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India :: The Nowhere Clans Well known author Hari Kunzru wrote this piece as part of the series Echoes from the Edge for Médecins Sans Frontières and The Sunday Times Magazine. A carpet of vivid green paddy fields stretches away towards a range of hills. 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 troubles of “The Northeast” 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. 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. They 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 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. 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. 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 the baked earth instantly dissolves and you find yourself up to your ankles in thick brown mud. 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. › › › Next Page | Print version
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