‘Hunger has brought us into this jungle’: understanding mobility and immobility of Bengali immigrants in the Chittagong Hills of Bangladesh

ABSTRACT

The recent history of the Chittagong Hills in Bangladesh is marked by ongoing conflicts between minority (non-Muslim and non-Bengali) locals and state-sponsored (Bengali Muslim) immigrants. In general, these immigrants are framed as land grabbers who have been receiving protection from a pro-Bengali military force. We propose instead, that the understanding of these Bengalis as a homogenous category of mobile perpetrators fails to take into account their complex histories as mobile landless peasants. Our ethnographic research reveals that the framing of the local minorities and the mobile Bengalis as two antagonistic categories with opposing interests obscures the fact that both categories have fallen victim to very similar regimes of mobilities and immobilities of the state and national and local (political, economic and military) elites. Here, we reject binary thinking that counterpoises mobility and immobility as two antagonistic concepts and argue that mobility and immobility are intrinsically related and their relationship is asymmetrical.

KEYWORDS:

• Mobility
• immobility
• ethnic-conflict
• Chittagong Hills
• Bangladesh

Introduction

At the end of the year 1979, there was great excitement (haichai) amongst the Bengali peasants of the plains of Bangladesh. This had to do with the introduction of a population relocation programme that promised potential participants (a) free legal-land possession (approximately 5 acre), (b) all technical and material supplies to initiate agriculture, (c) substantial food allowance prior to first harvest, (d) cash-capital (approximately 50 Euro) for setting up an entrepreneurship and (e) a free ride to the destination. The destination was a hilly region referred to as the Chittagong Hills in the south-eastern part of Bangladesh bordering India and Burma.¹

The designers of the scheme played with the many misconceptions about the Hills. Some of these were: (a) it was empty in contrast to densely populated plains of the country (Bangladesh has the eighth largest population in the world),² (b) it had enormous underutilised agrarian resources waiting for the industrious Bengali peasants and (c) Bengali culture and plough cultivation were superior to the cultural and agricultural practices of the original inhabitants of the Hills³ (Levene, 1999; Van Schendel, 1992). Most importantly, the designers of this scheme wished to combat the ongoing resistance in the Hills (cf. Adnan, 2004; Mohsin, 2002).

The resistance by the non-Bengali and non-Muslim locals in the Hills was aimed at the Bangladeshi state and had its origin in the 1960s against what they perceived as ‘invasion of their land’ (Van Schendel, 1992, p. 118). By 1971, the resistance was an explicit call for recognition of their cultural distinction in opposition to Bengalis and the right to self-determination. It was completely denied by the state, which framed it as secessionist and a severe threat to national integrity. Consequently, a low intensity war broke out in the area in 1976 between the Bangladesh army and the resistance’s political-military wing (namely, śānti bāhinī or peace army). The Bengalis of the plains who were encouraged to emigrate to the Hills were expected to show their loyalty to the state and act against the interests of the local minorities in general and the resistance in particular.

In the period that followed from 1980 to 1985 nearly 400,000 landless Bengali peasants joined the scheme to migrate into the Hills (Adnan, 2004, p. 49). These Bengalis immediately altered the demographic situation of the Hills by drastically outnumbering the minority locals from nearly 81% (1974 estimation) to 51% (1991 estimation) of the total population (Adnan, 2004, p. 57). In addition, many of the men amongst them had, together with the soldiers of the armed forces, raped and massacred minorities during the war that continued until 1997 (The Chittagong Hill Tracts Commission, 1991, 1994, 1997). The war came to an end through the signing of an accord by both the Bangladesh Government and the PCJSS⁴ in 1997 and raised high hopes for the inclusion of the minorities. In reality, however, the exclusion and marginalisation of minorities still continues. The accord has been evaluated as a failed one – ‘largely because of its “top-down” nature and inadequate implementation by the central government’ (Panday & Jamil, 2009, p. 1054). In addition, the post-war situation has accelerated the in-migration of the Bengalis even without state sponsorship. According to Panday and Jamil (2009, p. 1058), the Bengalis now constitute 65% population of the Hills.⁵

In this paper we aim to analyse and explain the interrelationship between patterns of mobility and immobility and the dynamics that are closely interlinked with mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion amongst and between groups and power structures that involve a broad variety of actors (cf. Bräuchler & Ménard, 2017). For this purpose, we will take into account the complex histories and experiences of state-sponsored Bengali immigrants in the Hills. We depart from the labelling of them as mere intruders and consider it as highly problematic. Such a premise frames these Bengalis as one homogenous entity and, furthermore, poses them and the local minorities as two antagonistic categories with dissimilar and opposing interests. This in turn leads to a further articulation of ethnic identities. We refer instead to Li's ‘surplus population’ (2010, p. 69) as an analytical tool to understand the dynamic between and amongst the Bengali immigrants and the Hill minorities. We propose that dispossession is detached from any prospect of labour absorption in which space and place (or their resources) are useful, but not the people who reside there. The case of the Hills shows that (dis)placement is an essential component of the political order that the state imposes on its margins to endure specific political and economic relations (Ahmed, 2012). States may indeed use population relocation schemes at the ‘margins’ with an attempt to homogenise spatial authority and counter local resistance (cf. Elmhirst, 1999). They may also initiate processes of colonisation at ‘frontiers’ through agricultural expansion as a persistent product of the national discourses of security and sovereignty (cf. Eilenberg, 2014). However, our attention is not focused on the narratives of dislocated, displaced and mobile suffering subjects, but on their attempts at repossessing values, both material and immaterial, in accordance with their experience of dispossession (cf. Salemink & Rasmussen, 2016). Here, we want to emphasise an approach that takes into account that the landless Bengali peasants who joined in the population relocation state scheme had individual as well as collective agendas.

Our ethnographic research⁶ in the Hills shows that most of the state-sponsored Bengali immigrants had already been marginalised by the shifting state regimes of im/mobility (cf. Glick Schiller & Salazar, 2013). More than half of our informants shared their life histories of mobility as a livelihood strategy. In order to cultivate lands they themselves, their parents or their grandparents had travelled from scarcity-prone deltaic plain of Bengal to adjacent hilly areas, which in their view were sparsely populated with ‘primitive’ (jaṃli) people. With the formation of new national borders in 1947 in the Indian subcontinent by which the delta was divided between India and East Pakistan (former name of Bangladesh), this livelihood strategy of Bengali peasants was restrained. Furthermore, many were pushed out violently from those areas that now belong to India. Several of our informants told us that they ended up in the Hills particularly as a result of the impossibility to cross (new) national state borders to access land resources. Thus, the population relocation programme which offered entrance to new agricultural land was seen as a vehicle for gaining upward social mobility. However, in reality the state-sponsored Bengali immigrants in the Hills had to experience new forms of exclusion and immobilisation. Our ethnographic long-term perspective on experiences of physical and social mobility of the Bengali immigrants reveals the urgency and necessity of scrutinising the meaning of movement and mobility in relation to their simultaneous experiences and perceptions about immobility and exclusion. Our data reject binary thinking which counterpoises mobility and immobility as two antagonistic concepts (Bräuchler & Ménard, 2017; Bräuchler, 2017; Sakti, 2017; Borch, 2017; Menard, 2017; Bedert, 2017). We argue that mobility and immobility are intrinsically related and their relationship is asymmetrical.

Inter and relative relations between mobility and immobility

Recent studies on mobility (e.g. Grieco & Urry, 2011; Sheller & Urry, 2006) are highly celebrated in focusing attention on movement and flows and argue against normativity of fixity and sedentarism. According to Glick Schiller and Salazar (2013), however, these ‘mobility studies’ are severely inconsistent. The studies suggest a ‘methodological nationalism’ (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2003) – an ideological orientation that is built on binaries of differences that positions mobility and immobility in dichotomy – and reproduce the exact normativity that they aim to challenge (cf. Franquesa, 2011; Glick Schiller & Salazar, 2013). That is to say, by producing either agentless or frictionless narratives of mobility, they undoubtedly approve mobility as novel and transgressive – even glamorous, and immobility as normal and natural. Consequently, they fail to analyse the dialectic relationships between mobility and immobility.

The ‘regimes of mobility’ framework, on the contrary, theorises the society ‘as globally but unequally relational’ (Glick Schiller & Salazar, 2013, p. 185). It argues that ‘there are several different intersecting regimes of mobility that normalise the movements of some travellers while criminalising and entrapping the ventures of others’ (p. 189). It advocates a moving beyond ‘the ready equation of mobility with freedom by examining not only movement as connection but also as an aspect of new confinements and modes of exploitation’ (p. 190).

Many researchers have adopted this conceptual move away from the widespread mobility/immobility dichotomy. For example, Hackl, Schwarz, Gutekunst, and Leoncini (2016) argue that ‘mobility is always bounded, regulated, mediated and intrinsically connected to forms of immobility and unequal power relations’ (p. 20). Scholars have also depicted the interconnection between imagined (global) future possibility and personal (re)evaluations of socio-cultural, political and economic transformations ‘back home’ not only in actual movement and migration but also in the aspiration of migration to faraway places (Bal, 2014; Bal & Willems, 2014). Taking our cue from this scholarship, we show that the intra-state physical movement of Bengali peasants, both state-sponsored and voluntary, was bounded and localised.

This issue’s focus is on intra-state im/mobility, but we go a step further to emphasise that the actual state border and people’s im/possibility to cross it are important aspects in understanding im/mobility (see also Sakti, 2017; cf. Cunningham & Heyman, 2004). Here we understand borders, in line with Van Houtum and Naerssen (2002) as ‘the exclusionary consequences of the securing and governing of the “own” economic welfare and identity’ (p. 125). In other words, the ‘processes (of bordering, ordering and othering) are intrinsically territorial and are always guided by normatively debatable decision-making processes’ (p. 134).

Below we will present our data and analysis in three sections. First, we will describe the formation of state in the Hills to demonstrate how, over the long period of time, the ideas around who belongs to the state and who had access to its resources re/configured the im/mobility of Hills’ peoples. Second, we will describe how the same state formation in the plains had an impact on the im/mobility of Bengali peasants, particularly on the recruits of the population relocation programme. Third, we will describe how the state-sponsored Bengali immigrants attempted to construct their belonging in the Hills, but simultaneously went through exclusion by the national and local power structures.

The Chittagong Hills as mobility configuration

The main argument of this section is that the marginal position accorded to the indigenous peoples of the Hills in relation to the majority Bengali Muslims is the consequence of the dynamics of recent state formation (cf. Scott, 2009). Historical evidence (e.g. Van Schendel, 1992; Mey, 1984) clearly shows that before the British colonial annexation, although the Chittagong Hills was linked to the dynamic and historical events of the adjacent Chittagong plain and sea port (Van Schendel, 2015 for details on Chittagong), it was neither dependent on nor obedient to any particular ruler. On the contrary, the indigenous communities were loosely organised under self-governing small units without a highly formalised political system. They were also feared by the plain dwellers for their raids on the plain to capture slaves and for their military skills.

An official interaction between the Bengal plain and the Chittagong Hills was established only during the Mughal period (1666–1757). The byapāris (traders) from the plain were permitted by the Mughals to organise trade of cotton with the jumias (swidden cultivators). Through this interaction the byapāris rose as state agents (as they, in their capacity as traders, paid taxes to the Mughal King), while a few jumias’ role as contractors grew. Still, this formal contact did not mean the establishment of an order in the Hills.

Since 1757, the British colonial order began to progress in Bengal delta and resulted in a transformation, even in the Hills. During this period, while aiming to rule the Hills apparently three issues were under consideration: (1) separating the Chittagong Hills from the Lushai Hills, (2) taking full control of the maritime trade route in the Indian Ocean and expanding it towards China and (3) modifying the Chittagong port into an export centre. Consequently, sets of rules and laws (i.e. ACT XII in 1860 and CHT Regulation 1900) were introduced that officially disconnected the Hills from the plain and offered a guideline for an exclusive regional administrative system for the Hills.⁷

These rules entirely neglected the local custom of ancestral land ownership and traditional agricultural practices in the Hills. All the forests in the Hills were declared as government forests (in 1871), segregated as princely property and plough cultivation was introduced and encouraged (in 1864). As a result, most of the indigenous people’s access to land was restricted and at least one-third of land resources in the Hills was turned into sedentary agriculture. The organisation of the indigenous peoples was only allowed under their chiefs and in a fixed territory. While the chiefs had the power to collect revenue for the British Empire and maintain internal order, state agents, like superintendents and deputy or assistant commissioners were posted in the Hills with full legal and judicial authority.

The restoration of full control and order of the state in the Hills was also linked to military expeditions by the British in Lushai and Chin Hills (in 1890). The implementation of the Pacification of Burma (in 1885) also had a great impact on this restoration. This led to the final reduction of incoming (and outgoing) flow of the Hills’ peoples from (and to) Burma/Myanmar.

Besides the restriction of the physical movement of indigenous peoples, the introduction of state and border also hampered the diverse cultural flows in the region and ensured the emergence of Bengali supremacy. Paradoxically, the subsequent ‘Bengalisation’ by which the indigenous peoples in the Hills were completely marginalised, was of some concern to the colonial ruler. They gradually approached the latter as ‘poor and ignorant savages’ (as compared to the ‘crafty’ Bengalis) and assumed the administrator’s position as sole protector of ‘tribal rights’ (Van Schendel, 1992, pp. 110–111). Consequently, all Bengali migration into the Hills was restricted.⁸ The distinctive administrative and taxation status of the Hills was furthered (with the Government of India Act of 1935) when it was designated as a ‘totally excluded’ area.

In practice, this meant that the regulations curbed the free movement of Bengalis as well as the accumulation of wealth from merchandise and profits from money lending of the Bengali entrepreneurs in the Hills. This also meant that ‘only certain economic and ecological niches were open to the hill people’ (Van Schendel, 1992, p. 115). State control over the resources was not restricted. The British also hoped to impede the spread of nationalist propaganda that developed against the regime from the plain to the Hills. The act of declaring the area as ‘totally excluded’ had a reactionary effect as it raised hopes amongst the chiefs to gradually establish themselves as local princes and to transform the Hills into a semi-independent Native State (or even three such states). Amongst the ordinary indigenous peoples, it had the effect of obstructing the interference and settlement of Bengalis for once and for all (cf. Levene, 1999, p. 349; Mey, 1984, p. 23).

After the fall of the British (in 1947), the successive states (i.e. Pakistan and Bangladesh) approached this excluded region as a full-fledged part of the newly established regimes. These regimes secured the access to and the appropriation of land and other natural resources in the Hills in line with colonial regulations. They went a step further and, instead of collecting income from the products of indigenous peoples’ labour (for instance, land tax and revenues from cotton and forest produce), the new regimes increasingly focused on higher productivity. However, this has had a massive and devastating impact on economy, environment and population in the Hills.⁹ The indigenous peoples of the Hills were never compensated financially or with other land and neither were they ever consulted about these so-called development projects. On the contrary, the ban-on in-migration of Bengalis had been withdrawn (in 1962) which fostered the crisis and the competition to access the resources in the Hills. This exclusion of indigenous peoples in the Hills intensified particularly through the years of army rule by the Bangladesh state (1976–1989). Arens (1997) refers to the fact that foreign interference, in the form of development aid to Bangladesh has, both directly and indirectly, not only added to continuing militarisation of the Hills and increased human rights violations, but has also led to a systematic destruction of the mode of production, way of life and culture of the Hill’s indigenous peoples.

Ethnicity in the Chittagong Hills

Exclusion and marginalisation of minorities has been widespread in Bangladesh. Since its emergence in 1971, the power holders in Bangladesh have advocated ethnicity (Bangaliness) and religion (Islam) as the most vital factor of their national identity. Consequently, there is not much space for the non-Bengali, non-Muslim inhabitants of Bangladesh (Bal, 2007; Van Schendel, 2001a). This exclusion of the minorities from the national imagination is not accidental or based on sheer ignorance about them. Rather, it is a consequence of a problematic idea that was prevalent even before the emergence of Bangladesh in 1971 and split of Bengal delta into East and West (currently part of India) in 1947. By and large Bengal is perceived as a culture zone that is dominated by a single language (Bangla), sole culture and shared history (Van Schendel & Bal, 2002). The recent history of Chittagong Hills in Bangladesh highlights this severe case of exclusion of minorities.

Nevertheless, the situation of the minorities in the Hills is distinct in the sense that they had been targeted by the Bangladesh state for ‘genocide’ (Mey, 1984). Levene (1999, p. 343) argues that this is not simply on the grounds of their ethnic differences, but also because ‘they (the locals) traditionally inhabit and claim land rights in the CHT which amounts to 10% of Bangladesh’s territory and whose assets the state specifically wishes to realise and consolidate in the interest of its nation- and state-building’. The Bengali population relocation scheme, according to Van Schendel (1992, p. 117), was the ‘final blow’ in the marginalisation process. He argues that the emergence of Jumma identity in opposition to Bengalis ‘was a bid or ethnic innovation, to cope with the political and economic consequences of loss of power, and growing expendability to the state, and cultural marginalisation’ (Van Schendel, 1992, p. 126; cf. Eilenberg, 2011).

Since the late 1990s, there have been important shifts in the politics of exclusion and resistance in the Hills. Such shifts could be seen, for example, through development projects by the non-governmental organisations that claim to be based on neutrality in the post-conflict Hills and are ‘directly involved in the processes of demarcation among ethnic groups’ (Gerharz, 2002, p. 34). As a consequence of the focus on the world’s indigenous peoples by the United Nations in 1993, discourses on the rights and claims of ādibāsis ¹⁰ have also penetrated Bangladesh. Bal (2010), for an example, has observed that the Garos (a minority community living mostly in the northern-east of Bangladesh) have decisively incorporated the discourse to underscore their belonging to the country and to indicate the specific problems and challenges that they as an indigenous community are still facing as well as what they share in common with other indigenous communities at home and abroad. A social and political process towards constitutional recognition of Bangladeshi ethnic minorities as indigenous peoples did get gradual recognition, but was rejected by an amendment in 2011. This period reflects the limited scope for transnational activism and reveals that the potential for success is highly dependent on context (Gerharz, 2014a). The contemporary indigenous movement in Bangladesh shows that the minorities are building multi-ethnic, strategically oriented alliances which are open to evolve situatively and which at the same time are contributing to the maintaining of the ethnical demarcation (Gerharz, 2014b).

Bengali peasants’ mobility as livelihood strategy

While the determined position of agriculture and the enhancement of polarisation amongst the peasants were direct consequences of the unequal and exploitative economic relations between the British colonisers and the colonised rural Bengal economy (Jahangir, 1997, p. 19), mobility has long been a livelihood strategy for the landless peasantry of East Bengal. During the nineteenth century, the increase in the agrarian export from East Bengal took place largely by means of a steady expansion of cultivated area rather than by the improvement of technology or higher productivity. Local landlords appropriated the surplus for their own benefit instead of investing in agricultural production (Van Schendel, 2009, p. 67). By the end of the nineteenth century, this extension of agricultural land in the Bengal delta had reached its natural limits and the local peasantry was fast running out of land. Landless peasants, in particular from densely populated regions such as Mymensingh and Rangpur, began travelling beyond the delta into Arakan, Assam and Tripura (Van Schendel, 2009, pp. 68–69; Weiner, 1988, pp. 97–98). The major influx in these regions however began after 1900 and continued even after the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, when East Bengal became part of Pakistan and an international border was imposed between East Bengal, northeast India and Burma (Weiner, 1988, pp. 97–98).

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century peasant strategies of mobility were attuned to the administrative purposes of the colonial regime and local administration. Assam, for example, had been imagined as a fairly empty area, with vast virgin tracts and forest lands to be cleared in the nineteenth century. Weiner shows how different British and local administrators celebrated the Bengali Muslim settlers, for bringing wealth, industry and general prosperity (1988, p. 95). Others, however, feared the local discontent and ethnic clashes, which resulted from the mass influx of these Bengali Muslims. The economic imbalances between East Bengal and Assam, in terms of opportunities to cultivate land remained so great through the 1950s that even the existence of an international border, the imposition of various legal restrictions and the presence of an Assamese government failed to completely stem the flow of Bengali Muslims into Assam. These large-scale peasant migrations had a serious impact on the local use of land and on the local population.

Between 1930 and 1970, anti-colonial politics, Britain’s exit from the Indian subcontinent and initial postcolonial border dynamics transformed the delta plain and the hills of Bengal and Assam province into state-owned military zones. Both state agents of East Pakistan and India as well as the local peasantry, battled over rice fields and raided each other’s harvest store houses to make claims on each other’s territories (Sur, 2016, p. 805). Communal (inter-religious) intimidation and violence took place to promote ‘citizenship-by-religious-community’ and to drive out Muslims from India and Hindus from Pakistan (Van Schendel, 2001b, p. 412). While interviewing our informants about from where and under what conditions they had moved into the Hills, we gradually began to realise that for many of our informants the above mentioned historical events had been a real-life experience.

Available literature on the relocated Bengali peasants in the Hills, on the contrary, have approached them quite simplistically. In pro-Bengali nationalist discourse their migration is first and foremost understood as their citizenship entitlement. Since the Hills are considered as much part of the nation-state as other regions, all Bangladeshis should have the right to settle there (see for an example, Sayeed, 2015). The Bengali hegemonic standpoint also portrays Bengalis as ‘victims’ of a tribal conspiracy with regional and international conspiracies to break the integration of the state and nation (Ahmed, 2010). In contrast, often human rights organisations frame these same Bengalis as perpetrators involved in land-grabbing while receiving protection from a pro-Bengali, pro-Muslim military force (Amnesty International, 2013; Hill Watch Human Rights Forum, 2013; International Working Group for Indigenous Affairs, 2012).

Adnan and Dastidar (2011) provide a comparatively detailed account of the land-grabbing mechanisms that are at play in the Hills. They categorise all the land-grabbing Bengalis in three and particularly label the state-sponsored Bengali immigrants as the ‘political migrants’. The other two categories are: ‘non-resident influential Bengali elites’ and ‘commercial land grabbers and dealers’. They find that the ‘political migrants’ have been receiving direct benefits of the state’s mechanisms for land-grabbing and particularly from the state’s ‘security forces’. This was prevalent not only during the war but also in the course of the present ceasefire through the continuing practices of nepotism, cronyism and favouritism to settle this group in the Hills. Adnan and Dastidar identify few ‘self-propelled’ Bengali immigrants in this group and refer to them as ‘local Bengalis’ who entered the Hills from the nearby coastal plains. These Bengalis had replaced the state-sponsored Bengali migrants who left the Hills because of the terror and violence of the war. In this replacement process state departments, such as the district administration and land administration, were again manipulated. This means that the documents of land possession that the ‘political migrants’ now hold are largely flawed. In addition, these documents are circulating from one Bengali’s possession to another, beyond the state’s legal mechanism. Issuing documents for one piece of land to multiple persons has been observed as well. It was also found that these Bengalis particularly affiliate with the ruling political party, make gangs and terrorise the local minorities in order to force them to flee from their lands so that any Bengali can grab them.

Our research reveals a more complex and ambivalent reality. Some informants took us back all the way to the 1940s, others to the 1960s in order to explain mobility as their livelihood strategy. The first set of stories resonated with recorded accounts of the ‘paddy soldiers’ along India’s north-eastern borders with East Pakistan who were identified as illegal migrants and traitors by both nation states (Sur, 2016, p. 805). Rahman and Van Schendel (2003) show that during the prolonged India–Pakistan state divorce there were diversities in social, linguistic, religious and locational belongings of ‘partition refugees’ as well as in their experiences of violence, accounts of benefit and loss, and reasons to move. The following story by Badshah Mia resonates with those of “partition migrants” whom Rahman and Van Schendel (2003) categorise as ‘refugees from the interior’ (p. 559). In the following interview fragment, both the severity of exclusion and expulsion of these Bengali Muslim peasants from India and religious and ethnic minorities (Hindus and non-Bengalis) from East Pakistan stand out. The excerpt also depicts how the powerful people of Pakistan made use of these expelled people from India in order to occupy the land property of the minorities of Pakistan. Furthermore, it shows that after a while even the Bangladeshi state abandoned these expelled people and forced them to move on without state care.

So we got down [in East Pakistan] and they [the Pakistani army] served us food …  They (agents of both India and Pakistan states) had contacts … the government made camps in big jute warehouses. In every camp some 15 to 20 or even 30 families were living. For three months, the government took care of us. Then we were given a card and we were labelled as refugees. We were provided with food rations  …  then some of us were taken to Noakhali, some to Comilla, some to Sylhet, Barisal. We were taken to Noakhali  … and shown the house of a Hindu … The chairman (village level government agent) took us there, and said, ‘you will live here’. We found three buildings. One had a roof, while the other two did not have any. The building with the roof had five rooms, and five families started living there. For the building without roof, we made a shed with coconut leaves. We stayed there for eight to ten years, but the government did not take care of us (as it had promised). Because of their negligence we had to find a new way to survive, which was to move to the Chittagong Hills …  In India we had been living in hills and jungle, with Tipperas, Chakmas and Maghs and here also we are living with the same Tripuras, Chakmas and Maghs … 

The forceful expulsion in 1961 did not end the migration of Bengalis into Northeast India. Many of our informants told us that Bengalis from nearby lowlands such as Chittagong, Comilla and Noakhali continued to move to Tripura and Assam until 1971. Shanat Kumar, a Bengali Hindu, explained how migration to India, particularly to the nearest ‘jungle places’ was the only survival strategy to combat their decaying peasantry. The India–Pakistan state border, officially established in 1947, did not stop these movements. Kumar’s story shows that it was only after the ‘liberation’ of Bangladesh that a strong sense of belonging to Bangladesh developed amongst young mobile Bengalis (cf. Bal, 2007, p. 188). Many of our respondents told us that after the ‘liberation’ of Bangladesh in 1971, the idea of crossing the international border for the purpose of agriculture became unpopular.

My father was a very careless person. As the only son, he had a lot of land to sell. I observed all this as a child. He was more interested in enjoying musical shows and theatre plays, (and) not used to earn, but only to sell his assets for his own pleasure … Eventually he lost everything. My father left for India [to stay with his cousin brother], leaving my three siblings with our mother. [After a few months] I got some money by selling my mother’s ornaments, and went to India to find my father, which I fortunately did. He was working for a farmer …  there was a river …  he was working in a sugarcane farm to make molasses … The name of the place was Monubazar in Tripura district …  I started working with my father and paid 25 taka to purchase a land’s de facto rights … There I built a house. Then the war of 1971 broke out …  During the war, all my maternal cousins, uncles, aunties took shelter in Tripura (in my house) …  After independence, I decided to return to the land where I was born, but my father refused. Then my auntie convinced him, and we returned and built another house in Ramgar. (in the Chittagong Hills)

Families like Kumar’s in the East Bengal delta had histories characterised by poverty, and for many of them physical movement to neighbouring countries had been a livelihood strategy [whether or not at the expense of minorities]. The establishment of national borders in this previously borderless region did not only render this kind of mobility impossible, but also unpopular. National borders soon represented notions of citizenship and created new ‘borders in the mind’ (cf. Sinha-Kerkhoff & Bal, 2007). Yet moving towards minority inhabited places within the newly established nation states, in this case the Hills, remained trendy. In the following section we will demonstrate that the meaning of im/mobility of Bengali landless peasants does not only refer to the im/possibility of crossing border, but also of social im/mobility.

Scarcity and joining the population relocation state-scheme

Member, a daily labourer from Mymensingh town in the north-eastern part of Bangladesh, and his relatives and neighbours had been recruited for the scheme and went to the Hills but returned to their ‘home’ shortly after their recruitment. The unusual nick-name ‘Member’ was given to him during his childhood because he looked well-fed and chubby like a member – the most powerful leader at the village level. In real life however, neither Member, nor any of his relatives or neighbours, were close to rich and powerful Bangladeshi politicians. Instead, they had lived hand to mouth in an urban slum for homeless, floating and refugee people. Their slum was situated behind the gutters of the district town bus terminal, beside the river Brahmaputra. It was established in the year 2000 and officially has 400 single-room houses for poor Muktijoddha (freedom fighters of 1971 war) and Bastuhara (homeless and refugee) families. It provides facilities such as 1 tube well, 1 toilet and 1 bathroom for every 10 households. The houses are lined up in neat rows, separated by straight concrete pathways. In addition to the official single-room houses there are some 500 privately built (illegal) shacks. These are built on the slope of the river bank, which usually gets submerged during the monsoons. Our friend Member lives in one of these marginal huts. He seems to belong to the poorest of the poor, without even the slightest connection to the people in power who can assist him in getting a ‘proper house’ in this state made slum. In the slum we encountered several people who had gone to the Hills through the population relocation scheme. Many of them could not continue living there because of illness and had to return. We also met people who have relatives and/or in-laws who are still living in the Hills. There were also some people who frequently travel to the Hills for temporary sources of income. Jonab Ali Munshi, the eldest paternal uncle of Member, informed us that many people from his neighbourhood were actually displaced from Assam¹¹ (during the 1960s), which is why the locality is also known Assam slum. Jonab described how hopeless the situation had always been for these mobile people before (even after) they registered their names in the programme:

[After our deportation from India in the 1960s, we had been located in Garo areas, removed from there after one year, relocated on forest land, but again removed (legally) from there]. We returned to Mymensingh town and started to live in front of the bungalow of the district commissioner. After living there for a couple of years we moved to the newly emerging dry lands besides the Brahmaputra River, which was just in front of the bungalow. The land was full of Kans grasses, snakes and leeches, and used to go under water every monsoon. But we continued living there for eleven years until the land had totally submerged and then we were rehabilitated in this slum.

The above account illustrates how the dispossession of refugees (who had already been expelled from India during the 1960s) was detached from any prospect of labour absorption in Bangladesh. It also depicts the extreme impoverished and hopeless background of the people who registered for the population relocation scheme. Besides refugees, other, ordinary poor Bengalis also joined the programme. When we asked about the reasons for joining the programme we were told stories about their whole life to explain. In the stories, again, their state of poverty and destitution was projecting.

Exclusion of state-sponsored Bengali immigrants in the Hills

In this section we will analyse the inclusion and exclusion mechanism of state-sponsored immigrants in the Hills. Here we want to emphasise that while the solidification of self-ascribed minority identities like Jumma and/or indigenous peoples has been excluding the Bengalis, the state-sponsored Bengali immigrants in the Hills have encountered exclusion particularly by local middle-class Bengalis.

The dominant idea regarding the Bengali in migration in the Chittagong Hills is that the Bengali landless peasants had entered the Hills only via the state scheme. Our research, however, demonstrates that in reality there were diverse means and reasons. For example, already during the 1970s many landless Bengali peasants had actually migrated to the Hills on their own account. After the implementation of the population relocation programme, these comparatively early comer Bengali peasants witnessed that more Bengalis had been entering the Hills with a similar kind of socio-economic background, active in an equivalent labour market, and living under similar conditions in identical neighbourhoods. Our respondents also revealed that the programme had opened new opportunities for the Bengalis who were already living there. Although access to these opportunities was different for different classes of Bengalis. Here, we use class to refer to the form of different economic categories which fit the local situation (cf. Van Schendel, 1982, p. 37).

Amongst all the Bengali immigrants there were few who had entered the Hills during the colonial period. Their motivation to migrate was economic as owners of small-scale businesses, trades and as supporters of the Hill’s new plough cultivators (cf. Sopher, 1964; Van Schendel, 1992). Others had a political impetus in that they were fleeing the conflict and violence of the plains. Our respondents addressed these early Bengali immigrants as original (ādi) Bengalis. They formed an ‘upper class’ and were considered as the local leaders with whom the army consulted for the implementation of the programme. Some of them even got leading roles in food ration distribution.

The Bengalis with slightly lower economic background were employed in infrastructural development projects. Amongst them some were employed as labourers or labour supervisors. Others were employed as suppliers of stone or other raw materials to the newly implemented infrastructural projects. Some people did not get work directly, but were just happy with the arrival of so many poor Bengalis like them.

Nevertheless, the state-sponsored Bengali immigrants were derogatively addressed as ‘settlers’ and were excluded from the Hills by the Bengalis who were differentiated as ‘sober’ (vadra). An interview by a prominent Bengali who is a descendant of one ādi Bengali family (amongst five) in Khagrachari and a journalist by profession expresses that exclusion. In his interview, Nurunnabi (his pseudo name) was proud of his family for bringing modernity to the Hills (such as, automobiles and high yielding seeds), but ashamed of Bengali ‘settlers’ for poisoning the previous (imagined) harmonious relation between the Bengalis and the Hill people. He stressed the highest degree of nativeness of ādi Bengalis in the Hills (like the indigenous peoples) by emphasising the idea ‘this is our birth place’. Simultaneously, he referred to Satkania (a nearby sub-district of the Hills) as his ādi home from where his ancestors had migrated to the Hills. While these claims propose that, ‘identity is always mobile and processual, partly self-construction, partly categorisation by others, partly a condition, a status, a label, a weapon, a shield, a fund of memories, et cetera’ (Malkki, 1992, p. 37), and ‘to plot only “places of birth” and degrees of nativeness is to blind oneself to the multiplicity of attachments that people form to places through living in, remembering, and imagining them’ (p. 38). The settlers were not included in this constructed nativeness. On the contrary, Nurunnabi stressed that the government should withdraw the ‘settlers’ from the Hills to restore ‘peace’.

The unsettled lives of ‘settlers’ in the Hills

We have already described how poor people recruited themselves for the settlement programme. Now, we will describe the stories of the programme participants about leaving the scheme after experiencing initial hardship. From the several stories that we collected during our field work, we learned that they all had shared very similar experiences. After being scrutinised by the lowest level of local government representatives, the people were registered as project participants and transported to a temporary camp in Chittagong under the supervision of the Bangladesh Army. In Chittagong, they were divided into teams constituted of 10–12 families. They were supervised by one team leader, who was made responsible to report to an army commander who was in-charge of the zone where they would be settled. Since the plot allotment was promised against per household, many marriages amongst young boys and girls were arranged in Chittagong camp. These new couples were considered as one unit and given necessary documents.

Then the ‘settlers’ were taken to the Hills. First, they were placed in camps (shibir), decorated with huge banners written welcome (sbāgatama) on them. In the welcome camps they waited for a couple of days before being transported to their promised rehabilitation areas. The following excerpt describes a heart-breaking scene of one welcome camp demonstrating how state forces were prepared to manage the inevitable disaster of the large scale incoming population in the Hills and how tragically many lives were lost. However, when we asked directly our respondents did not blame the state or the government for their loss, but blamed their own misfortune. They said that, they were given a chance by the government to improve their life but it did not work for them.

We reached a place named Ultachari. Straw-made houses were waiting for us. There were also piles of soap and cloths to bury dead bodies and hospitals and doctors. Everything was ready for us. The soldiers were standing in two rows. There were also few local people to see us …  Then we were ordered to clean the area and to build our houses. We were also told that we would be given land later. But soon after we began clearing the jungle, people started to die. It was mainly because of malaria and dysentery. Five, six persons died in every family … If three thousand had been taken to the camp, at least one thousand died, one thousand ran away, and only one thousand stayed to see what would happen in the end … There was no food scarcity … 

The settlers who survived the welcome camp were transported to different rural parts of the Hills. They were provided with 18 months of food ration, an amount of cash and seeds to cultivate, but could not survive in their rehabilitation plots for more than two years because of the local resistance in the form of armed attacks. These attacks started in 1986 and continued till 1988 when the immigrants were withdrawn from their rehabilitation plots and relocated in so-called cluster villages. One of our respondents, who was also a team leader of settlers told us that the relocation felt as imprisonment, as they were not allowed to engage in any work but jungle clearing for army camps. Some women took up domestic work in officer’s households or worked at grinding spices in army kitchens or cleaned camp hospitals. Many ‘settlers’ started to withdraw from the programme particularly during this period, and moved towards the urban places of the hills to find jobs in the informal labour market. In Khagrachari town, we observed several informal poor neighbourhoods populated with poor Bengalis.

Conclusion

In this paper our aim was to understand the interrelation between mobility and immobility and the dynamics of the mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion. We have described our ethnographic research experience with state-sponsored Bengali immigrants who were taken to the Hills, which were originally populated by non-Bengali and non-Muslim minorities of Bangladesh. Media and civil society generally frame the confrontations between these immigrants and the locals as ethnic clashes, by categorising the indigenous peoples and the Bengali immigrants as opponents. The Bengali immigrants are generally identified as the aggressors through this framing. We, on the other hand, approach the Bengali immigrants in the Hills as an extremely heterogeneous group. Our research takes their histories of marginality and mobility into account. We argue that the Bengali immigrants in the Hills are often wrongly framed either as unwelcome intruders or as passive participants in a colonisation process spurred on by the Bangladeshi state.

We have seen that Bengali migration into the Hills was to some extent spontaneous because of the large number of impoverished people who were looking for new places for their survival. The establishment of an international border in 1971 resulted in the marginalisation of this group of people within Bangladesh itself. In addition, because of a Bangladeshi nationalist view by which the Hills were perceived as an empty place, the state came up with a scheme to transport a landless poor peasant population there. This move could also be interpreted as the burden of a new state in an attempt towards achieving modernity. We have found that these marginal peasants who formerly travelled beyond state borders in search for cultivable lands and other livelihood resources actually became immobile because of different regimes of border formation in this previously borderless region. Their desperate feelings of entrapment by the international state borders, along with the actual scarcity they faced, lured many of these marginal peasants to participate in the state scheme and to migrate into this area and to contribute towards the elimination of the area’s original inhabitants.

To conclude, we emphasise that the framing of Bengalis and of local minorities as two antagonistic categories with opposing interests is leading to a further articulation of ethnic identities and dissimilar interests, feeding on-going discontent and resulting in new conflicts.

Acknowledgments

The first version of this paper was presented at the bi-annual PACSA (Peace and Conflicts Studies in Anthropology) conference in Frankfurt, in 2-4 September 2015. We would like to thank the conference participants for their precious reflections on our paper. We would also like to thank Birgit Bräuchler, Nandini Bedi and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions and comments for finalizing the draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In this paper, the Chittagong Hills will be referred to as the Hills.

2. The current population of the Hills is estimated to be 160 million, amounting to 1200 people per square kilometre. The Hills, which covers one-tenth of the country is populated by 1.1% of the total population (1,598,231 people) (CHT Development Board; link http://www.chtdb.gov.bd/; Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, 2011).

3. Twelve different cultural and linguistic groups are commonly distinguished in the Hills. They are: Chakma, Marma, Tripura, Tonchengya, Sak, Khyang, Bawm, Pangkhua, Mru, Mrung/Riang, Khumi and Lushai (Van Schendel, 1992). Locally they had been practicing Jum (also spelled as Jhum), a special form of hillside agriculture (commonly known as shifting or swidden cultivation). Jum is also practised widely by the indigenous peoples in the Northeast India and beyond. Since the 1960s, however, the practicality and relative economic significance of Jum had declined in the Chittagong Hills (Tripura, 2013).

4. PCJSS refers to Pārbatya Caṭṭagrām Janasaṃhati Samiti (literally: United People’s Party of the Chittagong Hills) which was the leading political party of the resistance.

5. At the time of India-Pakistan partition in 1947 when the Chittagong Hills finally amalgamated with Pakistan state the indigenous peoples were almost 97.5% of the total population, while the Bengalis were only 2.5%. In the aftermath of the partition the Bengalis started to migrate to the Hills in large numbers. They became 10% of the total population of the Hills by 1951, 35% by 1981 and 45% by 1991 (Van Schendel, 1992, p. 95).

6. Between February 2012 and September 2014, Ellen and Nasrin paid two field visits to the Chittagong Hills together. From August 2013 to September 2014, Nasrin conducted field research for one full year in Khagrachari (one amongst three district towns of the Hills) and its surrounding areas. In January 2015, we both visited Mymensingh, another district town of Bangladesh in northeast, and its sub-district Haluaghat, where we conducted several interviews with former recruits of the population relocation programme.

7. The administrative and taxation structure in the Hills was completely dissimilar to Bengal where a collectorate Zamindari (landlord) system was in force for over a century (Van Schendel, 2009).

8. The Bengali migration restriction regulation was that anyone who was not a member of indigenous peoples’ communities, but who wished to enter the Hills, or to reside in it, needed a permit which was subject to so many precondition as to be almost impossible to acquire (Mey, 1984, p. 22).

9. For example, between 1959 and 1963 a hydro-electric power plant was constructed on Karnaphuli river in the Hills. The venture intended to create an infrastructural base for a quick industrial start-up of Bangladesh and supply electricity to Chittagong port city. In reality Kaptai lake of the plant had submerged at least 40% of the most productive agricultural of the Hills and displaced one quarter of the local population (Levene, 1999; Sopher, 1963; Van Schendel, 1992).

10. The Bengali term used for indigenous peoples in Bangladesh.

11. ‘Bengali Muslims who migrated to Assam in 1871 are not “illegal Bangladeshis”’, http://scroll.in/article/664077/bengali-muslims-who-migrated-to-assam-in-1871-are-not-illegal-bangladeshis.