While it isn’t the first time that Hindi-speaking communities have been at the sharp receiving end of indigenous assertion in Karbi Anglong or even Assam, this friction points to the underlying tension between ethnonationalism in the Northeast and the nationalism of the Hindutva ideology.

Who is the outsider?

2007 was a long and dark year for Hindi-speaking migrant workers in Assam. On August 8, heavily armed cadres of the Karbi Longri National Liberation Front (KLNLF), a militant group fighting for Karbi autonomy, barged into Ampahar villages and opened fire at Hindi-speaking migrant workers from Bihar. Eight, including five women, were killed. Three days later, the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) gunned down another fourteen of them in Karbi Anglong. Six more were killed days later. In January of that year, ULFA killed at least 70 Hindi speakers in separate instances across Assam.

The bloodbath came out of a certain strand of radical nativist ideology that was the hallmark of nearly every armed group in the Northeast. The aggression was rooted in their belief that Hindi-speaking migrants — even those who arrived in the Northeast decades ago and were fairly well-integrated into the region’s daily economy — represented New Delhi’s agents and by extension, were legitimate targets.

To deny Hindi-speaking communities the right to co-exist was also a way to assert an exclusivist imagination of indigeneity. The Hindi-speakers in the Northeast, much like the Bengali-speaking communities, were widely considered as the quintessential “outsiders”. In fact, for the ULFA, which viciously targeted Hindi speakers in the 2000s, the so-called “illegal Bangladeshi” or bidexi (foreigner) was less of an enemy than the average Hindi-speaking labourer or trader.

It is critical to understand the political economy of this hatred.

Hindi-speaking communities who migrated to the Northeast (mostly Assam) from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, through the postcolonial period came about to dominate the region’s local trading ecosystems and parts of the lower-tier labour economy. This generated a sense of anxiety and loss of control over resources among non-Hindi groups, which many of the armed outfits were able to successfully weaponise for their own vested ends. Tragically, some of the poorest people who sought nothing more than better economic opportunities in the Northeast ended up becoming the biggest victims of the reign of terror.

A tough balancing act

A key reason why the BJP has managed to win voters in large parts of the multi-ethnic Northeast, especially Assam, in recent years is its ability to deftly use ethnic nationalisms across the region to expand and consolidate its own political agenda. This bespoke strategy is premised on a delicate balancing of indigenous nativism and Hindu nationalism. But, the recent Karbi-Hindi friction in Assam also shows the precarity of this approach.

If the Himanta Biswa Sarma-led BJP government in Assam allows the KAAC-ordered evictions to go ahead, it stands to lose ground among Hindi-speaking constituencies in not just Assam, but elsewhere too. It is perhaps for this reason that the evictions haven’t commenced yet. But, if it permanently stalls the move, the party could end up losing the Karbi seats, which it currently controls through the KAAC.

Interestingly, days after the eviction order, Sarma said that the definition of “Assamese” had changed and that Hindi speakers and tea tribes could now be included in it. This is a reflection of the BJP’s cautious social engineering in the Northeast, which seeks to carve out space for “mainland” communities in the region’s complicated ethnic geography. But, this isn’t a programme of expansion that includes all residents.

The party refuses to accept Bengali Muslim communities, many of whom migrated to Assam from erstwhile East Bengal (later Bangladesh) at the same time as other Hindi-speaking migrants and tea tribe communities, as members of Assamese society or politics.

Ultimately, this is a clash of two sociopolitical imaginations over identity, land and resources — one that frames the Northeast as a ring-fenced territory belonging to a select group of “indigenous” people; and another that sees it as a land of all groups as long as they identify as Hindus. While both are narrow assertions, they will continue to decisively shape the region’s politics and conflict dynamics for the foreseeable future.

Angshuman Choudhury is an Associate Fellow with the Centre for Policy Research and focuses on Northeast India and Myanmar. The views expressed are personal.