Incendiary statements: ‘Election’ massacres of Muslims darken India immigration debate

Narendra Modi’s comments ignite a spate of ethnic violence.

GUWAHATI:

From his hiding place in a cowshed, Sefaqul Islam watched as masked gunmen moved through his village, shot women and children dead with automatic rifles and tossed wounded survivors into the blazing remains of their homes.

The cattle herder’s sister and seven-year-old nephew were among 41 Muslims killed by suspected tribal militants last week in India’s remote state of Assam, the latest atrocity against people accused of being immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh.

“We will never go back to the village,” said Islam, as he and dozens of Narayanguri’s traumatised inhabitants erected bamboo-framed tents on the opposite bank of the Beki River.

Police and local residents said three separate attacks were carried out by militants from the ethnic Bodo community as punishment for Muslims who failed to support their local candidate in the election, which is still going on across India.



“The infiltrators have to go, go and go,” Modi said on Wednesday in West Bengal, which also borders Bangladesh. “Don’t you think they have made your life miserable?” A few miles from Narayanguri, in an area prone to religious violence, Modi made a similar speech a few days before the massacres, warning that Bangladeshis were taking over the state.

He has distinguished between economic immigrants from Bangladesh and Hindu refugees, whom he calls ‘family’ escaping religious persecution in the Muslim-majority nation.

“If they do it, the relationship between the two countries will be jeopardised, it will be damaged,” said Bangladesh Commerce Minister Tofail Ahmed.

“India, being a ... big country, a democratic country, a secular country, cannot take such a position.”

BJP’s Defends Stance

Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which opinion polls suggest will lead the next government after a staggered, five-week election that ends on Monday, denies stirring tensions in Assam and has firmly condemned the killings.

Party leaders says it has every right to address what it says is an issue of national security, because immigration is part of a bid by Bangladesh to expand its borders informally.

“This is a fight between ethnic people and suspected foreigners who have captured our land and our jobs,” said Ranjit Kumar Das, a BJP legislator in Assam’s state assembly who lives in Barpeta Road, the closest town to the massacre. “(The violence) is the natural outcome,” he said.

“If there is no permanent solution it will happen again and again.” The BJP also accuses the Congress party, which rules in Assam but looks set to be toppled from power on a national level, of failing to prevent the violence despite warning signs that trouble was brewing after voting took place there.

As part of the strategy, it has launched verbal attacks on leaders of Assam and West Bengal, accusing them of caring more for illegal immigrants than jobless youth from their own states. Many local people in Assam, where the Muslim population has risen over the past century and now make up some 30 per cent of the population, agree with Modi.

Estimates suggest several million Bangladeshis and their descendents born in India have settled in the country over the decades, and a chief complaint of the BJP is that Congress gives immigrants voting papers.

Any push for mass deportation risks creating social unrest and leaving many of Assam’s Muslims in limbo, since Bangladesh is unlikely to take them back - a situation with parallels to the plight of stateless Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 10^th, 2014.