The 2012 riots between Bodos and Muslims in the BTAD represent a watershed moment in ethnic relations between the two communities, as well as in shaping the perception of Muslims in BTAD and Assam. Such violent events present a moment of rupture, in which identifying the Other becomes important, and an opportunity to mould and re-shape these categories can emerge. This process is seen, for instance, in the reinforcing of neo-oriental categories of Otherness in the continuing crisis of migration and asylum-seeking in
contemporary Europe (Barbero 2012b), and the transformation of ordinary Muslims into members of a “suspect community” after violent acts of terrorism (Hickman et al. 2011, Jarvis and Lister 2013).
The dynamics of Bodo-Muslim violence in the BTAD are not the same as the dynamics of Hindu-Muslim violence in India (although there are efforts to subsume it within this discourse, which are discussed later). In Assam, for instance, the discourse of illegal immigration from Bangladesh, which became especially prominent during the Assam
movement of the 1970s, plays a far greater role in defining the relationship between Muslims (especially Bengali-speaking ones) and other communities in the state, than do the themes of Hindu-Muslim communal discourse that are prevalent in other parts of India. Paul Brass (Brass 2003) identifies three major defining themes from Indian history — the Mughals, the British, and the partition of India and Pakistan — as central to the perpetuation of this
discourse in India. In the BTAD, the Bodo agitation of the 1990s, and the creation of the Council in 2003 are significant markers of ethnic violence locally, until the riots of 2012. There are many versions and narratives of what precipitated the riots in the BTAD in July 2012. In one version, the violence began to escalate when two Muslim men were shot dead in Angthihara on 6thJuly 2012, in the jurisdiction of the Dotma police station in Kokrajhar district. On 20th July, four Bodo men, members of the ruling Bodoland Political Front, were killed in retaliation. According to other commentators, it was this act of violence that sparked off the riots, and by the 21st, further retaliation by unidentified persons on a Muslim-inhabited village led to the a total death toll of 9 (The Sentinel 2012a). This cycle of violence took on a life of its own and for the next two months, nearly 500,000 people became displaced in the process of fleeing their homes (Mahanta 2013, p. 52). In many affected villages, people did not return for six months, and some displaced communities never returned at all.
In interviews with the survivors of the violence, while attempting to understand what precipitated the violence, both temporal and local factors become relevant. Almost all of those affected reported a build up of tensions between the two groups several months before the two incidents mentioned above, precipitated by a spate of killings of non-Bodo residents by the militant outfit, the NDFB.
Given the electoral incentives and gains to be made in post-riot situations, it is perhaps unremarkable that various political parties as well as social and political groups, including right-wing Hindu nationalist outfits, constructed their own narratives of the situation. India’s national-level Hindu nationalist party, the BJP, for instance, decided to send its own fact finding team to the BTAD, only three days after the violence began (Indian Express 2012). At this time, the BJP had a very small presence in Assam’s electoral politics, but as a party gaining ground politically at the national level, was still able to influence the discourse of violence in Assam. As the riots progressed, the BJP was able to capitalise on the growing distrust of Bengali Muslims, who are often labelled illegal Bangladeshi immigrants because of their religious and linguistic profile. Thus, on several occasions, senior members of the BJP alluded to the role of the central and state government in failing to check illegal immigration (Seven Sisters Post 2012a, 2012b, The Sentinel 2012b), and went as far as to call the BTAD “Bangladesh occupied Assam” (The Sentinel 2012c). Other right-wing groups, such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Bajrang Dal, similarly chimed into the immigration debate, demanding the deportation of Bangladeshi Muslims from the
country, alleging links to terrorist outfits, or demanding a ban on Muslim groups in the state (Assam Tribune 2012, The Sentinel 2012d), thus conflating local antagonism against illegal immigration with antagonism against Muslims more broadly. As RSS operatives in the BTAD confirmed, the emergence of relief camps and services also facilitated the entry of the RSS, which has historically conducted relief work in many areas of India after major
disasters. As Dixit’s (2016) piece confirms, RSS operatives have been present in other parts of the BTAD since 2008, in particular, during riots in Udalguri district. This emphasis on “seva” (service) continues into their ongoing presence in the region, where they run medical camps, sewing training for young women, etc.
The riots also saw the arrival of other groups in the region — international NGOs like Oxfam and MercyCorps, other NGOs from India assisting with the relief effort,46 and other religious and charitable organisations, such as Caritas, and pan-Indian groups like the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind and the Jamiat-e-Ulema Hind. The Jamaat-e-Islami Hind and the Jamiat-e-Ulema Hind conducted relief work (primarily in relief camps housing Muslims), but also issued public statements urging Muslims to lodge reports with the police, and offered legal assistance (Seven Sisters Post 2012c, The Telegraph 2012). Many of these groups stayed on in the relief camps and rehabilitated villages, establishing themselves as a presence in these areas, and also, according to several interview participants, affecting the practice of Islam locally. Hijabs and veils for women, for instance, virtually unknown among Muslim communities in Western Assam, began to make an appearance where they had not previously existed. One interviewee made the connection between the funding that these groups received from organisations like OPEC, and the particular, more standardised version of Islam that they seemed to propagate. The riots also served to coalesce Bengali Muslim identity around a political party, the AIUDF, which already had a presence in other parts of Assam, and consolidated a presence in the BTAD by setting up massive relief efforts and resettlement colonies for displaced Muslims who did not want to return to their villages. These “model villages”, named after their contentious but popular leader Badruddin Ajmal, served as examples among many field respondents that of all the political actors in Assam, he alone spoke up for Muslims.
In different ways, right-wing Hindu groups as well as charitable Islamic organisations tried to subsume the specific lived experience of being a Muslim in Assam and the BTAD — or
indeed even the events that led up to violence of the scale that the region saw in 2012 — within the wider experience of being Muslim in India. Right-wing groups like the VHP immediately invoked Assam’s favourite bogeyman — the Bangladeshi Muslim — by
alleging that they were sneaking into India by way of refugee camps. The demonization of all Bengali-speaking Muslim victims in this fashion, allowed these pro-Hindutva groups to re- position the conflict as one where the Muslim outsider (in this case, literally from outside Indian territory) was the threat. In contrast to this, many Assamese-speaking Muslims in the villages immediately surrounding my field area confirmed that they too were affected by violence, their houses burnt and families displaced, but these instances were ignored by media narratives. Such a framing allowed for all Muslim victims to be portrayed as outsiders and non-citizens, based on their religious and linguistic profiles.
The idea of “outsiders” in the context of the 2012 violence appeared repeatedly through invocations of Bangladeshis and immigrants. These became a convenient way for those interested in appropriating this conflict in a Hindu-Muslim context to make Others out of Muslims, and for those in power, became a way to externalise blame. Local narratives of the violence employed the notion of “outsiders” too, but in different and much more locally grounded ways. In interviews, narratives of how the violence unfolded depended, above other things, on the dynamics between communities in the villages in question. Soon after the riots ended, political and insurgent groups representing the Bodos imposed an “economic boycott” of Muslims, who work as agricultural labourers on Bodo land. This meant that in many villages, for as many as two consecutive agricultural seasons, Muslims were not “allowed” to work on Bodo farms. This arrangement, initially imposed by the aforementioned groups, took on a validity of its own, as those living in more polarised villages continued the ban for a second consecutive year, despite economic losses to both.
In the cluster of villages in Uzanpara, which have mixed populations of Bodos and Muslims, social and economic relations returned to normal to a certain extent by the end of the first year. In these villages, relations between the two communities have been more cordial and inter-dependent from the outset, perhaps as much of necessity than anything else. In these villages, when violence is discussed in public forums, the emphasis is always on the figure of the “outsider”, literally a resident of another place. “Outsiders from another village came and torched our homes, we were already in relief camps and have no idea who it was”, was a refrain echoed in multiple settings. In Uzanpara, where all the Bodo houses were burnt during
the violence, speaking to Bodo residents individually revealed a different story: “how could they have known which houses were Bodo, if they were from outside? It must have been the Muslims from the village”. Many Bodo residents even claimed to know who burnt down houses or looted property, but held back from filing police reports because “ultimately we have to stay together”. In a nearby village, it was the fear of these “outsiders” that prevented the Muslim families from returning to their homes. While their Bodo neighbours assured them that they have nothing to fear from them, they could not offer guarantees of protection should “others” from neighbouring villages attack.
For both Bodos and Muslims, the spectre of the outsider also includes the figure of the militant, another unpredictable figure whose role in the violence is unclear, but a factor nonetheless. Militants from insurgent outfits such as the NDFB are also responsible for much of the regular, targeted violence against non-Bodo groups, as well as violent assertions of power when collecting “taxes”.47 In one village of Chirang district, local Muslims wondered whether it was their failure to pay tax in the previous year to the NDFB that precipitated the violence, thus linking a specific, local phenomenon to a larger-scale incident. Here the notion of “outsiders” is much more context-specific to the local. Unlike the grand narratives of Bangladeshi infiltrators, these narratives configure outsiders literally as those not from within the village — within this discourse are subsumed both ordinary residents of other villages, and militants.
In other villages, both in Kokrajhar and Chirang districts, where the Bodo neighbourhoods were distinctly separate from the Muslims, relations have been much more distant from the outset. In Anthaiguri village in Kokrajhar, where all 37 Muslim houses in the Muslim basti were burnt down, Muslim residents were bitter and openly accused their Bodo neighbours of complicity. Similarly, another nearby village also saw its Bodo basti burnt to the ground, and residents were certain that their Muslim neighbours were responsible. In these cases, people were able to flee before the mobs reached their villages, either due to a tip-off (often from a member of the other community), or out of fear from having seen violence erupt in
neighbouring villages. Thus, while they were not physically present to verify who was part of the mob, perceptions about the guilt of neighbours, sometimes corroborated by accounts from
47
This group also has several factions within, some of which, like the NDFB (Songbijit), are active, and others, like the NDFB(Progressive) and the NDFB(Ranjan) have currently negotiated a ceasefire with the government. Much like other insurgent groups in Assam and the Northeast, insurgent groups like the National Democratic Front for Bodoland collect “taxes” from residents and owners of businesses, in return for protection and permission to operate in the area.
surrounding villages, were common. In contrast, after another riot scare in May 2014 following an attack on Muslims in the neighbouring district of Baksa, Bodo and Muslim residents of Uzanpara were able to form a joint patrol group, that also played the role of keeping the flow of information open between the two groups, thus preventing a repeat of a 2012-like situation.
Seen in these local narratives about the riots and violence, is the idea of the outsider as a figure that is very much rooted in the local context. Even where the complicity of neighbours is suspected, it is hidden in the public narrative for the sake of preserving inter-ethnic
relations in a village, the “outsider” that is invoked is still a relatively “local” one — someone
from another village or a mob of people from surrounding villages, or Bodo militants that hide out in the jungle. These are not de-contextualised, threatening Muslims who pose a
threat on a more abstract level — their “outsiderness” is still rooted within the context of Bodoland and its politics, and thus they are not from very far away, still from one of the villages nearby. The point here is not to point out that having a “local” outsider enemy is somehow better or worse, but that the construction of this figure, especially with regard to violent threats, is important to understanding the how the conflict itself is perceived by people. Bodo inhabitants are not at war with all of India’s Muslims or Islam as a whole, their understanding of the violence is framed in terms of their local context. This is where it
becomes important to analyse the impact of the sort of narrative being propagated by the RSS in the region, which I go on to do in the next section.