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.
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