Extracts:
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At work here is the manufacture of panic by using easily accessible communication means and tools such as photoshop, which can be effortlessly manipulated to morph pictures and pass them off as real. The worst culprits here are probably not the social media websites, accessed by a relatively small minority, but SMSs which can be widely disseminated. Groups like the RSS are past-masters at using such whisper campaigns, rumour and disinformation to provoke communal violence. The Sangh is clearly trying to expand its relatively small base in the Northeast and promote communal-religious polarisation in India.
In the present case, the concerned state governments abjectly failed to protect Northeastern migrants against chauvinist and racist attacks. Instead, to their shame, they chartered trains so people would leave cities like Bangalore en masse. The engineering of this mass migration showed that the authorities willingly abdicated their responsibility towards vulnerable citizens. It also showed that many Indians don’t trust the government to defend their life and limb against hate crimes. People from the Northeast have every reason to distrust governments such as Karnataka’s, ruled by the BJP. The RSS is on a rampage there. Recently, many Northeastern people were targeted in racist attacks and sexual harassment in Bangalore, against which the state didn’t protect them.
However, what about the violence in Assam, which has still not been brought fully under control? The death toll in the Bodo-Muslim clashes in the Bodoland Territorial Autonomous Districts (BTAD) area of Kokrajhar, Bongaingaon and Chirang, and in the adjoining Dhubri district, is nearing 80 amidst massive displacement and insecurity. There is very little clarity about the proximate causes of the conflict, barring a tussle over an attempt by some Muslims to permanently occupy a plot of land near Kokrajhar for Eid prayers. The national media has not bothered to report in depth on the situation and the humanitarian crisis. Reportedly, none of Assam’s numerous TV channels has an OB (outdoor broadcasting) van.
This speaks of colossal callousness within the mainstream towards a region that every government and every national party claims belongs irrevocably to India, even more integrally and organically than Jammu and Kashmir. Few in mainland India comprehend the absurdity of claiming such territorial ownership when they exhort the Northeast’s people to become “confident citizens” of the nation while minimising the injustices, violence and bloodshed heaped upon them, not least through draconian laws like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which gives impunity for outright murder of anyone merely suspected of intention to infringe a routine prohibitory order.
This monumental incomprehension has not prevented self-appointed experts – many of whom lack even nominal acquaintance with the Northeastern region – from attributing the BTAD clashes to the supposedly “increasing influx” of illegal migrants from Bangladesh, and the Bodos’ fears of being swamped in their own “homeland”. The standard theology runs thus. Bangladeshi Muslims, often termed “infiltrators”, as distinct from Bengali-speaking Hindu “migrants” or “refugees” who cross the border illegally, are pouring into Assam just as they did in the early 20thcentury. They are illegally grabbing the Bodos’ land and changing BTAD’s demography, causing resentment and violent clashes.
According to extreme versions of the theology, such as the Sangh Parivar’s, the Muslim migration is driven by communal motives: creation of a “Greater Bangladesh” or a conspiracy to spread radical Islamicism. This is the BJP’s “default” or knee-jerk position, which sees everything through a narrow, parochial Islamophobic prism. Yet benign versions too attribute the violence to rising illegal migration of Muslims from “dirt-poor” Bangladesh and the tensions this is causing in BTAD. However, this militates against several material facts.
[. . .] SEE FULL TEXT HERE: http://www.sacw.net/article2808.html
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