Refugee in own land
Victims of the ethnic cleansing of 1993 were put in different camps and forgotten. They are forced to lead a miserable life.
Avidip Chaudhury

The problem of internally displaced persons (I.D.P) in India needs to receive both govt. and public attention. Ethnic and other conflicts displaced a substantial number of people in India. The Norwegian Refugee Council estimated as many as 65000 people were internally displaced in India as on Oct. 2003 and the number is on the rise. The North-East  India contributed a major chunk of this figure.

The I.D.P’s or better to say refugees in their own homeland is having a substantial presence in Lower Assam’s Bongaigaon and Kokrajhar districts. They are the victims of the Bodo ethnic violence of Oct. 1993. In Bongaigaon and Kokrajhar districts a total of about 3786 families were affected of which majority are from religious minority community. The victims of the ethnic cleansing of 1993 were put in different camps and forgotten. They are forced to lead a deplorable and miserable life because of govt’s apathy towards them. The United Nation’s guidelines for treatment of IDPs are mocked in this part of the globe daily. Here the govt. gives birth to one committee after another to look in to the issue and in the so called ‘relief’ camps mothers die one after another giving birth to there young one’s.

The inmates of the camps of Goraimari, Garogaon, Tapatari, Bangaldaba and Sandlartarietc are treated as such by the govt. as they are something unfixable with the main stream.

Before the proper rehabilitation of the inmates Govt. ordered the withdrawal of the relief camps in the year 2000, and thus stopping the supply of negligible amount of relief material, which they use to get. Basic amenities like food, drinking water, medical aid, education are a few of those things, which lost or changed their meanings for the refugees of these camps. In the absence of any govt. aid the camp inmates to sustain there life are made to work as daily wage labourers in the neighbouring localities, where they have been economically exploited and fate is not the only one to be blamed for their present status.

The govt. through I.A.Y. (Indira Aabash Yojna) scheme wanted to rehabilitate the refugees by allotting them I.A.Y, houses. The refugees are there to fill those houses but who is going to fill their empty stomachs, as there is no proper earning source for these uprooted persons. The govt. just wants to get rid of the symptoms but the disease will persist unless and until the tinted Ray-Ban is not kept aside from the eyes of the Assam state govt.

On 4th March 2004 Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi constituted a committee headed by Dr. Bhumidhar Barman along with 9 other members to look into the problems. Accordingly the members of the committee visited the camps on 19\03\04 and declared than on 15th of August 04 the C.M will handover the keys of the I.A.Y houses to the beneficiaries, but with the passing days the total matter was put in to cold storage.

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