That is why when the Government of India, under the direction of the Minister of State for Home Affairs, Rajesh Pilot, and the Assam government under Hiteswar Saikia agreed to set up an autonomous Bodoland Council, they were asking for trouble. The Bodos kept up a stream of demands to include areas with non-Bodo populations in this territory. The other side was equally adamant in refusing these demands.

Bodos began moving from the Kokrajhar belt to other parts of northern Assam with the support and connivance of local politicians in the 1970s. But this became a significant trend in the 1990s as part of a strategy by the National Democratic Front of Bodoland of Ranjan Daimuri, which wants an independent country, to change the demographic profile of districts like Sonitpur.5 A substantial part of this movement took place quietly.6

When negotiations kept stalling and failing on the inclusion of more areas, Bodo militant groups, led by the Bodoland Security Force (later to become the Bodoland Tiger Force) and the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB), organized pogroms of communities which had lived in these areas for generations. The major target were Santhals, a group which had been settled there since the latter part of the nineteenth century. At the time, they were transported by the British to work as labourers on tea plantations. Over the years, the Santhals settled on the land in their traditional style—in isolated hamlets practising subsistence agriculture. In fierce attacks on the Santhals in May 1996, the Bodos drove tens of thousands from their homes and forced them to take shelter in refugee camps set up by the state government. The Santhals, no mean fighters themselves, retaliated with their traditional weapons—bows and arrows as well as daos (machetes).

Nearly 200,000 persons, non-Bodos for the most part, and Bodos, continue to live in unsanitary conditions, cheek by jowl, with little sustenance but irregular government doles. Some who went back to their homes have become refugees a second time after the Bodos descended on them again and made them leave.

The Bodo example shows how land and language have become important tools in the development of political identity in the North East. There are other examples which show how this process has been accelerated in other parts.

One is of the Motoks and the other of the Tiwas. In each case, marginalization caused by dispossession of land led to conflicts.