Refugees Within, Refugees Without

The Chahma are too small to be so fragmented and scattered, but there is little incentive for anyone to try and redress their condition.

On 15 August 1947, the Indian tricolour went up a flagpost in Rangamati, the main town in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. The Chakma leaders had believed during the tortuous negotiations leading up to Partition that, given the religious composition  of the  largely  Buddhist CHT, their district would be parcelled out to India.

Not so, decided Sir Cyril Radcliffe, head of the commission with the task of apportioning the territories, and the Hill Tracts were awarded to (East) Pakistan. On 18 August, Pakistani troops marched into Rangamati, pulled down the Indian flag, and sent up in its place the star and crescent of Pakistan.

The days of travail had begun for the Chakma, a minority which, over the following half century, has had more than its share of fragmentation, even by South Asian standards. Today, their own homeland, the CHT, is overrun with Bengali settlers from the overpopulated Bangladeshi mainland, and divided groups survive under trying circumstances in Tripura, Mizoram and Arunachal.

However, for all the tragedy they have suffered, the world knows too little about Chakmas. Within Bangladesh, they pale to insignificance before the size of the mainland population and the suffering that regularly visits it. In India, Chakmas make up three segregated groups whose problem is one among so many in the increasingly violent Northeast, itself a region that suffers neglect from India´s rulers.

Colony to Bahini

The Chakma form part of the great Tibeto-Burman language family whose antecedents, like those of the tribal communities stretching all the way east from central Nepal, go back to the central and eastern Asia of thousands of years ago. The jungles of the CHT are home to several such Tibeto-Burman tribes, among whom Chakmas and Marmas are the largest.

The Hill Tracts, an undulating curiosity in a Bangladesh that is otherwise remarkable for its deltaic flatness, became a refuge for Buddhism even as the. faith declined across the region in the face of a resurgent Hinduism and, later, Islam. The Buddhist character of what is today the CHT, in fact, seems to have been cemented in the 14th century when Sawngma (Chakma) Raja Marekyaja migrated from neighbouring Arakan hills into the Chittagong belt to establish his rule and dynasty here.

During colonial times, the Chakma did not take kindly to new demands for taxes by the British, who had to make at least three major offensives to subdue the tribals until an agreement was extracted from them. However, relations with the British became progressively cordial afterward, to the extent that Chakmas under Rani Kallendi sided with the imperial rulers during the Great Mutiny of 1857.

In 1860, the British divided the hill tracts into three subdivisions, under the control of three tribes. In 1900, in return perhaps for loyalty shown, they introduced a regulation banning the settlement of outsiders in the Hill Tracts and prohibiting the transfer of land to non-indigenous people. The 1935 Government of India Act defined the hills as a "Totally Excluded Area", taking it out of Bengal´s control.

These actions to protect the tribal identity and economy were strongly resented in Dhaka and Calcutta. The displeasure found expression immediately after 1947 in the open season that was declared for settlers. Successive regimes in East Pakistan, and later Bangladesh, supported the influx of Bengali-speaking Muslim migrants into the 5,000 sq km Hill Tracts, which is sparsely populated in relation to the rest of the country. Today, as a result of the aggressive settlement policy, the Hill Tracts has a population of 900,000 which is evenly divided between Muslim homesteaders and the indigenous Buddhists.

If the first political blow suffered by the Chakma was when their territory was placed with East Pakistan, the following decades saw successive measures that fuelled discontent. It started with the crackdown on the anti-Pakistan demonstrations of 1947. Then came the inundation of prime agricultural lands by the Kaptai Dam reservoir, one of the first mega-projects in all South Asia. The reservoir displaced tens of thousand Chakmas.

During the 1971 war for Bangladesh´s liberation, the CHT population backed the Mukti Bahini against the Pakistani army. The following year, Manobendra Larma, who had been elected to the national parliament from the Hill Tracts, called on Sheikh Mujibur Rahman with a delegation, seeking to place Chakma concerns on the new nation´s political agenda. As it became clear that Shiekh Mujibur and the new establishment he represented was in no mood to listen, Mr Larma set up the Jana Sanghata Samiti as a political group, and later, its armed wing, the Shanti Bahini.

Over the course of the following years, operations by the Bangladeshi army in the Hill Tracts against the Shanti Bahini led to an exodus of Chakma refugees into neighbouring Tripura, the Indian state which juts like a wedge into Bangladesh´s east. Over the last 2 0 years, Indian security forces have supported the Chakma fighters and have provided training which is conducted for the most part in Tripura. During this period, the Bahini has carried out a series of attacks on Bangladeshi forces and on civilian targets as well.

There was a split in the Bahini in 1983 and a faction surrendered to the Dhaka authorities. However, the leftist group that is backed by India battles on. Manobendra Larma was killed during the factional infighting, but his brother, Shanto, has continued the campaign against Dhaka. The hills are presently quiet, as a ceasefire is in force while peace negotiations continue.

Fourfold Division

The number of Chakma who continue to live in their homeland of the Chittagong Hill Tracts is said to be about 300,000. Another 80,000 Chakmas are to be found concentrated in the southwest of Mizoram, the Indian state that is sandwiched between Burma and the CHT. Most of this population is now regarded as Indian, having lived in Mizoram for generations. A third group of most recent arrivals is located in Tripura, and numbers 50,000. Here since 1988, these Chakma refugees fled the Bangladesh Army operations against their villages in the CHT. Today, they live in decrepit settlements that are euphemistically termed refugee camps by the Indian government.

A fourth group of Chakma consists of those displaced by the Kaptai Dam reservoir in 1964, who were forced to fend for themselves when the erstwhile government of East Pakistan failed to pay compensation. About 30,000 of these Chakma "development refugees" ended up in the Cachar and Lushai hills (which later became the Mizo Hills, and then the state of Mizoram). At least 20,000 more left for the Arakan hills in Burma, where they are now settled.

"They came in a hopeless, pathetic condition, just with the clothes that they wore," recalls one senior Mizoram official, who was part of the Assam government team that received the Chakma in the Cachar and Lushai hills. At one point, the Indian authorities toyed with the idea of moving the Chakma en masse to the Andaman and Nicobar islands, but it was later decided to shift the refugees to the North East Frontier Agency, now the state of Arunachal Pradesh.

No Honour, Nor Dignity

The Chakma encampments in Tripura are not "refugee camps" as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees would define them. They have none of the facilities available to, say, the Bhutanese refugees in the Jhapa camps of Nepal. The Chakma huts are of mud and thatch, and for years they have received from the Government of India a measly daily quota of 400 grams of rice, some salt, and 20 paisa on the side.

Because this dole is hardly enough, many Chakmas work outside the camps for wages lower than what the locals ask. This has created tension, and recently, the Tripura state government passed an order restricting the refugees to the camps. This year, for the first time since the Chakmas arrived in Tripura, refugee students were not allowed to sit for school-leaving examinations of the state education system.

Repatriation talks between the Bangladesh authorities, the Indian Government and the Chakma leadership have continued over the past few years, but there appears little hope that the refugees will be returning anytime soon with the "honour and dignity" that their leaders insist on. Assurances from the Bangladeshi authorities do not seem enough, and the Indian side does not favour forced repatriation. Conditions are far from settled, especially as the ceasefire between Dhaka and the Shanti Bahini is due to end on 31 March.

The Chakma of Mizoram, while they seem to be the most secure among the displaced groups, have problems of their own. Regarded as Congress party backers, they were granted an autonomous district council back in 1972. The local Mizo, who see a cultural and demographic threat in the Chakma presence (they now make up ten percent of Mizoram´s population), resent the granting of the council, especially as it was done without consulting them. Besides, the Mizo also suspect that many of the state´s Chakmas are subsequent migrants from Bangladesh, and not part of the original settlers.

The Mizo are predominantly Presbytarian and they recently celebrated 100 years of the coming of the Church to their hills. The growth of the Chakma population, whether natural or through illegal influx, has sparked a campaign of intimidation by the militant Mizo Students Union. Chakmas have been assaulted, their houses torched, and names struck off the electoral lists. The anti-Chakma campaign is set to  resume this spring and continue through the summer. "The Chakma are foreigners, and they do not belong here," is the refrain among the Mizo student leaders.

Another 70,000 or so Chakmas are into hard times in nearby Arunachal Pradesh, where a student-led campaign is underway to drive out the Kaptai ´oustees´ who were settled here by the Indian government 32 years ago. Here, too, a campaign to frighten them is on, which recently forced hundreds to flee to the relative safety of Assam. The Supreme Court of India has given directives against the anti-Chakma drive, but Arunachali leaders and agitators insist that the campaign will continue. The Central government has appointed a committee to review the situation, but with both the state government and opposition agreed on the question, uncertain times loom ahead for the Chakma of Arunachal.

Demographic Threat

In their homeland of the Chittagong Hill Tracts as well as in their Northeast India exile, the Chakma are about as vulnerable as it is possible for any community to be. A tenuous peace prevails in the Hill Tracts themselves, and in the points of their diaspora in India—Tripura, Mizoram, and Arunachal—they face hostile locals and a rising threat of eviction. The politics of demography is all the rage in the Northeast, and the Chakma have no constituency. The New Delhi authorities may try to show understanding, but that is no match for the rising animosities on the ground. The fact that the Chakmas of the Northeast are fragmented into three different populations makes their voice that much weaker.

If there were to be a common effort by New Delhi politicians and bureaucrats, the chief ministers and opposition leaders of the Northeast states, the Chakma leaders, and eminent members of the public, a humane solution that addresses the interests of longtime residents as well as the demographic concerns of the locals may be found.

Even in the unlikely event of the Chakma problem in the Northeast being resolved in a few swift strokes, however, the problem of Chakma in the Chittagong Hill Tracts would remain. That was, after all, how it all began.