The following incidents made a feeble presence in north east India’s media and disappeared in quick time. They did not evoke much protest. They did not stir up the nation’s collective conscience. But the bottom line is that these incidents happened and they keep happening.
- 3rd July, 2020: Five non tribal youth, all Bengalis, beaten brutally with iron rods and sticks by about 20 men in Shillong.
- 8th May, 2020: A non-tribal journalist in Nagaland, Prasenjit Dutta, slapped, abused and intimidated in Dimapur by police authorities for no reason.
- 1st March, 2020: Two non tribals killed, many injured in violent clashes in Meghalaya
- 1st November, 2018: Five Bengalis, massacred by suspected ULFA militants in Tinsukia district of Assam.
A rather long and exhaustive list of such acts of targeted violence against the non-tribals in general and Bengalis in particular can be compiled from the north eastern part of the country. While, every act of racism perpetrated against the tribals from north east in mainland India is well documented, it’s a tragedy that such blatant acts of reverse racism are conveniently ignored.
The history of violence against the non-tribals in north east is old and such incidents continue to happen with alarming regularity. However, among all the non-tribal communities, the Bengalis have certainly bore the brunt of such attacks much more than the other communities.
So, why do the Bengalis face these attacks? The ‘Bongal Kheda’ movement in Assam specifically targeted the community in the 80s. Similar ethnic cleansing attempts took place in towns like Shilllong, Imphal and Aizawl and many Bengalis were forced to either move out of the region or settle down in safer locations like the Bengali dominated Barak Valley in southern Assam.
The first and foremost reason of course is the politics of migration in the region, which has pitted the Bengalis as outsiders, who have allegedly intruded into the north eastern region and threatened its demography. While, it cannot be denied that large scale migration did take place during the partition as well as during the liberation war in Bangladesh, recent data does not show any such activity of threatening proportions. However, the ‘illegal migration’ bogie is a potent political tool now and some political parties and pressure groups continue to keep the issue alive to sustain their existence.
An entire generation of tribals and the other so-called indigenous communities has grown up in the region feeding on this xenophobia. The hatred has been ingrained into their psyche to such an extent that the damage to the social fabric of the region has become almost irreparable.
Ironically, from much before independence, the Bengali community has been one of the largest in the north eastern region. The southern Assam districts of Cachar and Sylhet were predominantly Bengali speaking and Sylhet was the entire region’s most populous district. Therefore, it was only obvious that during partition, many Bengalis chose to settle down in this part of the border. In addition, many Bengalis played a pivotal role in setting up schools, colleges, government establishments, markets etc in distant parts of the north east when these places were completely inaccessible from the rest of the country. When the tea gardens were being set up in Assam, many Bengalis were brought in to work in clerical or managerial positions. Even today in places like Shillong, Imphal, Itanagar, Dimapur, Tinsukia, Jorhat Bengali families can be found, who settled there at least three generations back. But their children also carry the stigma of being called ‘foreigners’ in their own land.
It has to be accepted that the Bengalis have continuously failed to put up a strong enough counter to the ‘illegal migration’ theories both politically as well as intellectually. On the political front, while the migrant Muslims established their own political force headed by Maulana Badruddin Ajmal, the Bengali Hindus relied on the mainland parties like BJP and the Congress. These parties, obviously have much larger vote bases beyond the community only and have conveniently used the Bengali Hindus as vote banks. Their issues have remained largely in the margins.
Not one political leader from the community has emerged since independence who has shown sufficient guts to speak for the people of the region with compassion and assertiveness. Even if some leaders did try, their voices were silenced by the ‘high command’ and they were forced to toe the line taken by their national or state leaderships.
Intellectually, as well, very little has been written on the issue of reverse racism and attacks against the Bengalis in north east. ‘Insider – Outsider: Belonging and Unbelonging in North East India’, a compilation edited by Preeti Gill and Samrat Choudhary is an important book which lists some of those horrific attacks.
Therefore, when I heard today, that five Bengali youths had been brutally attacked yet again in Shillong, I wasn’t really surprised. Such assaults have attained some degree of acceptance now. Nobody really bothers much anymore. People just go back to their normal lives and somewhere, deep in their minds, wait for the next episode to unveil hoping that they themselves are not the victims.
So, where is the solution to this never-ending saga? The answer definitely lies learning the language of protest. The Bengalis of the north eastern region must organise themselves and form a unified political or at least social organisation which can speak for the people, of course within the ambit of our democratic as well as constitutional rights without resorting to any form of violence. This organisation may work towards greater amity among communities and take these horror stories to West Bengal as well, so that the Bengalis there can learn more about the plight of their brethren in other parts of the country.
In 2018, when anti Sikh riots broke out in Shillong, the entire Sikh community of the country rallied around their miniscule community in Shillong. However, similar bonhomie is never visible in case of the Bengalis.
The entire world recently erupted in protest against the brutal murder of a US national. The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter went viral. Recently, death of two Tamil businessmen also evoked massive outrage across the nation. Repeated acts of violence against non-tribals in the north east, especially Bengalis also has to be highlighted. We are as much citizens of this country as anybody else is!! #BengaliLivesMatter