Fear of Reprisals Forces Assamese Exodus
Workers from Assam take the first train out of Mumbai. Bangalore has a similar story to tell.
Dharmendra Basumatary, 28, from Silapathar, on Assam’s eastern frontier, is devastated. A Class XI dropout, he landed in Mumbai four years ago and got a job as a peon with a private company. His monthly income of Rs 8,000 provided for his family of four in Silapathar after they lost their farming land to the hungry tide of the Brahmaputra. But what happened in Kokrajhar has forced the Airoli, Navi Mumbai, resident to leave the city which not only gave him a livelihood but also dignity.
“The grocery shop owners refused to sell things to me. Two bearded men asked me to leave Mumbai within three days. When I saw the violence at Azad Maidan on TV, I knew it was time to flee,” he says. On August 18, Basumatary boarded the train for Guwahati from Lokmanya Tilak Terminus. On the train were 26 other Assamese workers. “It’s okay if we die starving, but I don’t want my son to die brutally in a faraway land,” says Basumatary’s father Hari, 73.
Unlike Basumatary, his friend Ukheswar Mipun, 25, from Dhemaji, received no threat but was too scared to stay on in Mumbai. “I heard that Muslims from Assam were brought in to identify Assamese people in Mumbai and that we would all be killed,” says Mipun, who worked as a security guard in a mall in Airoli, earning Rs 6,000 per month. The panic has gripped Northeasterners in other states as well. Tanka Bahadur, 30, a Nepali from Udalguri, Assam, received a threat from an unlikely quarter. “A software engineer, who came for an interview at Cinova Software Solutions, where I worked as a security guard, told me to leave Bangalore before August 20. He said that a Muslim organisation he was part of was planning an attack on us,” says Bahadur, whose monthly salary was Rs 6,000. There are people leaving even from an unlikely state— Goa. “We decided to return home as we felt we were potential targets,” says Pinky Narzary, 28, who fled with her son and husband Mohin Narzary, 34. The couple from Assam’s Baksa district worked in a mall in Panaji and earned Rs 14,000 per month.
The same fear factor has forced over 100 youngsters from 70 of the 497 families in Moynapur, a picturesque vil- lage around 200 km southeast of Guwahati, to leave Bangalore. The village is surrounded by several Muslim villages, but communal tension has never touched the area. “When the 1983 massacre happened in Nellie, not very far from here, there was no bad blood between us and the Muslims. But the new generation has started seeing things in a different light,” says Bhogeswar Nath, 54, a former home guard with Assam Police. “Muslim migrants are either buying or encroaching upon our land. We did not protest and instead went out seeking jobs. What do we do now?” says Dharmakanta Nath, 32, who earned Rs 11,000 a month as a security supervisor in a Bangalore- based agency. “I was not warned but several of my friends were. Does Bangalore belong to Muslims alone?” he adds.
Curiously, none of the Bangalore-returned youths INDIA TODAY met had personally received any threatening SMS or MMS. Asked why they fled without verifying if reports of attacks by Muslims were true or not, Dharmakanta retorts: “How do we verify? By waiting for one of us to get killed?”