The Train out of Assam
Once it was the Bangladeshi. Now the ULFA’s target is the migrant from Bihar

“We may be Hindi-speaking. But we belong to Assam. Many of us have lost our links with the villages our forefathers came from more than a hundred years ago,” says Ramnivesh Yadav, a shopkeeper at Tinsukia, Assam’s ‘mini-Bihar’.

Yadav’s great grandfather came to Assam in the1860s to work in the neighbouring coalmines at Makum. There are thousands like him in Tinsukia in Dibrugarh district where the ULFA struck on January 5. “We belong to Assam, it is our only home,” says Bindeswar Prasad, another shopkeeper.

Tinsukia, in fact, is represented in the state assembly by Rajendra Prasad Singh whose grandfather migrated to Assam 75 years ago and set up a small grocery shop near a tea garden. “My grandfather came from Chapra, but today I am proud to introduce myself as an Assamese,” says the two-time MLA in fluent Assamese.

Till the arrival of the Bangladeshi migrant, migrants from Bihar ran — and still do — the show in many parts of the state. They run small shops in remote villages, catch fish on the Brahmaputra, rear cattle on the numerous chaporis (winter river islands) on the Brahmaputra, supply milk, work as barbers and washermen, ply rickshaws. And then there is the seasonal labourer who comes around Dussehra to work in the brick kilns till early March.

The average Assamese villager however does not consider him to be an alien. He has become an inseparable part of the community. But the ULFA obviously thinks otherwise. The ULFA may be an offshoot of the AASU’s six-year long movement to oust Bangladeshi infiltrators in 1979-85, but now it appears to have trained its guns on the migrants from Bihar. In the December 15 issue of its newsletter Freedom, the ULFA outlined its “mission”: “The ULFA is determined to uproot those illegal migrants who have threatened Assam’s existence, created a chaotic situation in its social formation and occupied the economic and political sphere by making the indigenous people homeless. All those who illegally migrated from the Indian subcontinent must be identified and expelled.

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