Bodo hopes and minority rights
News: Gunning down of 44 Muslim villagers, including many children, in a matter of 36 hours between May 1 and 2 in Bodoland Territorial Area District (BTAD).
According to the author reason for the enduring political failure to prevent the violence lies in the very political-bureaucratic predispositions with which the government has been addressing the complex ethnic and security challenges in the region.
Violence was a result of:
- intensified inter-group competition over resources
- subsequent rise of the “son of the soil” doctrine
- escapist measure of the state in “allowing” selective elite dominance in Bodoland
Historical underpinnings
In the interest of early colonialism, new reservation policies were introduced and peasants and labourers from outside brought in.
Forest reservation policies as well as cross-border migration continued heavily in the first decades of independence. This led to entrapment not only of the community from the resources but is an entrapment of one community from the other.
The Bodos, who constitute the largest tribal community out of a total of 34 tribal communities in Assam, have been fighting for greater political autonomy since the early decades following independence; this gathered momentum with the organisation of the Plain Tribals Council of Assam (PTCA) in the 1960s and then matured with the demand for a separate State by the All Bodo Students’ Union (ABSU) in 1987.
Within the BTAD the Bodos constitute less than 30 per cent with no other ethnic group (Assamese speakers, Bengali Muslims, Bengali Hindus, Koch-Rajbongshis) having an absolute majority.
The Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC) was formed as a special territorial privilege under the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution as in the Memorandum of Settlement of February 2003 between the Government of India, the Government of Assam and the Bodo Liberation Tigers (BLT).
Growing political assertions by sections of Muslims under banners like The All Bodoland Minority Students’ Union (ABMSU) and ‘Sankhyalagu Aikhya Mancha’ (Minorities United Front). ABMSU has even demanded proportionate employment policies for community numbers and reservation for minority students in medical and engineering colleges in the area. It has also asked political parties to reserve at least three seats for the minorities in those constituencies where they are in an absolute majority.
A safety valve that failed
Bodoland is an example where institutions like the autonomous council (as in the Sixth Schedule) have become de-facto tools of political management used to defuse possible dissent against the state. The government invests in group leaders by distributing substantial financial and coercive resources, allowing some form of local autocracy to consolidate power which is aimed at minimising threats to “national security” and “anti-state” violence, even while creating the conditions for the rise of localised violence and corruption.
The violent rivalry between Bodo political outfits and gradually emerging non-Bodo political conglomerations is a reflection of this agenda of elite ethnic dominance. It is the proactive defiance and political mobilisation of Muslims against the Bodoland Peoples’ Front (BPF) candidate that had invited the assassin’s bullets. The independent candidate, Naba Saraniya, supported by the Sanmilita Janagostiya Aikkyamancha (SJA), an amalgamation of 20 “non-Bodo” ethnic and linguistic groups based in BTAD, have put up a strong fight against the BPF candidate, Chandan Brahma, while the “Bodo votes” are divided.
Need for radical measures
- to sweep the region clean by seizing the significant amount of illegal weapons.
- modification of the BTC agreement. The arrangements now not only give the elites from one ethnic group disproportionate power over the others, but also provide further incentive and a rationale to/for this domination.The BTC accord needs be reworked to expand the democratic ambit of its mandate by making it more accommodative with a greater share and proportionate representation to different communities residing in BTAD.
Another article on patents. Talks of all the issues till now. Was asked in this years mains so not summarizing.
It’s the standard file format for nearly every academic paper, political briefing and research note. But a new report by the World Bank suggests that the venerable pdf is keeping valuable information buried in servers, unread and unloved.
The portable document format, or “pdf”, was invented by Adobe in 1993 as a way of rendering documents with rich text formatting and inline images in a consistent way across multiple computing platforms and various software packages. A document saved as a pdf should always look the same, no matter where it is being viewed, a fact which has made it popular for the digital release of complex reports.
But owing to the way such documents are rendered, pdfs often give up machine readability in favour of human readability. The basic format doesn’t include any requirement that text be selectable or searchable, while data presented as charts and tables is often impossible to export in any useable way.
That then makes it impossible to mine the documents for the data they contain and so create databases of new information pulling together disparate sources.
Lessons from Mullaperiyar
Verdict: Two decades ago, the apex court struck down a Karnataka law that sought to nullify the interim award of the Cauvery Tribunal, and now, the Court has invalidated a Kerala amendment to circumvent the 2006 judgment, allowing the raising of the storage of the Mullaperiyar Dam from 136 feet to 142 feet.
Issue: The dispute was between Kerala’s stand that the dam built in 1895 is not safe enough to store water above 136 feet and that there should be a new structure, and Tamil Nadu’s position that it is structurally sound and needs only strengthening, not replacement.
The judicial outcome has some valuable lessons for our quasi-federal polity.
- First, it proves that unilateral action in inter-State matters is ill-advised.
- Secondly, it shows the courts are able and willing to adjudicate impartially on sensitive issues with political overtones that could inflame regional passions.
- The verdict sends out a message that rights crystallised by judicial orders cannot be abrogated by legislation.
In the Mullaperiyar case, safety, and not appropriation of water, was the issue. The finding that the dam is safe on structural, hydrological and seismic aspects ought to be given the respect that judicial finality deserves. Regretting the rigid and inflexible stand taken by the two parties, the Court has flagged the two alternatives suggested by an Empowered Committee that can be implemented if the two States come to an agreement: a new dam, or a new tunnel at a particular elevation so that some currently unused quantum of water may be evacuated when the dam is under strain.
Women are a growing economic force and expected to add about $6 trillion in earned income globally over next five years according to the research by the Boston Consulting Group. Yet many women lag behind men when it comes to using those assets to plan and build financial security.
Cell tower project gets weak signals
A Central project to set up mobile phone towers in nine States to strengthen anti-Maoist operations has suffered a setback. Even after a re-tender, the project has found no bidders other than the two which qualified in the technical bidding earlier.
The project was conceived three years ago as a key element in the fight against Maoists. The deadline was June 2014.
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