 "Assam reaps bitter harvest of an election campaign of hate")
This year Ramzan Ali, his wife, Jahnara, and their five children, scheduled their summer vacation to coincide with polling day at their home constituency of Kokrajhar in western Assam.
Ramzan took leave from his job as a labourer at the DLF Mall in Saket, New Delhi; Jahnara prepared the children for the journey, and when the Brahmaputra Mail arrived at the Old Delhi Railway Station, the couple made sure everyone boarded: Sainur and Zainur, aged eight and 11; Supia and Ramna who were three and 10, and four-month-old baby Abdul.
The authorities fished Supia's bloated corpse out of the rain-swollen Beki river on Wednesday; Sainur is still missing. Earlier this week, Ramzan identified the mangled corpses of Jahnara, baby Abdul, and his mother, Hasna Begum, amidst the smouldering remains of what was once his village.
Forty-one bodies have been found in the aftermath of last week's attacks by suspected Bodo militants on Assam's Muslim community. At least 11 people - including children as young as three - are still missing. The killings, victims said, are a brutal consequence of an election campaign where politicians across the political spectrum have deliberately provoked ethnic and political tensions to consolidate their respective electoral bases.
While the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate for prime minister, Narendra Modi, has repeatedly described east India's Muslims as Bangladeshi infiltrators, the violence in Assam occurred soon after Pramila Rani Brahma, a prominent leader of the Congress-allied Bodoland People's Front (BPF), accused Kokrajhar's Muslim community of voting en masse for her party's opponents.
The culprits are yet to be identified but victims believe Brahma's statements were a call to arms in the context of a similar attack in 2012 in which over 100 people were killed in Kokrajhar and several thousands displaced in clashes between Bodos and Muslims.
"A day had barely passed after Pramila Rani's statement, and the militants attacked," said Hanif Ali, a trader from the nearby town of Anand Bazaar, "They killed our people because they said we had voted for Naba Saraniya."
The BPF is the political avatar of the Bodoland Liberation Tigers (BLT), a militant group that surrendered in 2003 but is believed to retain links with armed factions operating along the porous India-Bhutan border. The party is allied with the Congress; their Kokrajhar candidate, Chandan Brahma, is the minister for transport and tourism in the Congress-led state government. In recent public statements, BPF leaders have reached out to the BJP.
The Kokrajhar constituency is reserved for Scheduled Tribe candidates and is broadly contiguous with the Bodoland Territorial Autonomous District (BTAD), a special administrative region created in 2003 as a solution to a protracted and violent struggle for a separate Bodoland that began as a response to the alienation of Bodos from their ancestral lands.
Bodo militias have clashed with the many other ethnic groups, including caste Hindus and Santhal adivasis, who have made inroads into the BTAD over 150 years of trade and resettlement but the Muslim community has been targeted most often.
Naba Kumar Saraniya, the independent candidate standing against the BPF, is from the Saraniya Kachari tribe and was propped by a broad alliance of non-Bodo communities but the BPF has singled out Muslims for public censure.
"When the Bodos target the Muslim peasantry, it is with the silent support of caste Hindus and Assam's urban middle class, who see them as Bangladeshis responsible for Assam's problems," said Arupjyoti Saikia, a historian at IIT-Guwahati, explaining that political discourse has marginalised the community.
Data from a state government white paper on immigration says region experienced significant immigration from East Pakistan and Bangladesh from the 1950s, but immigration tailed off once when Bangladesh gained independence. Most of Assam's Muslims, the paper noted, migrated to Assam in the colonial period, well before 1947.
Modi has promised to deport illegal Muslim immigrants in eastern India. Yet, the white paper suggests the identification and deportation of non-citizens is a complex matter. India's legal framework, including the Assam Accord of 1985, provides citizenship for those who entered Assam before 1950 and between January 1, 1966 and March 25, 1971. Further, the children of illegal immigrants, born in India between January 1, 1987 and December 3, 2004, are also legally citizens of India, irrespective of the citizenship of their parents.
In Khagrabari, Ramzan Ali will leave for Delhi for good. "They said this fighting is about land but the river eroded my fields. There is nothing for me here," he said. "I came home only to vote. My mother kept telling me, go from here, this is not a good place."
Ramzan took leave from his job as a labourer at the DLF Mall in Saket, New Delhi; Jahnara prepared the children for the journey, and when the Brahmaputra Mail arrived at the Old Delhi Railway Station, the couple made sure everyone boarded: Sainur and Zainur, aged eight and 11; Supia and Ramna who were three and 10, and four-month-old baby Abdul.
The authorities fished Supia's bloated corpse out of the rain-swollen Beki river on Wednesday; Sainur is still missing. Earlier this week, Ramzan identified the mangled corpses of Jahnara, baby Abdul, and his mother, Hasna Begum, amidst the smouldering remains of what was once his village.
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"We came to vote, we came to see my mother, she lived alone," Ramzan said in telegrammatic sentences, "We were a family of eight, now it is just me, Zainur and Ramna."
Forty-one bodies have been found in the aftermath of last week's attacks by suspected Bodo militants on Assam's Muslim community. At least 11 people - including children as young as three - are still missing. The killings, victims said, are a brutal consequence of an election campaign where politicians across the political spectrum have deliberately provoked ethnic and political tensions to consolidate their respective electoral bases.
While the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate for prime minister, Narendra Modi, has repeatedly described east India's Muslims as Bangladeshi infiltrators, the violence in Assam occurred soon after Pramila Rani Brahma, a prominent leader of the Congress-allied Bodoland People's Front (BPF), accused Kokrajhar's Muslim community of voting en masse for her party's opponents.
The culprits are yet to be identified but victims believe Brahma's statements were a call to arms in the context of a similar attack in 2012 in which over 100 people were killed in Kokrajhar and several thousands displaced in clashes between Bodos and Muslims.
"A day had barely passed after Pramila Rani's statement, and the militants attacked," said Hanif Ali, a trader from the nearby town of Anand Bazaar, "They killed our people because they said we had voted for Naba Saraniya."
The BPF is the political avatar of the Bodoland Liberation Tigers (BLT), a militant group that surrendered in 2003 but is believed to retain links with armed factions operating along the porous India-Bhutan border. The party is allied with the Congress; their Kokrajhar candidate, Chandan Brahma, is the minister for transport and tourism in the Congress-led state government. In recent public statements, BPF leaders have reached out to the BJP.
The Kokrajhar constituency is reserved for Scheduled Tribe candidates and is broadly contiguous with the Bodoland Territorial Autonomous District (BTAD), a special administrative region created in 2003 as a solution to a protracted and violent struggle for a separate Bodoland that began as a response to the alienation of Bodos from their ancestral lands.
Bodo militias have clashed with the many other ethnic groups, including caste Hindus and Santhal adivasis, who have made inroads into the BTAD over 150 years of trade and resettlement but the Muslim community has been targeted most often.
Naba Kumar Saraniya, the independent candidate standing against the BPF, is from the Saraniya Kachari tribe and was propped by a broad alliance of non-Bodo communities but the BPF has singled out Muslims for public censure.
"When the Bodos target the Muslim peasantry, it is with the silent support of caste Hindus and Assam's urban middle class, who see them as Bangladeshis responsible for Assam's problems," said Arupjyoti Saikia, a historian at IIT-Guwahati, explaining that political discourse has marginalised the community.
Data from a state government white paper on immigration says region experienced significant immigration from East Pakistan and Bangladesh from the 1950s, but immigration tailed off once when Bangladesh gained independence. Most of Assam's Muslims, the paper noted, migrated to Assam in the colonial period, well before 1947.
Modi has promised to deport illegal Muslim immigrants in eastern India. Yet, the white paper suggests the identification and deportation of non-citizens is a complex matter. India's legal framework, including the Assam Accord of 1985, provides citizenship for those who entered Assam before 1950 and between January 1, 1966 and March 25, 1971. Further, the children of illegal immigrants, born in India between January 1, 1987 and December 3, 2004, are also legally citizens of India, irrespective of the citizenship of their parents.
In Khagrabari, Ramzan Ali will leave for Delhi for good. "They said this fighting is about land but the river eroded my fields. There is nothing for me here," he said. "I came home only to vote. My mother kept telling me, go from here, this is not a good place."