[Attachment(s) from Farida Majid included below]
Excerpt from Walter's article:
<< An anti-immigrant stand symbolises these issues though immigration from Bangladesh is not recent and the Bangladeshi Muslims are not the only immigrants. A comparison between the 1951 and 2001 census figures shows an excess of 20 lakh immigrants in Assam compared with what the number would have been had the population growth had kept to the national average. Because of natural growth this excess has reached 40 lakh persons, around 40 percent of them Bengali speaking Muslims, presumably of Bangladeshi origin and the rest Hindi or Nepali speaking Hindus, presumably from Bihar-UP and Nepal. The presence of a large number of immigrants causes pressure on land and is also a threat to the local people's identity. Muslims are today nearly a third of Assam's population against less than 20 percent at independence. Their proportion in higher in districts bordering on Bangladesh and the Bodo inhabited territory where the recent disturbance occurred belongs to that category. But the threat comes equally from the Bihari and Nepali not to mention the tea garden workers who came to Assam 150 years ago. One can thus understand the threat that the local people feel to their identity. The immigrants also do unskilled jobs that the local people either do not want to do or for which they would demand shorter hours and higher wages than the immigrants do. Thus the threat includes land, jobs and identity.
Though the threat comes from all the communities, the issue has been politicised by focusing only on the Muslims and by referring to them as illegal Bangladeshi immigrants sent by some Pakistani agencies to disturb peace in the country. In reality their immigration began in the 19th century, not after 1947. From 1891 the British regime encouraged the East Bengal peasants to cultivate what they called wasteland in western Assam. What was wasteland according to the colonial individual ownership based land laws was in fact community land that was the sustenance of the Bodo and Rabha tribes who formed the majority in that region. That turned the immigration of East Bengal peasants into a source of conflicts. Moreover, most zamindars in the erstwhile East Bengal were Hindus while peasants were, by and large, Muslim. As a result, 90 percent of the immigrants were Muslim. That introduced a communal element to the threat to land caused by their immigration. Since by the 1920s the immigrants had spread beyond western Assam to Nagaon and elsewhere in Central Assam fear grew among some leaders of the freedom struggle that Assam was becoming a Muslim majority province. So they encouraged peasants from Bihar to migrate to Assam. Nepali migrants followed quietly. It introduced a communal Hindu-Muslim division among the immigrants. >>
From: walter.nesrc@gmail.com
To: farida_majid@hotmail.com
Subject: Re: Bodo-Muslim clashes: A ticking time bomb
Date: Fri, 3 Aug 2012 19:03:30 +0530
North Eastern Social Research Centre
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Website: www.nesrc.org
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Attachment(s) from Farida Majid
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