Bodo hopes and minority rights - The Hindu

12th May 2014 - Link

The Bodoland Territorial Area District (BTAD) has emerged as one of the most volatile flashpoints of violence in the country with deadly clashes breaking out repeatedly over a mobilisation of identity, territory and resources being linked to claims on political power.

Who are the Bodos?

• The Bodos, who constitute the largest tribal community out of a total of 34 tribal communities in Assam.
• The BTAD, an area of 27,100 square kilometres (or 35 per cent of Assam), the Bodos constitute less than 30 per cent with no other ethnic group (Assamese speakers, Bengali Muslims, Bengali Hindus, Koch-Rajbongshis) having an absolute majority.



Timeline of violence

They have been fighting for greater political autonomy since the early decades following independence

1960s - This gathered momentum with the organisation of the Plain Tribals Council of Assam (PTCA)  

1987- The demand for a separate State by the All Bodo Students’ Union (ABSU). 

February 2003 - The Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC) was formed as a special territorial privilege under the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution as in the Memorandum of Settlement of  between the Government of India, the Government of Assam and the Bodo Liberation Tigers (BLT). 

Why this violence?

• In the interest of early colonialism, new reservation policies were introduced to restrain “native” access to valuable forests and to stimulate the clearance of fertile “wastelands” for the setting up of tea estates resulting in an increasingly restrictive regime of “boundaries” that curtailed livelihood options
• This colonial enterprise for revenue maximising, also accompanied by schemes like “grow more food,” radically altered western Assam’s demography as a large influx of poor peasants and labourers from Chota Nagpur, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Nepal and Maimansing was engineered in the interest of the colonial economy
• The tribal population in northwest Assam surrounded by a wealthy forest zone of 3,539.95 sq.km — in formal-judicial terms, more than 80 per cent was inaccessible to them. This entrapment is not only of the community from the resources but is also an entrapment of one community from the other.

Result of this:

The fear of all political minorities in Bodoland is a replication of the way the Bodo community was once entrapped.

And now:

Feelings of relative deprivation through an entrenched minority entrapment could spark off new insurgencies in the BTC/BTAD territory.

Why did the BTC accord fail?

1.The BTC accord justifies that every community with perceived historical roots in a particular place has a right       to delineate that “imagined place” and to protect it from perceived “outsiders.”

    as a result

    Riots in the Bodoland area have highlighted increasing valorisation of the “son of the soil” doctrine, a                 doctrine that is the result of powerfully territorialised (ethnic) identities and the enduring but highly selective       reaffirmation of “natural” geo-cultural links between ethnic groups and territory.

2.the choice to negotiate with the BLT in 2003 bilaterally and a significant tolerance of BLT ceasefire violations all seem to have been intended to allow the BLT to consolidate local power.

3.Even the interim body created to oversee the first elections to the BTC was headed by former militants.

4.Observations about the exercise of special political autonomy often show that it has perpetuated local oligarchies and created new elites, often weakening the links between people and political power.

Need for radical measures

1.First step would be to sweep the region clean by seizing the significant amount of illegal weapons.

2.A modification of the BTC agreement: The arrangements now not only give the elites from one ethnic group disproportionate power over the others, but also provide further incentive and a rationale to/for this domination.

The BTC accord needs be reworked to expand the democratic ambit of its mandate by making it more accommodative with a greater share and proportionate representation to different communities residing in BTAD.

Otherwise, a redrawing of BTAD boundaries by removing areas with a substantial non-Bodo majority seems to be a sensitive but an unavoidable option.