Home Invasion in Bodoland - Part I

As if devastating floods this season was not enough of a misery, violence broke out in and around the areas  called the BTAD (Bodoland Territorial Areas District) in Assam, causing further displacement, loss of lives and livelihood and all the other attendant misery.

Like the floods, the media would have given the episode a pass. But three things happened. First, having extensively covered the molestation of a young girl in Guwahati in the hands of a Youth Congress worker and journalists employed by a TV channel owned by a Congress minister in Assam (of course, the coverage did not go into these details), only recently, media could not pretend that the North Eastern state of Assam did not exist.  Second, there was a very strong blowback from North East social media activists.Third, India now receives very strong coverage in the Western press, which in turn makes it back to Indian audiences thanks to - Globalization.

This put seculars in the press/TV or otherwise into an uncomfortable position. Facts travel far these days and it is  not a nice prospect having to put what could nominally be called Shri Rajiv Gandhi Voter Acquisition Yojana on prime time, especially in a time of political turmoil.  So, it was wrapped around in various euphemisms like 'ethnic clashes', 'sporadic violence between groups', 'clashes between tribals and Bengali speaking Muslims' - reluctantly graduating up to - 'Muslim settlers'.

A secular person bellowed:  Do these Hindu fundamentalists even know who Bodos are?

Maybe we don't, why don't you tell us? Oh wait, you wrote like a zillion op/eds on Kashmir and another bazillion on Gujarat. Why didn't you write on Bodos? Not enough glamour or not enough dollars?

Talking of Kashmir. A few years ago, the bodies of a young Kashmiri woman and her sister-in-law were found in a stream, in Shopian, Kashmir. That triggered a massive protest by locals, seculars jumped into the fray, concocting conspiracy theories after conspiracy theories.  It turned out the women had simply drowned in the stream and not raped and murdered by the army, as the locals has suspected.

A few days ago, a very tragic case came to light - a schoolgirl in Rajouri, daughter of a Hindu armyman committed suicide after having been raped by her school principal, his son and two other teachers. The crime was abetted by a fellow student. Naturally, seculars could not be bothered with this.  Then again, that cylinder blast a few days ago which may or may not have been a grenade attack.

But we digress. The point is simply this, whenever Hindus found themselves in a demographic disadvantage, things did not turn out so well for them in South Asia. It did not really matter whether in Pakistan or Bangladesh or in India. In Kashmir for instance, India's only comprehensive, devastating and irreversible ethnic cleansing happened.

So, the coverage began, with choice tricks of secular TV played to perfection - selective visuals, interview of select experts with the right sound bites to offer etc. According to the secular party, apparently there are no illegal immigrants, while some estimate the number in Assam currently at about 15 lakhs. This is not accounting for the fact that a very significant number was assimilated during the 1971 war. At the time, Indira Gandhi had said, absolutely no question of citizenship for either Hindu or Muslim refugees from Bangladesh. That worked out really well! Now, a Congress MP Shashi Tharoor himself admits there could be 20 million illegal immigrants.

Soon, the coverage inevitably veered towards the favorite pastime of seculars, blame game.  We quote from the HRW report:

In May, Bodos and Muslims were injured in clashes that also caused injuries to police attempting to contain the violence. On July 6, two Muslim men were shot dead, and during protests that followed a Bodo man was severely beaten. On July 19, unidentified gunmen reportedly shot two Muslim youth leaders. The next day, unidentified attackers killed four Bodo men, presumably in retaliatory attacks. This sparked full-scale riots where rival groups from both sides attacked communities, beating people to death and burning down homes.

Now, by no stretch of imagination can that be called "Bodos attacked the Muslims", especially when both groups possess automatic weapons, but that appears to have become the tagline for this event in the secular press. Currently some 266 thousand Muslims are in the camps, while there are about 111 thousand Bodos. Surely, if Bodos were unilaterally attacking Muslims, they would not be living out in the camps (tragically, in their own homeland), would they?

What Bodos are experiencing is a full scale home invasion and they have a right to claim back their territory. But they have messed with the wrong group of people, those who come up aces in secular narratives no matter which side they are, whether they are the aggressors or even whether they are legitimate citizens. From "minorities have the first claim to resources" we have progressed or regressed to, "illegal immigrants have first claim to resources" in a matter of two terms of the secular party.

(... to be continued.)