The Indian
government has been accused of religious and racial discrimination after
members of the Chakma ethnic group said their pleas for help following the
devastating floods and landslides that swept the country’s north-east have
fallen on deaf ears.
Routine
abuse of Delhi's maids laid bare as class divide spills into violence
Read more
About 2
million people have been affected by the severe rains that have hit the region
over the past two months. More than 80b people have died, with homes and
landdestroyed.
Members of
the Chakma group, which live along the riverbanks across four states – Mizoram,
Tripura, Assam and Meghalaya – claim that government has been deliberately slow
with its rescue efforts.
“The Chakmas
are Buddhist,” said Paritosh Chakma, secretary general of the All India Chakma
Social Forum. “We are ethnically and linguistically different from the local
people and we suffer racial discrimination. The worst affected areas here are
those by the river banks, where most Chakmas live. The government has been slow
to provide relief to these areas because it’s where the Chakmas live and they
don’t care.”
World Vision
said tens of thousands of people continue to wait for rescue teams to reach
them. The charity has distributed food, tarpaulins, and bedsheets to roughly
800 Chakma families in the Lunglei district of India’s Mizoram state, close to
the border with Bangladesh.
The charity
estimates that £150,000 is needed to help the community rebuild their homes and
replant crops.
“The scant
roads that existed before the floods were washed away by landslides,” said
Kunal Shah, World Vision India’s director of disaster management. “As we
floated along the river to the reach the Chakma communities, we saw their
houses smashed to bits.
“Reaching
out to the most affected people was really tough. It took us two days by car
and a two-hour boat trip to reach the remote villages. These isolated
communities live in densely forested areas.”
Shah said
his team was “met by people standing waist-high in water”.
“Silt
deposits had covered their small plots of land; their bamboo houses had been
destroyed and their livestock had drowned,” he added.
The Chakmas
have been settled in the region for about 50 years, since arriving as refugees
from Bangladesh. While most state governments have granted them Indian
citizenship, Arunachal Pradesh – where local groups fear being “swamped” by the
Chakmas and losing their culture – has not.
The issue
has been further complicatedby the Arunachal Pradesh government’s refusal to
allow anyone from outside the state to buy land there. Without citizenship, the
state’s Chakmas have none of the official identity documents they need to
access government schemes and aid. Regarded as “nowhere” people, they have no
land rights or access to schools, and are denied the ration cards that would
entitle them to subsidised food.
A mother and child survey scenes of
devastating flooding in north-east India
Facebook
Twitter Pinterest
A mother and child survey scenes of
devastating flooding in north-east India. Photograph: World Vision
Even those
born in the state are often considered outsiders, and many suffer
discrimination.
In 2015,
India’s supreme court directed New Delhi to give citizenship to the Chakmas in
Arunachal Pradesh. So far, this has not been acted on.
Santosh
Chakma, who lives in Delhi but comes from Arunachal Pradesh, said lack of
citizenship made it easier for the government to ignore them during the floods
when they needed food, tents and clothes. Chakma said that families living on
riverbanks had still not recovered from last year’s floods, for which they
received no relief or rehabilitation, when this year’s monsoon hit them again.
“Our pleas
are ignored by the government. It’s discrimination, no other reason. We are
abandoned every time the floods hit our homes,” he said.
The Guardian
0 Comments