A police officer at Dhubri, who had handled infiltration over the years, including at Cachar District which also borders Bangladesh, described how they had once stopped a bus en route to Guwahati from Cachar. The bus had its windows closed tight, the curtains were pulled across dark-tinted glasses. It was a hot day, making the closed windows even more intriguing. When the police opened the door, they found not less than forty Bangladeshis, sweltering in the oven-like heat and cowering in fright.

They were immediately arrested and sent back to Cachar’s border with Bangladesh.

‘I don’t know if they were pushed back, that wasn’t my job, we apprehended them and sent them on their way—but I won’t be surprised if they managed to get back or were not sent out of India at all,’ he remarked.

Keshab Pradhani, a priest at the local satra, remarked that there were very few Bangladeshis in the neighbourhood since they would draw attention. ‘We look completely different to each other,’ said Pradhani, who is a Koch, or one of the aboriginal, Mongolian communities of the Brahmaputra Valley. The Kochs ruled western Assam for many years and were especially prominent in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

But Pradhani was not untouched by the immigration agitation. ‘We have read in the newspapers about this but have not seen such people with our own eyes,’ he remarked.

Pradhani’s scepticism is rare among Assamese-speakers. It is healthy for, too often, one meets with academics and journalists, officials and politicians in the country, especially in the North East, who are absolutely convinced that every Bengali-speaking Muslim is an illegal migrant who has come over into the area in the past decade or so. Such an attitude borders on xenophobia and scepticism is necessary if we are to look at such emotive issues with rationality and common sense.

One has to stand above the melee, as it were, to get the big picture and then walk into the pandemonium, to understand the ground situation better.

We have, in earlier chapters, looked at the broader picture. What are the voices in the melee?

Village Voices

On a warm afternoon at Satrasal, Upendra Nath Sen, a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party held forth to a small audience of family members and two researchers. He was joined by a nephew, Dipak Sen, an activist of the All Assam Students’ Union.

Sen Senior was talking about border crossing routes and zeroed in on Jhaukutty on the West Bengal side as a corridor. Five rivers, including the Sunkosh, the Kaaljani and Tursha, divide the flat plains, making travel extremely strenuous and long. Sen said that instead of crossing all the streams, Bangladeshis would go through Jhaukutty, Satrasal and Agomoni from the Kurigram side of their border.

And then, he went on, they would get into buses and spread out across Assam. Very pat, very organized. But not a shred of evidence to support it.