbours and at the same time also wanted that no issues having roots in another country should continue to harm it.

Herding Rohingya Muslims into refugee camps or their deportation to another country could be the only solution for the violence hit Rakhine state, the Myanmar President told the UNHCR in Yangon on June 12, according to a website of Myanmar presidential house. “We will send them (Rohingyas) away if any third country would accept them. This is what we are thinking is the solution to the issue,” President Thein Sein told UNHCR Antonio Guterres.

Communal violence between ethnic Buddhist Rakhine and local Muslims, including the Rohingyas, swept the state in June, forcing tens of thousands to flee as homes were torched and communities ripped apart. Some 80 people, mostly Rohingyas, were killed in the violence. Among the Muslims, Rohingyas are majority, while there are a smaller number of Muslims who were converted from Buddhism and other religious groups.

“The statement has shocked us, because following the observation of the head of the state of Myanmar, there may not be any scope left to send back hundreds and thousands of Rohingya refugees to their ancestral home from Bangladesh,” said a senior official of the foreign ministry. The statement of Myanmar president not only exposed Myanmar’s intentions not only to repatriate Rohingya refugees from abroad, but also to expel those still residing inside the country, according to a political analyst. Despite repeated pledges there was virtually no repatriation of more over tens of thousands of Rohingyas who had been pushed in to Bangladesh over the past years, another official of the home affairs ministry said.

If the expulsion of Rohingyas continues, it will keep on harming Bangladesh, as it is linked with Rakhine state along a 300-km long porous border through hills, rivers and maritime boundary, the official said. President Thein Sein, who had previously favoured a reconciliation between the communities during the riot between Muslim Rohingyas and Buddhists in the Rakhine state told the UNHCR that the Rohingyas were not welcome in Myanmar. “We will take responsibility for our ethnic people but it is impossible to accept the illegally entered Rohingyas, who are not our ethnicity,” he told Antonio Guterres.

The former junta general said the “only solution” was to send the Rohingyas — which number around 800,000 in Myanmar and are considered to be some of the world’s most persecuted minorities — to refugee camps run by UNHCR, western media reports said. During the June mayhem Bangladesh sealed its border and pushed back hundreds of Rohingyas who sought shelter fleeing Rakine state. The June violence sparked early in the month after a Buddhist woman had allegedly been raped and murdered in Taungup of Rakhine state, formerly Arakan until 1989.

Subsequently on June 3, a mob of hundreds of people attacked a bus, believing the perpetrators were on board, and beat 10 Muslims to death. The violence further escalated when police shot dead two Rohingya youths during a Friday protest at Maungdaw near Bangladesh bordrer on June 8. Although security forces have quelled the worst of the unrest, tens of thousands of people still remain in government-run relief camps with the UN’s World Food Programme reporting that it has provided food to some 100,000 people.

According to Chittagong-based Arakan Historical Society (AHS), Myanmar has been cleansing Rohingyas from Arakan since 1948, when Muslims were in majority. “Even in 1960s the Rohingya population in Arakan was around 2.0 million and now they have reduced to some 800,000, after most or the Rohingyas migrated to different countries including in the Middle East,” said Mohammad Rais, a leader of AHS. Meanwhile, following the June violence and floods in Myanmar, President Thein Sein cancelled his scheduled July 15 visit to Bangladesh.

However, he is expected visit Bangladesh after Ramadan. But the date has not been fixed yet. Bangladesh won a verdict of International Tribunal for Law of the Sea (ITLOS) over a maritime dispute with Myanmar in March this year. The verdict ensured Bangladesh’s sovereignty over its exclusive economic zone in the Bay of Bengal.

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Ethnic riots sweep Assam, at least 30 killed

Police shot dead four rioters in Assam on Tuesday as security forces struggled to contain ethnic fighting that has killed at least 30 people and left riverside hamlets ablaze, forcing tens of thousands from their homes.

Rioting between Bodo tribespeople and Muslim settlers has raged for days in a region near Bangladesh. Some victims died of machete wounds, said aid workers who has seen the bodies.

Police opened fire on rioters burning property in the Bodo-dominated Kokrajhar district, killing the four, police inspector general S.N. Singh told Reuters. Police found four more bodies in a neighbouring district.

"More and more villages are being burnt by attackers this evening. Violence started again in the evening after a brief lull," said a district civil servant, who asked not to be named.

Earlier on Tuesday, hundreds of men armed with spears, clubs and rocks attacked an express train passing through Kokrajhar, injuring several passengers. In another incident, several people suffered bullet wounds and others were injured in a stampede when police fired to disperse a gang of 400, a senior police official said.

Soldiers and federal paramilitary troops patrolled Kokrajhar town and outlying areas on armoured vehicles mounted with machine guns. Some police complained they were ill-equipped to deal with the riots, despite government assurances more security reinforcements were travelling to the region.

Rival mobs have spread to rural areas in three districts, targeting hamlets along river banks and in the jungle. About 500 villages have been destroyed by arson, said police.

Ringed by China, Myanmar, Bangladesh and Bhutan, India's northeast is connected to the rest of the country by a narrow land strip called the chicken's neck. Home to more than 200 ethnic and tribal groups it has been racked by separatist revolts since India's independence from Britain in 1947.

In recent years, Hindu and Christian tribes have vented strong anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment against Bangladeshi settlers. The Bodo tribe has clashed with Bengalis in deadly riots several times since the 1950s. Thirty years ago, about 2,000 people, mainly Muslims, died in riots in Assam.

The latest violence was sparked on Friday night when unidentified men killed four youths in Kokrajhar district, police and district officials said. In retaliation, armed Bodos attacked Muslims, suspecting them of being behind the killings.

Hagrama Mohilary, the leader of the tribal council governing the region, warned that former separatist rebels had joined the violence to protect Bodo villages. He called for the rebels, who are officially observing a ceasefire, to lay down their arms.

Bodo tribes shot at Muslim villages close to the border with Bhutan on Monday night, a senior police officer who asked not to be named told Reuters. He said no casualties had been reported.

Assam's chief minister, Tarun Gogoi, told TV network CNN-IBN he hoped the situation would be under control within two days. He said about 30,000 villagers have fled their homes and taken shelter in relief camps, but local officials said the numbers were at least twice that.

The main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) criticised Gogoi for not stopping the rioting and Prime Minister Manomhan Singh called the chief minister asking him to do everything possible to halt the violence. The Hindu nationalist BJP has in the past been accused of fanning religious conflicts.

Tribal leader Mohilary said relief camps were overcrowded and short of food and medicine because roadblocks across the region had stopped supply trucks.

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