GUWAHATI, 27 November 2003 — At least 10,000 Hindi-speaking settlers in Assam have been moved to special camps to protect them from attacks by separatist rebels, the state’s Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi told reporters yesterday.
“All these Hindi-speaking people are now staying at various relief camps set up by the government,” the chief minister said. “Some of the people were reluctant to leave their homes, but we insisted they stay in a more secured place as they could turn out to be soft targets of rebels.”
Two more Hindi-speakers, a woman and her six-year-old daughter, were burned to death in eastern Assam’s Tinsukia district when assailants set their home and 11 other houses ablaze yesterday morning.
A night curfew was in force in most parts of eastern Assam yesterday with federal soldiers given the power to shoot-on-sight suspected troublemakers.
A state of 26 million people, wedged between Bangladesh and Bhutan, Assam is riven by more than two decades of violent insurgency. Two of the region’s frontline rebel armies, the outlawed United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) and the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB), are both fighting for independent homelands.
But in the last fortnight, Assam has been witnessing a different kind of terror mobs and rebels targeting Hindi-speaking settlers from the eastern state of Bihar. On Nov. 9 some local Assamese youths prevented a group of candidates from Bihar to take recruitment tests for low-ranking jobs at the Indian Railways. Groups of Bihari youths retaliated by attacking Assamese passengers on a train passing through Bihar.
The result was a violent anti-Bihari backlash in Assam, with the militant ULFA asking Hindi speakers to quit Assam and launching attacks on them. Within a fortnight, 59 people had been killed. Twelve of them died in mob attacks, while the remaining were shot by the ULFA rebels.
Most of the estimated 400,000 Biharis in Assam have been living there for generations and work in business or are laborers in the construction sector.
The attacks on the Biharis have been widely condemned by ordinary Assamese as many of those killed or attacked have since long assimilated with the locals.
Many believe the ULFA was being marginalized and had therefore been looking for an opportunity to ride back to prominence.
“The attacks on the Bihari community must not be seen as a hate campaign by the Assamese but rather a ploy by the ULFA to create terror,” Gogoi told Arab News.
Gogoi also termed as “a wild allegation” claims that Bangladesh was responsible for the attacks on Hindi-speaking settlers.
Meanwhile, a truckers union in Bihar warned yesterday it will set up roadblocks to stop crucial supplies from entering Assam in a protest against the killings. “We will prevent any truck from entering Assam and moving out of the northeast by blocking traffic at the border towns,” said Sagirul Haque, general secretary of the Bihar Motor Transport Federation.
Assam is already facing a shortage of essential items as some Hindi-speaking truckers have avoided traveling to the northeast during the past week.
