Where Are the Women in Bodoland’s Peace Process?

In September 2023, I carried out fieldwork within the Bodoland Territorial Area (BTR), ruled by an autonomous council constituted beneath the Sixth Schedule of the Structure of India, in Assam. This was a part of my present venture on girls and peacebuilding in Northeast India. Given the truism that girls stay on the periphery of formal peace processes, I delved into girls’s casual peace negotiations. I carried out in-depth qualitative interviews with members of the All Bodo Ladies’s Welfare Federation (ABWWF) and All Bodo College students’ Union (ABSU), representatives of the present Bodoland autonomous authorities, villagers of Bhumka village, teachers, and a journalist. 

After the signing of the Bodo Peace Accord 2020, Kokrajhar was declared the “metropolis of peace.” In 2023, Kokrajhar hosted the 132nd Durand Cup, a soccer match in India, sending a message that the BTR is synonymous with peace. For an outsider (in ethnographic phrases) like me, the event within the metropolis since I final traveled there in 2017 for analysis work was a constructive change. The temper, too, was devoid of stress. I vividly keep in mind an incident throughout my final go to in 2017 when a Muslim scholar chief was shot lifeless in broad daylight, sending ripples of tension throughout the area. Some locals instructed me that occasions and the state of affairs have modified for the higher with the signing of the 2020 BTR peace accord.

Many ladies I spoke to, nonetheless, had been skeptical of the accord. They lamented that they had been neither consulted nor included within the negotiations. In response to them, the formal negotiations and the accord – signed between the central authorities, state authorities, ABSU, United Bodo Individuals’s Group, and completely different factions of the armed group Nationwide Democratic Entrance of Bodoland (NDFB) – had been a hush-hush affair. 

The statements of Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC) officers, nonetheless, provided a distinct perspective, highlighting the position of civil society within the talks. In response to the settlement itself: “Negotiations had been held with Bodo organizations for a complete and closing resolution to their calls for whereas holding intact the territorial integrity of the State of Assam.”

I realized throughout my discipline go to {that a} part of the Bodo persons are sad concerning the new accord and worry that peace is not going to be a long-lasting affair. On the one hand, some resistance stays. For instance, Gobinda Basumatary, the chief of 1 faction of the NDFB, which signed the settlement is an government member of the brand new BTR authorities, whereas Ranjan Daimary, the chief of one other faction, is serving a life sentence. The assorted factions of the NDFB have surrendered and signed the peace settlement, however new teams (e.g., the Boro Liberation Military) with renewed calls for of a separate state have emerged. 

Additional, the underlying issues of the completely different communities in Bodoland, similar to Adivasis, Muslims, and Koch-Rajbongshis, are nonetheless unresolved. Additionally, not one of the provisions of the 2020 accord particularly tackle any challenge associated to girls and gender. In response to one interview topic, “The third peace accord of 2020 was solely a method for some elites to return to energy. We’re but to witness the implementation.”

Regardless of their important contributions, the ladies in Bodoland have all the time remained on the periphery of the formal peace course of. Bodo girls’s contributions to the Bodo society formally started in 1986 after the formation of the All Assam Tribal Ladies’s Welfare Federation (AATWWF), headed by Pramila Rani Brahma. Brahma is without doubt one of the two Bodo girls elected to the Assam Legislative Meeting up to now, indicating the abysmally poor participation of Bodo girls in politics. AATWWF encompassed all tribal girls from communities together with the Bodo, Koch, Rajbongshi, Tiwa, Karbi, and others, and labored for the welfare of tribal girls. 

Nevertheless, because the Bodoland motion intensified, Bodo girls’s concentrate on the motion alienated different tribal girls. Subsequently, in 1993, the AATWWF was rechristened because the ABWWF, changing “tribal” with “Bodo.” The members of the group labored relentlessly on social points like alcoholism, witch searching, and polygamy and supplied unwavering assist to the Bodoland motion. 

When interethnic clashes between Bodos and Adivasis, and Bodos and Bengali-speaking Muslims, and fratricidal killings amongst completely different Bodo armed teams intensified, the members of the ABWWF intervened. They negotiated for peace between these teams, as moms. The ABWWF members engaged in on a regular basis negotiation by organizing rallies, protest marches, and gheraos, a kind of protest that entails surrounding a constructing till calls for are met. The ABWWF additionally holds public conferences, publishes magazines in Bodo language with writings on girls’s and social points in Bodoland, and intervenes between police forces and villagers. 

Nevertheless, like many different girls’s organizations in Assam, the ABWWF remained beneath the directives of the ABSU and later political events within the BTC, which restricted the ABWWF’s autonomy and the political participation of the members.

The violence throughout the Bodoland motion prompted unimaginable harm to Bodo society. Ladies had been caught between two highly effective armed patriarchies – the insurgents and the state. Throughout the motion, the state armed forces perpetrated violence on unarmed villagers. They raided villages, detained males, destroyed garments and grains, and raped girls. 

One such incident was the notorious Bhumka gang rape case. In 1988, personnel of the Assam Rifles, a paramilitary power, barged into the houses of villagers in Bhumka, Kokrajhar, and raped 11 girls. Most had been younger ladies; one sufferer was in her 50s. 

With the help of ABSU staff, I used to be capable of join with among the survivors, receiving their consent to talk with them. I visited the houses of 4 of the victims, the place I witnessed their appalling residing situations. A lady within the village acted as a translator as I spoke to the ladies. I realized that the ladies acquired a number of thousand rupees in installments and a certificates honoring them at a public ceremony held by the previous BTC authorities in 2020. The present BTC authorities has promised to supply their relations with jobs and housing. Regardless of these guarantees, the apathy of the state and BTC authorities towards these girls is obvious of their current situation. 

Regardless of being held on a pedestal as heroes of the Bodoland motion, the survivors have confronted stigmatization and silence from the villagers. As has been the case in different conflicts the place sexual violence is weaponized, Bhumka “remembers and negotiates its historical past of rape throughout the conflict by means of the discourse of scorn” towards the surviving girls. 

Sadly, neither the state authorities nor the central authorities supplied any counseling to the survivors. The one comfort that they acquired was within the momentary suspension of the perpetrators. 

Nevertheless, the Bodo neighborhood was dissatisfied with the punishment meted out to the perpetrators. The perpetrators loved the safety of the state whereas the survivors had been susceptible tribal girls on the mercy of the state. Whereas many years have handed because the incident, the injuries are nonetheless contemporary within the minds of the survivors.

The members of the ABWWF had been within the forefront for demanding justice for these girls. 

The ABWWF will not be a registered group. The members are girls with humble backgrounds. Most of them are schoolteachers by occupation and have been related to the ABWWF as volunteers. Throughout the Bodoland motion, many Bodo girls within the villages volunteered for the group. 

Nevertheless, the zeal with which the group labored throughout the Bodoland motion has diminished, among the older members mentioned. It’s “as if the Bodoland motion has culminated with the signing of an accord,” aged girls members lamented. “Can a motion ever die?” 

As girls residing in a conflict-torn society, the ladies of the BTR witnessed the deaths of tons of of younger males, noticed villages burn, skilled the hardships of reduction camps, and reeled beneath poverty. All through, they exercised their company in peacebuilding and social reconstruction regardless of being marginalized by patriarchal forces. 

For these underprivileged girls, peace imply greater than the absence of violence; it means mobilizing ladies and men within the villages to behave in opposition to perpetrators; serving to village girls create technique of financial livelihood by means of weaving, dairy farming, or promoting greens; elevating consciousness about social evils; emphasizing the necessity to educate women and girls; and urging completely different communities in Bodoland to stay in concord. 

Over the previous many years, the Bodo society has witnessed durations of intermittent “damaging peace,” in Johan Galtung’s phrases – that’s, the absence of (private) violence,. Nevertheless, “constructive peace,” that’s, the absence of structural violence particularly for ladies, remains to be a distant actuality.

Worldwide peace resolutions such because the United Nations Safety Council Decision 1325 emphasize girls’s roles in stopping, managing, and resolving conflicts. Its sister resolutions similar to UNSCR 1820, 1888, and 2467 acknowledge sexual violence as a weapon of conflict and spotlight the nationwide accountability of addressing the basis causes of sexual violence. In 2005, the Safety Council urged all U.N. member states to implement UNSCR 1325 by means of nationwide motion plans (NAPs). 

Nevertheless, students have raised considerations concerning the implementation of UNSCR 1325. Many countries, together with India, after greater than twenty years, are but to develop an NAP as a result of India fears the interference of the worldwide neighborhood in its issues of sovereignty.

The native, state, and nationwide governments should perceive that girls on the grassroots degree have been constructing peace for many years. There’s a plethora of information that girls from Northeast India can deliver to the desk. The one want is to acknowledge their contributions, faucet into their data, and supply them the house for decision-making. Peace accords resolve points on the “elite” and diplomatic degree; for peace inside and between communities in villages and cities, girls’s roles are and can all the time be probably the most important.