Refugees Within, Refugees Without
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 20 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 in-fighting, 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.
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