Ethnic Conflict and Adivasi Insecurity in Assam: A Review of Reports on Violence Affecting Tea Community Settlements Commission Reports, Human Rights Reports, and Published Studies

The sources used for this article were collected relying on various documentary sources concerned with ethnic violence and insecurities in the Adivasi communities of Assam’s tea economy to analyze reports on violence and address their consequences. In particular, the sources used rely on a civil-society fact finding report on the 2014 attacks and corresponding National Human Rights Commission reports on other attacks in 2014, and scholarly articles on plantation labor, land, identity, and intercommunity relations. Together they allow addressing the questions of what violence and displacements occurred and occurred in what numbers, exploring the context and history underlying such figures, and examining what do the sources say about the state’s protection, compensation, and reaction measures. The sources describe the attacks’ consequences in terms of lives and property losses, injuries, displacements, and ongoing court cases, but provide different evidence and tackle different issues. Therefore, the article argues that the sources should be compared and contrasted in order to discuss their limitations on the evidence of violence, support, and state responsibilities by analyzing reports of attacks and legal proceedings. They document different aspects and some sources provide more details on violence, destructions, and displacements while others focus on the aftermath, legal interventions, and the state’s role responding to the violence. As a result, the article focuses on allegations and evidence, investigations and judgments, and limits the discussion of the victims’ circumstances and social categories. Moreover, the article does not attempt to quantify attacks since the sources lack sufficient data and speculates on the numbers of incidents that may have occurred in similar settlements.