India - Kokrajhar or Muzaffarnagar: Camps shut, wounds open | Padmaparna Ghosh

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The Times of India

Camps shut, wounds open

Padmaparna Ghosh, TNN | Feb 9, 2014, 06.25 AM IST

Whether it's Muzaffarnagar in UP or Kokrajhar district in Assam, those displaced by riots have to eventually leave the shelters and return home. But the road back is full of anxieties and insecurities, reports Padmaparna Ghosh from the northeast

Everyone remembers two details distinctly — when they left home and what they left with. For Hamer Ali, 30, it was July 19, 2012. His most vivid memory is of the calm river that runs alongside his village Kanibhur. "The mobs set everything on fire. When I looked back, even the River Aie looked like it was on fire," he recalls. Samati Brahma, 45, from Aloorbui village, left at 9.30 am on July 23. "I still have the sandals I walked out in," she says.

Ali and Brahma are among over four lakh people displaced by Bodo-Muslim riots of 2012, where ethnic tensions over land and livelihood between indigenous Bodos and Bengali-speaking Muslims escalated after members of both communities were killed. Over the next two months, hundreds of villagers from Kokrajhar, Dhubri and Chirang districts scurried to camps for safety.

Over the past year, most of the riot-affected have trickled back home, some as recently as last month. But no one remembers the exact date of return, symbolizing the aching finality of displacement and the hesitance of homecoming.

The road back is not merely retracing steps — there are insecurities about safety, anxiety about livelihoods, and a sinking realization that lives will have to be restarted . While the closure of relief camps means the evacuees are no longer the district administration's headache, does it mean a seamless return to the past? It's a question being asked about Muzaffarnagar, after the abrupt closure of relief camps barely three months after the September 2013 riots. Harsh Mander, founder of Aman Biradari, an organization working towards inter-communal solidarity, believes this 'invisibility' suits the district administration . "After they disappear from the camp, the government thinks its problem is over," says Mander, whose team will be tracking Muzaffarnagar camp evacuees.

The outsiders

What is the afterlife of camp evacuees? A crucial answer lies in the geographical reorganization of these Assamese villages post the riots. Before July 2012, 456 Muslim family homes in Kanibhur village, Chirang district, were set apart by vast swathes of fields. But when the Muslim families returned, they re-built their tiny, fragile bamboo shacks, really close to each other, seeking security in tight clusters. It was as if the Muslim houses had curled up into a protective, foetal position. Thirty-seven Muslim families of Chakrashila-2 village, Kokrajhar district returned, but didn't enter the village. Their huts stand inches from the highway on the village border, as if asking to be let in. Makram Ali, 46, and his parents moved to the village 40 years ago. "Historically, my family was always moving. Now we are back to the same life." The village, with its mixed population of Bodos, adivasis, Nepalis, Rajbonshis and Muslims, was looted and burned down. Without pucca houses or small businesses and their cattle — the major livelihood for Muslims — lost, Muslims like Ali's have been reduced to daily labour and NGO handouts. (Bodos are majority landowners and received the most compensation from state as well as central governments.) "Everyone used to be employed here. It was quite a nice village ," says Ali. The brand new bicycles, shiny water drums and liquid soap bottles which NGOs have distributed are incongruous in this backdrop. Bodiod Jamal, 40, of Chakrashila-1 did not receive compensation because he didn't have a land deed (for the land his house stood on) for rebuilding his house. "I made the walls stand with whatever I could find. We got some cycles though," he says.

Nirmala Brahma, 44, a Bodo woman in Muslim-dominated Aloorbui village in Kokrajhar, was a regular at the big weekly marketplace. After her return seven months ago, she doesn't venture out after dark. "It isn't that there is zero trust; we talk but there are small hesitations. Like I won't tie my cow far away," she says. Her village has sent about 30 Bodo children to an ashram 35 kms away which takes care of their education and food now. Muslim families in Bodo-majority villages have also sent their children to relatives elsewhere.

Rahul Dey, team leader with Indo-Global Social Service Society, one of the NGOs working in these villages, says these anxieties need to be addressed. "After one of the mixed-community peace meetings, a woman told me, 'I don't know why you are holding these meetings but I like the space I get' ," says Dey.

Livelihoods lost

Bodo or Muslim, loss of homes, granaries and property has set villagers back years. Kathiram Basumathary, a farmer in Chakrashila-1 village, used to own two cows. Now he rents a tractor to plough his four-bigha plot at Rs 300 per bigha. "They return but resources are gone — cattle, water, land. The biggest loss is that of bargaining power," says Dey. "No one wants to live in a relief camp but when they leave, they are completely on their own."
Kanibhur, a Bodo-majority village was a major supplier of vegetables to the local market. Even today, a variety of vegetables are grown here. But after the return, there was a diktat against buying from or selling to local Muslims or hiring them for field work, punishable by heavy fines. Hamer Ali, 30, whose 10-member family owns 16 bighas of land, no longer goes to the market to sell the vegetables he grows. Down to a tenth of his income now, Hamer took his teenage brothers out of school and sent them to cities to find work.
Access to borewells for irrigation has been reduced and Muslim families are also hesitant to work in fields far from home or very close to Bodo areas. Whether Assam or Muzaffarnagar, economic and social boycotts are being used to sustain hatred between communities, says Mander. "Boycotts work effectively in rural areas than urban because the bitterness of estrangement is also greater because social bonds are stronger," he says.

Rebuilding trust

In 1971 there were just seven Muslim families in the three Chakrashila villages; now there are about 800. "The two communities managed quite well. Bodos and Muslims even did nightly guard duty together," says Prasanto Kumar Narjary, 70, former head of Bodo village Chakrashila-1 . He had witnessed the earlier riots of 1950. "I never thought it would happen again."
NGO workers believe that the toughest task of reconciliation is getting communities to trust the process. Shanti Gazun Manch, a team from Aman Biradari in association with Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Guwahati, has been working towards this. Team leader Srinivas recounts the first time he went to a village right after the riots, "The villagers yelled at me for even thinking about peace. I left in tears." Today, they have mixed teams of Bodo and Muslims in 30 villages that have built peace committees and have made them talk to each other. His teams broke the ice in the villages by helping with children's education , health. They get some backing from student's unions and NGOs but not the government as an official in Kokrajhar says, "People have gone back. Peace has been announced. Why do you have to ask questions now?"

Neither friends nor foes

In Muzaffarnagar, Muslim organizations engaged in relief work have suggested Rs 5 lakh compensation for the riot-affected to move to new areas and not return, a measure Mander calls "incentivizing ethnic cleansing" . Landless Muslims in Assam's riot-hit areas have a similar offer — the state will give them Rs 50,000 to buy land elsewhere and sign an affidavit to not return. "We didn't take the offer. This is where I was born. Where will we go?" says Makram Ali.

It is this very land, and inter-dependency , that is bridging the distance between the two communities. In Aloorbui, a Bodo and Muslim woman pat rice cakes together to make 'Jogran' , a local liquor. Lokhiram Musahari, 40, in the neighbouring Tintilla, goes to the fields with his Muslim neighbour every morning. Musahari, a Bodo landowner, owned cattle while his landless but cattle-owning neighbour worked others' fields. After their cattle were looted, they forged a 50-50 sharecropping arrangement . "We are not friends. We don't joke around but it is okay," says Musahari. Seated in his hut, near the ruins of his concrete house, Musahari says that rioters removed his wooden doors and windows before burning down the house. They hang in the same village in another house, a sight that pains him. Yet, he is a regular participant in peace-committee meetings because he believes they can help. Local leaders and village elders are thankful for the interreliance between land and labour. Raju Kr Narzary, executive director, North East Research & Social Work Networking, an NGO, says: "It is a good thing that they need each other. It gives us a beginning."