The Bangladesh military actions in the Chittagong Hill Tracts followed attacks on them by a rebel army called the Shanti Bahini, which was supported and trained by India’s external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW).

The people who fled the crackdown in 1988 included political activists as well as ordinary villagers—predominantly farmers and their families, labourers and others. They were settled in three camps near the Bangladesh border and supplied rations and some cash by the Indian government. Yet, no external refugee agency was allowed access to these refugees or the camps. Neither Bangladesh not India are signatories to the Convention on the Protection of Refugees, though India has had a long history of treating refugees with tolerance and compassion.

After years of fruitless negotiations, the pace of bilateral discussions, which also involved Chakma exile activists, picked up after the pro-India Awami League government led by Sheikh Hasina Wajed, daughter of the late Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, came to power in 1996. A settlement was thrashed out which gave greater powers over local government and issues affecting the Hill Tracts such as forests and land alienation to the Chakmas. The settlement does not mean that the political problems of the Chakmas are over. New issues and demands have cropped up. But this example is aimed at showing the different stages of migration, and forced migration in a border community. Here, at first, an internal problem forced the environmental outflow and created a problem that remains unresolved in the receiving country. Then, a military drive resulted in the classical refugee syndrome: thousands of frightened civilians crowding camps in an alien land.

Yet, strange though it appears—given the experience of the world—the refugee crisis was actually easier to handle than the problem of migrants or the internally displaced. This latter group shares the fate faced by external displacees, especially since the state government in Arunachal Pradesh fiercely opposes efforts to confer citizenship on them. A domestic political concern, created by an influx from across the border has thus become more intractable in the subcontinental context than a bilateral problem.

The Chakmas are victims twice over: in Bangladesh and in the land they chose over the country of their birth. If their experiences in the Chittagong Hill Tracts and in Arunachal Pradesh were not enough, their compatriots have faced harassment, eviction and discrimination in Mizoram state. The difficulties here have arisen over questions of religion (the Mizos are predominantly Baptists, while the Chakmas are Buddhists), ethnicity, language and demographic change.

Mizoram is a jagged sliver of land which is hemmed in by Assam, Bangladesh, Tripura and Myanmar. Mizo leaders say that the Chakmas are moving illegally into their tiny state (population of about 700,000) from Bangladesh, settling on agricultural land, increasing in numbers and posing a threat to their traditions, lifestyles and political power.