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Santhals: caught between a rock and a hard place

Nitin Gogoi in Guwahati

Even as the world celebrates the arrival of the new year, over a quarter million Adivasi Santhals in western Assam's Kokrajhar district are starving, shunned by the administration and ignored by various international aid agencies. The Santhals, victims of a major ethnic riot in May 1996, live in makeshift refugee camps, under the open skies along National Highway 31. Among the inmates are more than 20,000 children, in the age group five to eight years. These inmates, who have no means of earning their livelihood, have been provided with only five to six days of dry rations by the administration in the past two months.

As Nagen Murmu, a leader of sorts in one of the camps at Joypur says: "The government rations are very erratic. In any case, the foodstuff provided to us is adequate to last only about 10 days a month. For the rest of the 20 days, we are forced to eat roots." Apart from the problem of food, five to six people have been forced to share one blanket in the severe cold of December-January. The living conditions in the camps are unhygienic, leading to several hundred disease-related deaths since May 1996.

The Santhals, who settled in these areas about a century ago after arriving from the Chhota Nagpur and Bastar areas, ran into trouble with the dominant Bodo tribals, who themselves are fighting for a separate homeland. The tension between the two communities, who have co-existed in the area for more than a century, can be traced back to May 1996, when a sudden eruption of violence had sent the situation spinning out of control. The death toll then: 200 killed and over two hundred thousand rendered homeless, a majority of them Santhals, although some 20,000 Bodos also lost their homes and belongings.

Ever since then, the two communities have been eyeing each other with suspicion. In July last year, there was a sudden outbreak of violence which resulted in another 5,000 Santhals fleeing their villages. In the initial days of the tension in 1996, the Santhals, who used to eke out their living by working in the paddy fields on daily wages, were mostly at the receiving end of the attacks from the Bodo militants, who were armed with sophisticated weapons.

For the last six months though, the Santhals have organised themselves in small bands. They do not have any modern weaponry. In fact, most of them depend on bows and arrows and some pipe guns. And yet, retaliatory attacks by the Santhals have increased of late. As a senior police officer in Kokrajhar admitted: "Earlier the clashes were one-sided, dominated by the Bodos but these days increasingly, the Santhals are hitting back."

The root cause of the problem, however, lies in the ill-conceived Bodo Accord signed in 1992 at the behest of the then high-flying minister of state for internal security Rajesh Pilot and the leaders of the All Bodo Students Union. The accord, which envisaged the creation of an autonomous council for the Bodos, was signed without finalising the boundaries and jurisdiction of the council. Expectedly, a dispute arose over the inclusion of several villages within the council. A clause was inserted in the accord stating that only those villages with over 50 per cent Bodo population would be included in the council.

The ground situation in the proposed council area was against the Bodos. Several villages in the area had less than 10 per cent Bodo population. So the militants within the Bodo movement hit upon the idea of triggering an exodus of the non-Bodos from the villages. Thus began the violence in the area in the post-1993 period.

Initially, the Muslims, most of them immigrants from Bangladesh, were the target of Bodo attacks. Since May 1996, however, even the Santhals were targeted. The cycle of violence has been continuing ever since then. As Assam Chief Minister Prafulla Kumar Mahanta says: "Every time there is a postponement of negotiations over the Bodo issue, there is a fresh bout of violence in the Bodo area."

Mahanta has a point. The Union home ministry, in an unexplained move, suddenly postponed the proposed talks with the ABSU in the first week of September. This may have angered the Bodos. ABSU president Urkhao Brahma, of course, does not agree with the theory. "We have long ago rejected the Bodo accord. We will not compromise on anything less than a separate state, so where is the question of getting into all these calculations," he asks. Mahanta, who is opposed to the bifurcation of the state, may have contributed to the confusion too by announcing unilaterally the fresh process of demarcation of the boundary for the Bodoland Autonomous Council in August.

Amidst all this confusion, the unfortunate victim has been the poor villager in a completely underdeveloped district of the state. Kokrajhar, which borders West Bengal, serves as the gateway to the northeast, and any disturbance in the area has often led to choked lines of communications to and from the region. A prolonged state of uncertainty therefore does not augur well for the entire region.

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