The Nowhere Clans
British novelist Hari Kunzru reports from India
The Hindus called them the lowest of the low. Now, the refugees of Assam are being persecuted not only by rival tribes, militia and disease, but by the Indian government itself.
A carpet of vivid green paddy fields stretches away towards a range of hills. Though the monsoon has just begun here in Kokrajhar district, cyclists and brightly-painted trucks have to pick their way over a pitted road, which will only deteriorate as the rains set in. We bounce along a stretch of causeway past lines of villagers stooping to pick rice or set nets for tiny fish and frogs.
The scene is attractive, as long as you don’t think too hard about the back-breaking work, or the flimsiness of the huts clustered by the roadside. It could be anywhere in rural India. It certainly doesn’t look like a war-zone.
Yet Kokrajhar is a place where, depending on who you talk to, somewhere between a 100 000 and 300 000 people have been driven from their homes by years of communal violence, where government officials work with armed guards at their office doors, businessmen live in fear of kidnap and extortion, and a fragile peace is barely maintained by a massive Indian army presence.
The district is part of Assam, the largest of India’s northeastern states, an area wedged between Myanmar, Bangladesh and Bhutan which has spawned an alphabet soup of militant groups, all with their own grievances, political agendas and thirst for funds and recruits: the AAASS, ACMF, ANCF, ASF and the ATF (that’s just the A’s) the Hindu Liberation Army and the Muslim Liberation Army, the Muslim Liberation Front, the Liberation Tigers, the United Liberation Militia, the United Liberation Front … Nearly 40 organisations are thought to be active, some representing the interests of a particular ethnic or religious community, others aspiring to carve out their own new ‘united’ nation in this particular corner of India.
The troubles of “The Northeast” (a phrase that takes in Assam and neighbouring states like Manipur and Nagaland, which have their own insurgencies) are little known outside India. The obscure politics and the protracted low-intensity nature of the various conflicts don’t grab international headlines in the style of an acute humanitarian emergency. This probably suits the Indian government, which prefers to concentrate global attention on its economic boom, or the glamour of its film industry. Unlike Kashmir, where local religious and communal tensions have taken on geopolitical significance, Assam’s woes are still an internal affair.
Not being news doesn’t make life any easier for Joseph Tudu, the headman of Sapkata camp. Tudu is a slight, wiry, black-skinned man, with the self-effacing shyness of someone who is used to hard work and ill-treatment. He also happens to be a Christian priest. One night in May 1998, his neighbours started breaking down doors in his village and slaughtering the people inside. He took his family and fled to the nearest safe place, which happened to be the local police post. The Tudus set up camp outside, hoping that the presence of the policemen would be enough to protect them. Incredible as it seems, they were joined by several thousand others who had just been through the same terrifying experience. Six years later they are still there.
Sapkata is a kind of limbo, an embryonic village that, like other long-term camps around the world, exists only because there is nowhere else for its inhabitants to go. The people of Sapkata did not run far, only a few miles in some cases, but their old lives might as well be on another planet. They are too scared to return to their homes, if those homes still exist. Their former neighbours farm their old fields.
Joseph and the others supplement their government rice ration with day labour, sometimes for the very people who drove them out. Joseph takes me on a tour of the camp, through a maze of low mud-walled huts. Men loll on wooden bedsteads, children playing at their feet. Women peer round doorways. They have the impersonal curiosity common to very poor people around the world. When a rich man goes past, you stare, but only in the way that you might stare down a well, or out at the horizon. There is something self-protecting in this blankness. Allowing yourself to be fully conscious of such a stranger’s humanity would be unbearable. After all, this is a person just like you, no better, yet with his 2000 calories a day, his dental and optical care, his access to antibiotics, and above all his height, his very physicality testifies to the existence of a world of such opulence that it makes a mockery of your own. Better this cosmological distance. Better to imagine him as a cloud, a bird, a ghost.
So a certain wary attention follows us past the pumps where the people draw water and over to the stinking open latrine where they deposit their waste. There is a hopeless and slovenly feel to these parts of the camp, at odds with the huts and their neatly-swept floors, their walls decorated with relief designs of flowers or Christian crosses. There is a reason for this contrast. Indian government policy aims to ‘rehabilitate’ the people of Sapkata. There is a program to encourage them to leave the camp and set up home elsewhere. The carrot in this situation is a resettlement payment. One of the sticks is the official ban on digging a well or installing proper sanitation. A decent infrastructure would give this place greater permanence, which the state doesn’t want. So Joseph and his people suffer all the grim and degrading consequences of dirty water; diarrhea, parasites, cholera, and above all, malaria.
When the rain comes down (as it does over me on the second morning I spend in Sapkata) the baked earth instantly dissolves and you find yourself up to your ankles in thick brown mud. The light changes and the muggy heat goes out of the air. When the rain recedes, it leaves behind a world of standing water, of paddies and puddles and lakes and ponds and ruts, a paradise for the malaria parasite. The dominant variant found here is plasmodium falciparam, which the medical textbooks dryly describe as “the most pathogenic” of the four species. If P. falciparam finds its way to the brain it is capable of killing its host. In Sapkata, where the government hospital is half a day’s walk away, it frequently does.
The only foreigners in Kokrajhar are my own hosts, a medical team from the aid organisation Médecins sans Frontières who are running clinics in four camps providing basic health care and malaria treatment. At Sapkata they have converted a disused government building, constructing a waiting shelter complete with bamboo benches onto which up to 400 people cram three days a week waiting to see Dr Anup and Dr Swapan, two young Indian doctors. Marshalling the crowds is Jeri Merritt, an American nurse striding around in operating theatre greens. She towers above the villagers, the kind of woman you’d expect to play a pioneer in a fifties Western, wearing a gingham dress and carrying a shotgun. The pace is relentless. Patients are weighed and their temperature taken. Too high? They get a paracetamol to bring it down. The worst cases lie on the ground at the front, attended by family members. Everyone is tested for malaria. The first morning I attend the clinic, more than half the patients are positive.