By PTI
KOLKATA: Every 12 months, motley teams of Chakma tribals collect in varied elements of the nation with placards calling out August 17, 1947 as ‘Black Day’.
Seventy-five years in the past, the Chakmas misplaced the short-lived ‘revolt’ they mounted to make their homeland within the Chittagong Hills part of India and since then, the tribe’s now scattered diasporas lament that loss.
On August 15, 1947, Chakmas, Tripuris and different tribals, principally Buddhist, dwelling within the over 13,000 sq. kilometers of hills and dales in Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) determined to boost the Indian tricolour on the Deputy Commissioner’s Bungalow at Rangamati to indicate their new citizenship.
“My father Sneha Kumar Chakma, who was a member of the All India Excluded Areas Sub-Committee of the Constituent Assembly of India for CHT, engaged with Col GL Hyde, the then deputy commissioner of the district, and after he agreed that the hill tracts were part of India, raised the Indian flag on the morning of August 15, 1947,” mentioned Gautam Chakma, a professor of political science at Tripura University.
However, the jubilation that accompanied that momentous event was short-lived.
On the night of August 17, after the Radcliffe Award, which demarcated the boundary between India and Pakistan, was introduced over the radio, it got here to be identified that Chittagong Hill Tracts had been given to the latter.
Just a few days later, the Baluch regiment marched in to tear down the tricolour and substitute it with Pakistan’s flag.
In Banderban, additionally within the Chittagong Hill Tracts, some tribals who felt nearer to Burma, now Myanmar, had raised the Burmese flag.
This too was torn down by the Baluch troopers.
An arrest warrant was issued in opposition to Sneha Chakma and his associates, branding them traitors.
However, Sneha together with others, together with Indramoni Chakma and Girish Dewan, the ‘captain’ of Chakma guards, had already left for Agartala after an emergency assembly of tribal leaders on August 19 on the deputy commissioner’s bungalow the place it was resolved that “CHT shall not abide by the Radcliffe Award and that resistance be put up and squads be immediately set up with indigenous weapons”.
Sneha Chakma’s staff was authorised to journey to Kolkata and Delhi to hunt arms and to protest what they felt was “gross injustice”.
Chakma tribals declare that Sir Cyrill Radcliffe dismissed a seven-page argument written by Justice Bijan Mukherjee and Justice Charu Biswas (non-Muslim members of the Bengal Boundary Commission) in favour of retaining CHT inside India, and had agreed to provide it to Pakistan.
While Chakmas of their memorandum, and justices Mukherjee and Biswas of their arguments identified that CHT had a 98 per cent Buddhist inhabitants whose tribal ethnicity made them clan-cousins to individuals dwelling in Tripura and Assam, Radcliffe held that the world was the headwaters for Chittagong port and with out it, the port, the one main one in East Pakistan, could be unsustainable.
“The Maharaja of Burdwan offered my father some Lee Enfield rifles and ammunition. But most Indian leaders counselled a legal battle rather than an armed rebellion,” mentioned professor Chakma.
Raja Nalinaksha Roy, the titular tribal chief of the Chakmas regardless of being a part of the choice to go for an armed revolt taken on August 19, later opted to work with the Pakistan authorities, maybe to safeguard his clansmen.
“The princely family and elite among Chakmas did not really support our struggle, some of them felt Pakistan would give them a better deal,” felt professor Chakma.
However, the Chakma homeland in Chittagong Hills, didn’t stay a protected haven.
In 1957, work on Kaptai dam, which finally flooded a whole lot of villages and submerged greater than 1,300 sq km, began.
Between 1962 and 1965, tens of hundreds of Chakma villagers have been compelled to go away for India and Myanmar.
READ HERE | Chakmas, Hajongs protest denial of residential certificates by Arunachal authorities
“After the Kaptai dam was built (and tribals displaced), there was a rise in political consciousness among the Chakmas,” mentioned Amena Mohsin, a professor of Dhaka University’s International Relations Department While some grew to become refugees in neighbouring Tripura and Assam, the place their clan brethren lived, others have been resettled in Arunachal Pradesh.
However, life in diaspora has not been a mattress of roses.
Most of these settled in Arunachal nonetheless should not have voting rights and periodically there are agitations, which search their resettlement elsewhere, branding them “foreigners”.
“There are just 60,000 of the 2.5 lakh Chakmas in India living in Arunachal Pradesh. Just 6,000 of them have voting rights, yet they face agitations,” mentioned Suhas Chakma, the director at Rights and Risks Analysis Group, and writer of a number of books on Chakma points.
Chakmas dwelling in Mizoram are equally in a quandary with the state authorities looking for to conduct surveys to create a National Register of Citizens (NRC), which may establish unlawful Chakmas dwelling within the state.
“In 1900, the British took a slice of Chittagong Hill Tracts and made it part of the district which is today Mizoram, making many Chakmas and Rheangs citizens of that area yet today, they face illegal censuses which could target them,” alleged Suhas.
In Chittagong Hill Tracts the place an estimated 7 lakh Chakmas nonetheless reside, a lot of their ancestral lands have been encroached upon by settlers from the plains, typically with the assistance from the Bangladesh Army.
“Much more than partition or the Kaptai Dam displacements, the throttling of tribal identity by the Sheikh Mujib government in Bangladesh and the later displacement of Chakma tribals by plains settlers have been disasters for them,” mentioned professor Ranabir Samaddar, the previous head of Kolkata-based Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies.
The ‘Parbatya Chattagram Jana Samhati Samiti’ (Chiitagong Hills People’s Solidarity Committee) was shaped in 1972, quickly after Bangladesh grew to become impartial and its armed wing ‘Shanti Bahini’ (Peace Army) launched its first assault on that nation’s military in 1977.
“India was willing to assist them (Shanti Bahini) after the death of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in 1975,” claimed Mohsin, a cost many Bangladeshis make, however one which India denies.
In 1997, after Sheikh Hasina got here to energy, a peace accord was brokered, ending the two-decades-long bloody revolt.
However, as plainsmen-settlers continued to seize land within the hills, and as a robust military presence saved the tribals in test, the peace remained an uneasy one.
KOLKATA: Every 12 months, motley teams of Chakma tribals collect in varied elements of the nation with placards calling out August 17, 1947 as ‘Black Day’.
Seventy-five years in the past, the Chakmas misplaced the short-lived ‘revolt’ they mounted to make their homeland within the Chittagong Hills part of India and since then, the tribe’s now scattered diasporas lament that loss.
On August 15, 1947, Chakmas, Tripuris and different tribals, principally Buddhist, dwelling within the over 13,000 sq. kilometers of hills and dales in Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) determined to boost the Indian tricolour on the Deputy Commissioner’s Bungalow at Rangamati to indicate their new citizenship.
“My father Sneha Kumar Chakma, who was a member of the All India Excluded Areas Sub-Committee of the Constituent Assembly of India for CHT, engaged with Col GL Hyde, the then deputy commissioner of the district, and after he agreed that the hill tracts were part of India, raised the Indian flag on the morning of August 15, 1947,” mentioned Gautam Chakma, a professor of political science at Tripura University.
However, the jubilation that accompanied that momentous event was short-lived.
On the night of August 17, after the Radcliffe Award, which demarcated the boundary between India and Pakistan, was introduced over the radio, it got here to be identified that Chittagong Hill Tracts had been given to the latter.
Just a few days later, the Baluch regiment marched in to tear down the tricolour and substitute it with Pakistan’s flag.
In Banderban, additionally within the Chittagong Hill Tracts, some tribals who felt nearer to Burma, now Myanmar, had raised the Burmese flag.
This too was torn down by the Baluch troopers.
An arrest warrant was issued in opposition to Sneha Chakma and his associates, branding them traitors.
However, Sneha together with others, together with Indramoni Chakma and Girish Dewan, the ‘captain’ of Chakma guards, had already left for Agartala after an emergency assembly of tribal leaders on August 19 on the deputy commissioner’s bungalow the place it was resolved that “CHT shall not abide by the Radcliffe Award and that resistance be put up and squads be immediately set up with indigenous weapons”.
Sneha Chakma’s staff was authorised to journey to Kolkata and Delhi to hunt arms and to protest what they felt was “gross injustice”.
Chakma tribals declare that Sir Cyrill Radcliffe dismissed a seven-page argument written by Justice Bijan Mukherjee and Justice Charu Biswas (non-Muslim members of the Bengal Boundary Commission) in favour of retaining CHT inside India, and had agreed to provide it to Pakistan.
While Chakmas of their memorandum, and justices Mukherjee and Biswas of their arguments identified that CHT had a 98 per cent Buddhist inhabitants whose tribal ethnicity made them clan-cousins to individuals dwelling in Tripura and Assam, Radcliffe held that the world was the headwaters for Chittagong port and with out it, the port, the one main one in East Pakistan, could be unsustainable.
“The Maharaja of Burdwan offered my father some Lee Enfield rifles and ammunition. But most Indian leaders counselled a legal battle rather than an armed rebellion,” mentioned professor Chakma.
Raja Nalinaksha Roy, the titular tribal chief of the Chakmas regardless of being a part of the choice to go for an armed revolt taken on August 19, later opted to work with the Pakistan authorities, maybe to safeguard his clansmen.
“The princely family and elite among Chakmas did not really support our struggle, some of them felt Pakistan would give them a better deal,” felt professor Chakma.
However, the Chakma homeland in Chittagong Hills, didn’t stay a protected haven.
In 1957, work on Kaptai dam, which finally flooded a whole lot of villages and submerged greater than 1,300 sq km, began.
Between 1962 and 1965, tens of hundreds of Chakma villagers have been compelled to go away for India and Myanmar.
READ HERE | Chakmas, Hajongs protest denial of residential certificates by Arunachal authorities
“After the Kaptai dam was built (and tribals displaced), there was a rise in political consciousness among the Chakmas,” mentioned Amena Mohsin, a professor of Dhaka University’s International Relations Department While some grew to become refugees in neighbouring Tripura and Assam, the place their clan brethren lived, others have been resettled in Arunachal Pradesh.
However, life in diaspora has not been a mattress of roses.
Most of these settled in Arunachal nonetheless should not have voting rights and periodically there are agitations, which search their resettlement elsewhere, branding them “foreigners”.
“There are just 60,000 of the 2.5 lakh Chakmas in India living in Arunachal Pradesh. Just 6,000 of them have voting rights, yet they face agitations,” mentioned Suhas Chakma, the director at Rights and Risks Analysis Group, and writer of a number of books on Chakma points.
Chakmas dwelling in Mizoram are equally in a quandary with the state authorities looking for to conduct surveys to create a National Register of Citizens (NRC), which may establish unlawful Chakmas dwelling within the state.
“In 1900, the British took a slice of Chittagong Hill Tracts and made it part of the district which is today Mizoram, making many Chakmas and Rheangs citizens of that area yet today, they face illegal censuses which could target them,” alleged Suhas.
In Chittagong Hill Tracts the place an estimated 7 lakh Chakmas nonetheless reside, a lot of their ancestral lands have been encroached upon by settlers from the plains, typically with the assistance from the Bangladesh Army.
“Much more than partition or the Kaptai Dam displacements, the throttling of tribal identity by the Sheikh Mujib government in Bangladesh and the later displacement of Chakma tribals by plains settlers have been disasters for them,” mentioned professor Ranabir Samaddar, the previous head of Kolkata-based Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies.
The ‘Parbatya Chattagram Jana Samhati Samiti’ (Chiitagong Hills People’s Solidarity Committee) was shaped in 1972, quickly after Bangladesh grew to become impartial and its armed wing ‘Shanti Bahini’ (Peace Army) launched its first assault on that nation’s military in 1977.
“India was willing to assist them (Shanti Bahini) after the death of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in 1975,” claimed Mohsin, a cost many Bangladeshis make, however one which India denies.
In 1997, after Sheikh Hasina got here to energy, a peace accord was brokered, ending the two-decades-long bloody revolt.
However, as plainsmen-settlers continued to seize land within the hills, and as a robust military presence saved the tribals in test, the peace remained an uneasy one.
