One morning in the last week of March, as the heat started rising, I drove around the countryside of Kokrajhar, one of the four Bodoland Territorial Area Districts, where villages were waking up, and children were walking to school. The younger ones wore standard uniforms: shirts and shorts for the boys, shirts and skirts for the girls. But the older girls wore more distinct uniforms: wraparounds of different kinds.
“The Bodo girls are wearing dokhnas,” said Mijink, a young woman who works with NERSWN, a non-profit working in the area, and who had been kind enough to accompany me on the drive. “And girls from other communities are wearing mekhalas and saris." The dokhna is wrapped chest-down, unlike the mekhala and sari which are tied around the waist.
Not only were they wearing different clothes, the girls were heading for different schools. Bodo children study in Bodo-medium schools. While the others – Bengali-speaking Hindus and Muslims, Adivasis, Santhals, Rajbanshis, and other communities – enroll in Assamese-language schools.
Only a small fraction of students who go to English-medium schools have the chance to squabble over a tiffin box with a child from another community and then make up. Since most villages are segregated by community, it isn't as if they can go home and roll in the mud together after class.
'The men in Kabul dress'
“They are so tall…lamba lamba aadmi,” said Prabhawati Musahary, a Bodo woman who spoke a mix of Bengali and Hindi, and who had been asked to speak on behalf of her village in Tulsibil. She was talking about the Bengali-speaking Muslims who live in the nearby villages. Ordinarily, Bangladesh would come up in such a conversation, but instead there was a reference to Afghanistan. “Don’t know where they have come from, these men in Kabul dress.”
We sat in the shadow of a burnt structure – the abandoned home of her neighbours. In July 2012, when violence engulfed the region, the Bodo families, who are smaller in number in the Tulsibil area, were taken away to refugee camps. “It was July 22,” Prabhawati said, distinctly remembering the date. They came back in December to find their homes had been hollowed out by fire.
The ethnic clashes between Bodos and Bengali-speaking Muslims that summer had left nearly 100 people dead and displaced 400,000. Since then, both Bodos and Muslims have slowly rebuilt their homes. But they had not been able to mend the bridges.
"A few weeks ago, a Muslim boy from a neighbouring village went missing. He ran away after his mother beat him up for not taking out the animals to graze,” Prabhawati said, narrating a recent episode of tensions. “But the Muslims went to the police and complained that the Bodos had killed him. The police came and searched all our homes.” Her voice was bitter.
Now, a month and a half later, I read with some alarm that of the 32 people killed in the recent violence, seven had been shot dead in a village in the Tulsibil area.
The language of division
If you read Hindi and were to step inside Bodo-medium school, you might feel disoriented for a moment. The alphabets on the blackboard are comprehensible, but the language is not.
Bodo leaders chose Devanagari, the script in which Hindi is written, as the script for the Bodo language.
This was part of their attempt to distance themselves from the Assamese people and to assert their separate identity.
For the Bodos, their cultural identity is tied to the issue of land.
Repeated waves of migration during the colonial years – with an influx of Santhal workers and Muslim farmers – marginalised Bodos, writes Udayon Misra in an article in the Economic and Political Weekly. As shifting cultivators, Bodos did not pay land revenue, which “made them appear as encroachers on government forest land and helped the immigrant non-tribal peasant to permanently acquire the land that was the preserve of the tribal farmer.”
In 1947, the Assam government legislated to bar outsiders from buying land in tribal belts and blocks. But the law was not implemented properly, writes Misra, and tribal land alienation continued in the post-Independence years.
In the eighties, the Bodo struggle for greater autonomy started with a peaceful movement but soon gave rise to armed militant groups. By 1993, when the Centre offered an olive branch in the form of an autonomous council for Bodos, the demographic changes in the region were several decades old and migrant families were into their second and third generations, if not more. And yet, the Centre decided to fall back on demography in deciding the boundaries of the autonomous district. It declared that only those areas where Bodos formed one-half of the population would be included in the district.
Many believe this sowed the seed of the idea among Bodos that their political autonomy would rest on improving their demographic strength. This led to a wave of ethnic violence through the 1990s, in which nearly 500 people were killed. More than 200 were Adivasis whose forefathers had come from present-day Jharkhand.
That morning on the drive, I stopped at a bridge to take pictures and ended up striking up a conversation with a man on a bicycle. His name was Kishun Mardi. He was Adivasi and he lived in Kusimari village. Had life returned to normal after the gandagal, I asked him. I was referring to the 2012 ethnic riots between Bodos and Muslims. But he referred to the 1996 riots between Bodos and Adivasis when he replied, "Yes, things are normal. We are back home." The people of his village had spent 12 years in a refugee camp before they had managed to go back home.
Election violence
Coming in the middle of a national election, the recent wave of violence in western Assam has triggered a blame game between the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party, which is ironic because neither of the two parties have any real presence in the region.
The politics of the region is dominated by the Bodo parties – the ruling Bodoland People’s Front and its rival, the Bodoland People’s Progressive Front.
Since Independence, Kokrajhar has been represented by a Bodo parliamentarian.
But this election, there is a chance that a non-Bodo might win.
With fear and insecurity high in the aftermath of the 2012 clashes, non-Bodo groups came together to support Hira Sarania, a former leader of the United Liberated Front of Assam and an independent candidate.
When Tulsibil went to the poll on April 24, a rumour reportedly spread that the electronic voting machines had been programmed to convert votes for Sarania into votes for the Bodoland People's Front, which so angered some of Sarania's supporters that they went on a rampage and killed a policeman. With the police combing through the villages to nab those guilty for their colleague's death, the men of those villages had reportedly fled. When armed gunmen descended on the village last week, they gunned down five women and two children.
Tale of two teachers
That morning in March, after driving through a countryside of segregated villages suffused with mutual suspicion, we backed up at an incongruous sight: a Bodo woman sitting with Muslim women at a roadside shop.
She turned out to be a teacher at the government primary school of Anthaibari village. The school was across the road. It was lunch break. She was catching her breath.
Her name was Sharmishta Brahma Narzary. She was 29 and had an easy smile and a warm and friendly manner. Although her family belonged to Kokrajhar district, she had grown up in Guwahati, where her father worked in a bank. There, she had attended an Assamese-medium school. The family eventually returned to Kokrajhar and Sharmishta picked up a teaching job. Trained in Assamese, and not her native-language, she is qualified to teach in Assamese-medium schools, which means she is most likely to be posted in non-Bodo villages.
The Anthaibari school is her first posting, she said. She had completed one year in the job.
How's it been so far, I asked her. Did she feel accepted?
"The students have welcomed me and all," she said, with a broad smile. "But the parents...I don't know."
She travels 15 kilometres every day from her home in Gossaigaon town to come here. While she felt comfortable in Anthaibari, she was insecure on her way back.
"If there is a sudden bandh, you won't get an auto...You don't know what will happen."
What is her fear, I asked her.
"Majority of people are good but..."
"You feel you could be targeted?"
"Not by people of the locality, but outside people could come and force them..."
She introduced her colleague at the school, Mehrun Ahmad, who spoke in Assamese, which Sharmishta translated for me. "She's saying Muslims still live in fear. Those who lost their loved ones and their homes in 2012 have not been able to regain a sense of security."
Then, offering her own views on the strain between the communities, Sharmishta said, "There is still a gap. One can sense it. Feel it. It will take time…to fill the gaps and all."
Even before the gaps could fill and the wounds could heal, an election came and deepened the divide, and now armed gunmen have come and inflicted new injuries.
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“The Bodo girls are wearing dokhnas,” said Mijink, a young woman who works with NERSWN, a non-profit working in the area, and who had been kind enough to accompany me on the drive. “And girls from other communities are wearing mekhalas and saris." The dokhna is wrapped chest-down, unlike the mekhala and sari which are tied around the waist.
Not only were they wearing different clothes, the girls were heading for different schools. Bodo children study in Bodo-medium schools. While the others – Bengali-speaking Hindus and Muslims, Adivasis, Santhals, Rajbanshis, and other communities – enroll in Assamese-language schools.
Only a small fraction of students who go to English-medium schools have the chance to squabble over a tiffin box with a child from another community and then make up. Since most villages are segregated by community, it isn't as if they can go home and roll in the mud together after class.
'The men in Kabul dress'
“They are so tall…lamba lamba aadmi,” said Prabhawati Musahary, a Bodo woman who spoke a mix of Bengali and Hindi, and who had been asked to speak on behalf of her village in Tulsibil. She was talking about the Bengali-speaking Muslims who live in the nearby villages. Ordinarily, Bangladesh would come up in such a conversation, but instead there was a reference to Afghanistan. “Don’t know where they have come from, these men in Kabul dress.”
We sat in the shadow of a burnt structure – the abandoned home of her neighbours. In July 2012, when violence engulfed the region, the Bodo families, who are smaller in number in the Tulsibil area, were taken away to refugee camps. “It was July 22,” Prabhawati said, distinctly remembering the date. They came back in December to find their homes had been hollowed out by fire.
The ethnic clashes between Bodos and Bengali-speaking Muslims that summer had left nearly 100 people dead and displaced 400,000. Since then, both Bodos and Muslims have slowly rebuilt their homes. But they had not been able to mend the bridges.
"A few weeks ago, a Muslim boy from a neighbouring village went missing. He ran away after his mother beat him up for not taking out the animals to graze,” Prabhawati said, narrating a recent episode of tensions. “But the Muslims went to the police and complained that the Bodos had killed him. The police came and searched all our homes.” Her voice was bitter.
Now, a month and a half later, I read with some alarm that of the 32 people killed in the recent violence, seven had been shot dead in a village in the Tulsibil area.
The language of division
If you read Hindi and were to step inside Bodo-medium school, you might feel disoriented for a moment. The alphabets on the blackboard are comprehensible, but the language is not.
Bodo leaders chose Devanagari, the script in which Hindi is written, as the script for the Bodo language.
This was part of their attempt to distance themselves from the Assamese people and to assert their separate identity.
For the Bodos, their cultural identity is tied to the issue of land.
Repeated waves of migration during the colonial years – with an influx of Santhal workers and Muslim farmers – marginalised Bodos, writes Udayon Misra in an article in the Economic and Political Weekly. As shifting cultivators, Bodos did not pay land revenue, which “made them appear as encroachers on government forest land and helped the immigrant non-tribal peasant to permanently acquire the land that was the preserve of the tribal farmer.”
In 1947, the Assam government legislated to bar outsiders from buying land in tribal belts and blocks. But the law was not implemented properly, writes Misra, and tribal land alienation continued in the post-Independence years.
In the eighties, the Bodo struggle for greater autonomy started with a peaceful movement but soon gave rise to armed militant groups. By 1993, when the Centre offered an olive branch in the form of an autonomous council for Bodos, the demographic changes in the region were several decades old and migrant families were into their second and third generations, if not more. And yet, the Centre decided to fall back on demography in deciding the boundaries of the autonomous district. It declared that only those areas where Bodos formed one-half of the population would be included in the district.
Many believe this sowed the seed of the idea among Bodos that their political autonomy would rest on improving their demographic strength. This led to a wave of ethnic violence through the 1990s, in which nearly 500 people were killed. More than 200 were Adivasis whose forefathers had come from present-day Jharkhand.
That morning on the drive, I stopped at a bridge to take pictures and ended up striking up a conversation with a man on a bicycle. His name was Kishun Mardi. He was Adivasi and he lived in Kusimari village. Had life returned to normal after the gandagal, I asked him. I was referring to the 2012 ethnic riots between Bodos and Muslims. But he referred to the 1996 riots between Bodos and Adivasis when he replied, "Yes, things are normal. We are back home." The people of his village had spent 12 years in a refugee camp before they had managed to go back home.
Election violence
Coming in the middle of a national election, the recent wave of violence in western Assam has triggered a blame game between the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party, which is ironic because neither of the two parties have any real presence in the region.
The politics of the region is dominated by the Bodo parties – the ruling Bodoland People’s Front and its rival, the Bodoland People’s Progressive Front.
Since Independence, Kokrajhar has been represented by a Bodo parliamentarian.
But this election, there is a chance that a non-Bodo might win.
With fear and insecurity high in the aftermath of the 2012 clashes, non-Bodo groups came together to support Hira Sarania, a former leader of the United Liberated Front of Assam and an independent candidate.
When Tulsibil went to the poll on April 24, a rumour reportedly spread that the electronic voting machines had been programmed to convert votes for Sarania into votes for the Bodoland People's Front, which so angered some of Sarania's supporters that they went on a rampage and killed a policeman. With the police combing through the villages to nab those guilty for their colleague's death, the men of those villages had reportedly fled. When armed gunmen descended on the village last week, they gunned down five women and two children.
Tale of two teachers
That morning in March, after driving through a countryside of segregated villages suffused with mutual suspicion, we backed up at an incongruous sight: a Bodo woman sitting with Muslim women at a roadside shop.
She turned out to be a teacher at the government primary school of Anthaibari village. The school was across the road. It was lunch break. She was catching her breath.
Her name was Sharmishta Brahma Narzary. She was 29 and had an easy smile and a warm and friendly manner. Although her family belonged to Kokrajhar district, she had grown up in Guwahati, where her father worked in a bank. There, she had attended an Assamese-medium school. The family eventually returned to Kokrajhar and Sharmishta picked up a teaching job. Trained in Assamese, and not her native-language, she is qualified to teach in Assamese-medium schools, which means she is most likely to be posted in non-Bodo villages.
The Anthaibari school is her first posting, she said. She had completed one year in the job.
How's it been so far, I asked her. Did she feel accepted?
"The students have welcomed me and all," she said, with a broad smile. "But the parents...I don't know."
She travels 15 kilometres every day from her home in Gossaigaon town to come here. While she felt comfortable in Anthaibari, she was insecure on her way back.
"If there is a sudden bandh, you won't get an auto...You don't know what will happen."
What is her fear, I asked her.
"Majority of people are good but..."
"You feel you could be targeted?"
"Not by people of the locality, but outside people could come and force them..."
She introduced her colleague at the school, Mehrun Ahmad, who spoke in Assamese, which Sharmishta translated for me. "She's saying Muslims still live in fear. Those who lost their loved ones and their homes in 2012 have not been able to regain a sense of security."
Then, offering her own views on the strain between the communities, Sharmishta said, "There is still a gap. One can sense it. Feel it. It will take time…to fill the gaps and all."
Even before the gaps could fill and the wounds could heal, an election came and deepened the divide, and now armed gunmen have come and inflicted new injuries.
