Assam massacre: Bodofa, blasts and a bloody Brahmaputra

One day during the late 1980s. In a dimly lit, security-protected room in a nursing home in the town of Cooch Behar, a district in West Bengal, on the border of Assam, an outlaw in hiding, Upendranath Brahma, sporting a golf cap, is speaking to two journalists who have promised him protection from the Assam and West Bengal police.

Bodoland is discussed, and Brahma speaks about his people, the Bodos, and the atrocities they suffer at the hands of the other tribes of Assam. He speaks about a certain young, talented Bodo student, who had been sent to Gauhati University to study, and who was tortured to insanity by his college mates. He speaks about the ethnic clashes, day after day, that take place between the people in his land. Bodos, the sons of the soil of Assam, are way different from the Santhals, whom the British had brought to Assam to work in the tea gardens. Their cultures don’t match, their languages are different, their children grow up considering each other enemies. They have burnt each other’s houses too, but there are still a few years to pass between that day in that nursing home room and this day in 2014.

A cancer-ridden Brahma, on the run from the Assam Police, speaks in a diseased and low voice that his movement for a separate Bodoland will live on even after him. Two years later, Brahma, Bodofa (the father of the Bodos) has succumbed to cancer. And Assam is ravaged by voices of dissent.

In 1993, the state government, for the first time, shows signs of addressing the agitation. A Bodoland Autonomous Council is set up, and several provisions for the fulfilment of the demands of the Bodos are drawn up. After a year, the council collapses, leaving Assam in throes of an insurgency that the state has paid a heavy price for, over the last two decades. Bridges have been bombed away; trains have been derailed; blasts have rocked the state; numerous people have been killed, and even more have been displaced. In Kokrajhar, people have lived a life of uncertainty for aeons. Across the border, in West Bengal, numerous Santhals and Bodos have poured in, hoping for some certainty of peace in their lives. Kokrajhar has been torn apart by violence, descriptions of which evade the human vocabulary.

In 2003, after a decade of agitation, the Bodoland Territorial Council came into being. This autonomous body takes care of the districts of Kokrajhar, Chirang, Udalguri and Baksa. While the Bodo Liberation Tigers (BLT) surrendered their arms, were renamed Bodoland People's Front (BPF), and decided on a symbiotic arrangement with the government, the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB) continued to wreak havoc in the state, the latest evidence of which is the massacre in Kokrajhar on December 23, which left more than 50 people dead and many others injured.

The allegation that the Centre has neglected the Northeast is, more often than not, true. In a country where the Indian Railways began operating in 1853, reaching beyond Lekhapani in Tinsukia, Assam, on rail tracks was an impossibility till 2014. Meghalaya, only a month ago, was put on the railway map of India.

For the Bodos, the neglect is two-fold. The Centre has always treated them as lesser mortals, or so the agitators of the Bodoland movement allege; and the state has signed peace accords, provisions of which were never fulfilled, or so the NDFB’s numerous instances of violence would make one believe. So, the way a child throws a tantrum to draw attention, so do the Bodo militants. The Bodos are the victim of an attention-seeking syndrome. One, that has victimised both the militants and the state of Assam since the first time their bombs blew up a part of the district of Kokrajhar.

Upen Brahma passed away in 1990. But Bodofa’s discourses, much like any insurgent movement in the country, has taken wings and soared to destructive heights today. It is Assam that is being left tattered now, thanks to these militant groups – Bodos and ULFAs being at the top of the list. It is time some amount of time and attention was paid listening to these voices of dissent. Else, given the porosity of the state borders in the country, it will not be very long before a blast of higher intensity than the one that rocked Kokrajhar is used to wake up sleeping giants at the Centre.

That is exactly what the low-voiced, short-heighted Brahma had drilled in the minds of his followers – and that’s what my father had been able to distil from that interaction of his with Brahma in that nursing home room, a few years before the Bodo leader breathed his last. Whether or not we need to live to watch that day of doom that Brahma had prophesied is one for the government to decide. And till the time a consensus is reached, the count of victims in this ethnic clash will keep rising, till the Brahmaputra turns completely bloody.