The politics of the 'clash' between Bangalees and Paharis

Uchacha-A Chak

My intention here is not to shed light upon what had happened. Rather, I want to bring attention to the usage of the terms "clash between pahari/Indigenous peoples and Bangalees" or “pahari-Bangalee conflict.” to describe any incidents of violence in the CHT.

Firstly, the mass use of such terms normalises violence based on the essentialisation of people’s ethnic identities. The term “Bangalee-pahari conflict.” is used as a contextual term for the English “ethnic conflict.” In sociology and political science, ethnic conflict or ethnic violence is loosely defined as political or social conflict involving one or more groups identified by some marker of the ethnic identity. But often, what appears to be ethnic conflict is not ethnic conflict. It has been found that many cases labelled as “ethnic conflict,” from cases in Rwanda to India, are in fact political conflicts.

The rhetoric of ethnic conflict or ethnic violence views ethnic identity as an immutable feature of human nature. Or, in other words, these terms create the assumption that violence along ethnic lines is “primordial” or inherent to ethnic or cultural differences. This is seriously problematic because such assumptions normalise violence. When an instance of conflict is considered “natural” or “normal,” the question of justice gets entirely ignored while the real perpetrators hide behind nameless, faceless mobs.

I am not saying that we should ignore the ethnic or identity aspect of an instance of violence. But identity plays a very small part in the violence compared to the major historical-political dimensions that these terminologies manage to erase. Therefore, another key reason why these seemingly normal terms should be subjected to scrutiny is because they turn our attention away from the fact that this settler Bangalee-pahari binary is a construct of unjust historical-political and economic processes propagated by the state.

In reality, both pahari/Indigenous people and the settler Bangalees are victims of state experimentation. The first have found themselves amidst systemic violence, namely discriminatory state policies and laws, since the colonial times in the name of protection of forests and “development”—a trend which the supposedly postcolonial states of Pakistan and then Bangladesh have continued to follow more intensely. The new forms of oppression they encountered in the nation-state of Bangladesh came under the guise of nationalism, which manifested as militarisation of the CHT, followed by state-sanctioned population transfer programmes from the plains in the 1980s. Meanwhile, the landless/river erosion-affected Bangalees who were transferred through these programmes from the plains, being offered land and monthly rations, found themselves in an unfamiliar landscape. They also found the land they were promised could only be claimed by force, as it already belonged to the people who lived there and also looked very different from them. The reaction to this feeling of deprivation is often misdirected towards Indigenous peoples. Coupled with the real and perceived support of the military who rules the region, this sense of deprivation fuels hatred and finds outlets in violence from time to time. The media portrayal of these incidents is mostly reported as “pahari-Bangalee/settler Bangalee clash,” and rarely as “Bangalee-pahari clash/conflict,” identifying two conflicting categories of identities in that particular order and implying that the “pahari” people began the conflict.

To illustrate how the consequences of these words unfold in real life, I’d like to share a story. I have known “N” since 2013. He is in his late 30s now. His childhood memories haunt him almost every night in his sleep. He and his family have been evicted multiple times as a result of joint attacks by the “settlers” and military forces. Once, in the 90s, when his family had to take refuge at a camp on the Indian border, the temporary home they’d managed to get was next to a burning ground for dead bodies. They could see the fire and dead bodies very clearly. In N’s memory, someone from the refugee camp was always on the pyre due to death from the injuries they’d received when fleeing, from sickness, starvation, or other dire conditions in the camp. To him, the smell of burning flesh is as familiar as his own skin.

The experiences of N and thousands of Indigenous women and men—who have been deeply affected by the state’s systematic violence in the forms of burning, looting, killing, rape, and torture in many events since the 1980s—are concealed in such simple terms as “pahari-Bangalee clash.”

Make no mistake, the societies our parents and grandparents grew up in was no utopia. Based on the stories we hear, hardships were part of everyday life: hardship around jum cultivation, dying young, social problems, rivalries, family issues, and also patriarchal struggles suffered by women. But what they did not have before this Bangalee-pahari polarisation/categorisation was the fear of being attacked by violent mobs, fear of rape and abduction, and the constant anxiety of facing humiliation based on ethnic prejudices. Eventually, these new threats produced newer structural and everyday challenges within the Indigenous communities. It is also worthy to mention that neither the paharis nor the Bangalees of the CHT are homogenous groups as one may assume. The relationships between various sections of Bangalees and the Indigenous peoples are not of animosity as may be assumed.

Instead, by overemphasising the Bangalee-pahari oppositional categories, the mainstream media not only impedes the immediate justice processes by aiding the perpetrators in hiding behind these categorical masks, it also conceals the state-led historical-political process of the ethnicisation of the settler Bangalee and pahari categories. The media fails to ask the crucial questions of who benefits from these “conflicts,” and how these conflicts are brewed and dispensed in the first place.

We, the Indigenous peoples, know the pattern only too well. We know how anything in the world can be turned into a rumour and then a “legitimate” excuse to attack Indigenous peoples, while the perpetrators run scot free and wait for the mainstream media to gloss the attacks over as a pahari-Bangalee conflict.

Uchacha-A Chak is a researcher, activist, and a Co-Convenor of Lokayoto Bidyaloy.

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