Aditi Phadnis: The killing fields of Kokrajhar

Unless the Sarbananda Sonowal government in Assam makes a concerted effort to include Kokrajhar and nearby areas in the state's development plan, violence is unlikely to cease

Close to 30 people were killed in violence in Kokrajhar in Assam earlier this month - for the first time since the new government headed by the Bharatiya Janata Party and Sarbananda Sonowal came to power. The year 2014 saw a similar brutal massacre in this region that involved the killing of five-year old and three-year old children. On that occasion, the state government, which was then led by Tarun Gogoi of the Congress, said it was part of an attempt to prevent him from coming to power for the fourth time: elections were due and efforts were on to discredit the government. The truth is a little more complex.

Like in 2014, this time too, the killings are said to have been carried out by the National Democratic Front of Bodoland-Songbijit (NDFB-S). To understand how this group came into existence, a quick recap of events over the last few decades would help. The Bodos (currently accounting for about 36 per cent of Assam's population) consider themselves a persecuted minority in Assam and believe they deserve a separate region. To "help" the Bodos in their struggle for a homeland, successive Congress governments in Assam gave them moral and material assistance, sometimes covertly. The Bodos became a useful counterpoise against the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP). Later, the Congress tried to make good on its promise and a Bodo Territorial Autonomous District (BTAD) was granted to them. This was a notional homeland: because neither the Bodos, who occupied the region, nor the Adivasis nor the Muslims, had any land rights. They don't, even today. As a result, the Bodos have political power and wealth on the strength of arbitrage and rental income (largely from the funds that flow in for the development of the BTAD), but no real economic power. The other groups don't even have that.

The leader of the militant Bodos was Ranjan Daimary. With his followers he came overground but a split in the outfit caused the more militant of the Bodos - those elements which later became hired guns - to band under Songbijit Ingti Kathar. Ironically, Songbijit Kathar isn't even a Bodo - he is a Karbi. It is his group which carried out the mayhem in the Adivasi areas in December 2014. He himself is said to be in Myanmar.

Bodoland is desperately poor. According to a 2015 report from Assam's Crime Investigation Department, at least 4,754 children in the state have gone missing since 2012, of whom 2,753 are girls. Child trafficking for labour and sexual exploitation are among the main reasons. The report said that in the past year alone, at least 129 girls were forced into prostitution by traffickers. The state police have arrested 281 middlemen since 2011, but the conviction rate in human trafficking cases in Assam is just two per cent. Kokrajhar supplies a large part of slave domestic labour - especially girls - to Mumbai and Delhi. Outfits such as the NDFB-S find willing recruits as long as they get decent pay, a cut from the extorted wealth and a gun to wave around.

The key, of course, is bad governance. Arbitrage - providing intelligence, arranging logistics and extorting from local businessmen and contractors - is a way of life. It isn't that the Bodos have not made good - one was the chief election commissioner (H S Brahma), one became a judge in the Gauhati High Court (P K Mushary), another a Bodo chairman in the Assam Public Service Commission (Gita Basumatary), yet another became the governor of Meghalaya (Ranjit Shekhar Mooshahary), among others. But this has done little to boost Bodo self-esteem or improve standards of living in Kokrajhar.

The result: when the militants want, they can prove they have the upper hand by engineering events such as the one earlier this month. Those who expected the situation to improve after Sonowal came to power got the first jolt this month. No doubt more will follow. The Sonowal government's priority has been to dismantle the VIP security infrastructure. But autonomous council or not, much more needs to be done to get Kokrajhar and surrounding areas included in Assam's development. The Sonowal government is heading for a fall if it does not do that.