The killing of 37 tribals, including infants and women, by the National Democratic Front of Bodoland-Songbijit (NDFB-S) in Sonitpur and Kokrajhar districts of Assam is one of the worst such incidents reported from the region. It is reminiscent of the Nellie massacre of 1983. In both cases, hatred for the other made the attackers lose all sense of justice and humanity to target even sucklings. The NDFB-S is a banned organisation and what provoked it to target the innocents was the security onslaught in which two of its men were killed. Instead of fighting the security forces, they targeted the tribals, who could not have imagined that they would become cannon fodder.
Prime minister Narendra Modi has rightly described the attack as an act of cowardice. Last time, they killed a group of Muslims on the specious plea that they were settlers, meaning people originally from Bangladesh. In the instant case, the victims are tribals, whose forefathers had settled in the area about a century ago. The Bodos, who have been demanding separate statehood for what they call Bodoland, are not ready to accept any other tribe, caste or community, though in many places non-Bodos are in a clear majority. There are some groups like the NDFB-S that have not accepted the agreement the Bodos had reached with the Centre under which they already enjoy some measure of autonomy.
The Assam government has not crowned itself with glory by the manner in which it has been dealing with the ethnic problem. It is the Bodos’ ability to get away with killings that emboldens them to strike again and again. The government and civil society must join hands to isolate the ones who take the law into their own hands. The theory that the vicious cycle of killings is the result of a conspiracy by foreign agencies—hand in glove with the fifth columnists in the state—is too scary to be dismissed as far-fetched. The Centre must see all this as a threat to India’s security and unity and deal with it, accordingly.
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