The Times of India reports on a recent act of violence in relation to an internal conflict in India’s Assam region:
The Adivasi community in Assam has recently been hit by violence in a recent development of a decades-old dispute.
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The killing of over 60 Adivasis by armed rebels of National Democratic Front of Boroland’s Songbijit faction (NDFB-S) in Sonitpur, Kokrajhar and Chirang districts of the state is being seen as an extension of a conflict which surfaced in the 1990s.
Bodo militants had killed and displaced many Advisasis in 1996 and 1998 in western Assam districts. The Advisasis, descendants of indentured labourers brought to Assam by British tea planters, mostly from the Chhota Nagpur Plateau in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, indulged in retaliatory violence and floated armed groups to defend their community against rising Bodo militancy in the 1990s.
Security experts said NDFB’s Songbijit faction, like the Bodo militants earlier, sees Adivasis as a threat as the community is vocally opposed to the former’s demand for a separate Bodoland on the northern bank of the Brahmaputra.
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