| Image: AP |
Assam is bleeding. In the first week of January, armed with Kalashnikovs and other weaponry, rebels of the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) carried out a series of massacres across five districts of eastern Assam, killing 61 Hindi-speaking migrant workers. Close to 8000 of the survivors, most of them hailing from Bihar, have now been moved to about 50 government-run shelters for protection. There is panic, and quite a few of these seasonal migrants who work in dispersed brick kilns and dairy farms, or do odd jobs all over, have taken the train out of the state.
The ULFA, one of the Indian Northeast's most potent insurgent groups, clearly wanted to sow terror in an attempt to force New Delhi to take it seriously. Hindi speakers, after all, are regarded by radical sections in Assam and elsewhere in the Northeast as symbols of the dominant political class ruling the country — hence, the deliberate targeting of Hindi speakers.