Nearly 50 dead in anti-Muslim violence in India's Assam state

Oct 7, 2008, 8:25 GMT

   New Delhi - The death toll in clashes between Bodo tribesmen and Muslim settlers in India's north-eastern state of Assam rose to 49 and more than 100,000 people fled their homes, officials said Tuesday.

   'As many as 49 people have died in violence in four districts, most of them in the Udalgiri and Darrang districts north of state capital Guwahati since Friday,' Assam Health Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said by telephone.

   'The clashes have subsided and no incidents of violence were reported in the past 24 hours. The death toll has increased with the recovery of bodies from the troubled areas,' he said.

   Most of the victims were Muslims who had illegally migrated from neighbouring Bangladesh and settled on vacant land in Assam. Muslims also attacked the Bodos, an ethnic tribal people indigenous to northern Assam, in retaliation.

   An additional 2,600 police and paramilitary personnel were sent to the restive districts where more than 100 people were injured in the clashes.

   Authorities imposed a curfew with shoot-on-sight orders as police used helicopters to patrol the troubled areas, state police chief RN Mathur said.

   'The situation is under control and we do not expect any further violence,' Udalgiri district police superintendent AB Tiwari said.

   'We are playing a tough role and have used four helicopters for aerial surveillance to quell the clashes,' he added.

   Groups armed with bows and poison-tipped arrows, spears and machetes had attacked several villages in the region over the weekend.

   The violence forced more than 100,000 Bodos and Muslims to flee their homes and take refuge in government-run relief camps in the districts.

   State officials said a Bodo militant group called the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB), that is fighting for an independent tribal homeland, was instrumental in triggering the violence.

   'The recent violence which began under a planned ethnic cleansing by the NDFB who wanted to drive out all non-Bodos from the area slowly took a communal turn,' Sarma said.

   The NDFB is a majority Christian organization whose leader Ranjan Daimary is believed to be operating out of Bangladesh.

   The group had entered a cease-fire with the Indian government in 2005, but did not given up its independence struggle.

   The clashes were the latest in a long-simmering conflict between the indigenous Assam tribes, both Hindus and Christians, and the Muslim immigrants.

   The tribes have targeted Muslims in the past out of fear of being overrun by the settlers. In February 1983, over 2,100 people, mostly Bangladeshi immigrants, were killed in clashes with tribesmen in central Assam.