Nine more Muslims killed in sectarian attack in India’s Assam
BY BISWAJYOTI DAS
BARAMA, India May 3, 2014
Four-year-old Taslima Khatun, who was injured in an attack, is being comforted by her grandfather inside a hospital in the northeastern Indian city of Guwahati May 2, 2014.
(Reuters) – Security forces in northeast India found the bodies of nine Muslims on Saturday, raising the death toll to 31 in a spate of attacks by suspected tribal militants as a weeks-long general election re-opens ethnic divisions. The election has rekindled the question of religious animosity across India with the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) looking set to win, but the violence in the tea-growing state of Assam stems from friction over migration. Police said six of the nine Muslims found shot dead were women and children. Security forces rescued three children found nearby hiding in forests close to the border with Bhutan.
“Shoot-on-sight orders are issued to troops deployed in troubled areas,” L. R. Bishnoi, inspector general of Assam’s police, told Reuters. Assam has a history of sectarian violence and armed groups fighting for greater autonomy or secession from India. Police suspect militants from the Bodo tribe were behind the latest attacks in a region where tension between ethnic Bodo people and Muslim settlers has simmered for years. In 2012, clashes erupted in which dozens of people were killed and 400,000 fled their homes.
A member of medical staff tends to Phuleja Khatun, 25, who was injured in an attack, inside a hospital in the northeastern Indian city of Guwahati May 3, 2014.
Bodo representatives say many of the Muslims in Assam are illegal immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh who encroach on ancestral Bodo lands. Soldiers in convoys of trucks mounted with rifles were patrolling on Saturday in Baksa district where some of the attacks took place. The five-week general election, has exacerbated friction over migration in Assam. Candidates including prime-ministerial front-runner Narendra Modi of the BJP have called for tighter controls.
Polling in the Bodo region ended on April 24. Residents say it is a tight race between a Bodo and a non-tribal candidate. A policeman was killed on polling day. “There’s heightened tension because of the election,” said Ajai Sahni, the executive director of the Institute for Conflict Management in New Delhi, although he said it was too early to be certain about exactly what provoked the attacks.
“BAGS PACKED”
Modi said last week that illegal immigrants from Bangladesh in the nearby state of West Bengal should have their “bags packed” in case he came to power, accusing the state government of being too soft. Arun Jaitley, the BJP’s leader in the upper house of parliament and a strong contender for finance minister should the party come to power, denied that Modi’s comments risked stirring communal tension. “It just shows a determination that we want to stop infiltration. Any government should try to stop that,” Jaitley said. The communal clashes in Assam two years ago triggered violent protests by Muslims in cities elsewhere in India.
About 30,000 migrants from the northeast temporarily returned home after threats of reprisals by Muslims circulated by text message. Modi himself is tainted by accusations that he turned a blind eye to, or even encouraged, Hindu-Muslim riots in 2002 in Gujarat, the state he has governed for 13 years. More than 1,000 people, most of them Muslims, were killed. He has always denied the accusations and a Supreme Court inquiry did not find evidence to prosecute him. Modi has sought to calm fears about the future of religious minorities under his rule, saying his government would represent all Indians whether they voted for him or not.
(Writing by Shyamantha Asokan; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani and Robert Birsel)
Assam rebel attacks kill 10 villagers in India
2 May 2014
Kokrajhar district – Muslim migrants have been attacked by Bodo separatist rebels in Kokrajhar
Separatist rebels have killed at least 10 people in the north-eastern Indian state of Assam, police say. Four other villagers were injured in two attacks in Kokrajhar and Baksa districts late on Thursday. Police blamed the attacks on the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB). The NDFB wants an independent homeland for the ethnic group to be carved out of Assam. Thursday’s attacks took place in areas populated by non-Bodo people. LR Bishnoi, a senior police official in Kokrajhar told the BBC’s Amitabha Bhattasali that those killed belonged to the minority Muslim community.
“The first attack took place in a village in Baksa in western Assam where the rebels killed three people. The second incident happened in Kokrajhar where the rebels gunned down seven people,” he said. The dead included six women and two children. Police and the army have launched an operation to track down the rebels, but there have been no arrests so far. The incident comes in the middle of India’s ongoing general election, and Muslim groups feel that the community has come under attack because the rebels feel that they had not supported Bodo candidates.
Rakibul Islam of All Bodoland Muslim Students Union said local Muslims had been threatened by Bodo groups “because they thought Muslims had voted for non-Bodo candidates” during elections in Assam on 24 April. In Kokrajhar, the Bodo heartland, Muslim migrants are regularly attacked by Bodo separatist rebels and this periodically erupts into full-scale riots, says analyst Subir Bhaumik. More than 100 migrants were killed in one such raid at Bansbari, a makeshift camp for displaced Muslims in 1993. The Bodos now have an autonomous territorial council which one of their parties, the Bodoland People’s Front (BPF), controls. But many feel migrants have taken over much of the land they traditionally occupied.
32 killed in 36 hours by Bodo militants in Assam, curfew imposed
by Samudra Gupta Kashyap, May 3, 2014
There seems to be no end to the bloodbath in Assam as seven more bodies have been found in Baksa district, taking the total death toll to 32 in the last 36 hours. This comes after suspected Bodoland militants killed at least 23 people in a span of 24 hours in Kokrajhar and Baksa districts of lower Assam.Curfew has been clamped in all of Kokrajhar, Baksa and Chirang, three of the four districts of the Bodoland area, and on contiguous areas in neighbouring districts. The Army has carried out flag marches, and shoot-on-sight orders have been issued in Kokrajhar and Baksa. The state government has accused the Songbijit faction of the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB) of carrying out the killings. All the victims aremigrant Muslims.The government has denied any connection between the attacks and the Lok Sabha elections. However, one of the three massacres has taken place in a village that saw violence and the killing of a police constable as Kokrajhar went to polls on April 24. Around 7.30 pm on Thursday, militants shot dead two women and a man of a family in Narsingpara village in the Anandabazar police station area of Baksa district. The victims were identified asShampa Bewa (55), Sona Miya (35) and Ramisa Khatun (32).Some five hours later, between 12.30 am and 1 am on Friday, four militants armed with at least two AK series rifles opened indiscriminate fire in Balapara village in the Tulsibeel outpost area of Gossaigaon police station in Kokrajhar district. Four women, a man and three children belonging to two Muslim families were killed. Late on Friday evening, 12 bodies were recovered in the villages of Narayanguri and Khagrabari adjoining each other on the fringes of Manas National Park in Baksa district, Assam home secretary G D Tripathi said. At least 10 people were injured, and several homes were reported to be on fire, he said.Tripathi said curfew had been clamped on those police station areas of Dhubri, Barpeta, Bongaigaon, Nalbari, Darrang and Sonitpur districts that lay adjacent to the Bodoland districts of Kokrajhar, Baksa, Chirang and Udalguri. In Baksa district, groups of non-tribals were fleeing on Friday evening for fear of more attacks. “There have been reports of villagers belonging to a particular community leaving their villages seeking safety in adjoining villages in Baksa after the third incident that occurred at Narayanguri and another village,” ADG (Special Branch) Pallab Bhattacharyya said.The attack in Balapara came at a time when most adult males have been staying away from their homes for fear of police, who have been looking for the killers of the constable at the polling booth on April 24. An angry mob set upon the policeman after complaints that the EVM was registering votes of only a particular candidate, no matter which button was pressed. “Most of the menfolk were not in the village,” Tripathi told The Indian Express. Only one of those killed was male, 52-year-old Bachhu Ali. Two of the three children killed were girls. Other than Bachhu Ali, the victims have been identified as Meherban Bibi (41), Sayatan Bewa (40), Jelina Bibi (25), Suhana Parveen (22), Farida Begum (6), Sonabhan Khatun (2) and Jaminur Ali (3).
A group of BSF personnel had made a round of the village barely half an hour before the killers struck. “There were inputs that some NDFB(S) militants were coming into the area from the north. Accordingly, security forces had sanitized the area north of Balapara. But they attackers came from Dhubri district in the south,” Tripathi said. Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi, who was to fly to Delhi and onward to Germany on Friday, cancelled the visit and reviewed the situation with top police, Army and intelligence officials. “I have directed the police to control the situation from flaring up,” Gogoi said after the meeting.
The opposition AGP and BJP said the government was responsible for the renewed violence in the Bodoland districts. “The state government is solely responsible. It has failed to protect lives and property of the common people despite repeated (intelligence) inputs,” AGP chief Prafulla Kumar Mahanta said. The All Bodo Students’ Union (ABSU) and Bodo Sahitya Sabha (BSS) too blamed the Gogoi government. “The common people today are insecure because the government has repeatedly failed to protect their lives,” Bodo Sahitya Sabha president Kameswar Brahma said. hitya Sabha president Kameswar Brahma said.
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