Fear is the key...

The Chennai suburbs of Thirisulam and Vanagaram turn into second-hand cloth markets every weekend. Sellers lay out their wares on Fridays at Thirisulam and on Sundays at Vanaagaram. Migrant workers from the northeast, mostly from Assam, and their families form a chunk of the customers. On the Independence Day weekend, the two markets recorded a sharp decline in sales and the vendors were left counting their losses.

In Hyderabad, the scene was pretty much the same in the Muslim-dominated Anjaiah Nagar and Siddique Nagar, two localities where a majority of the city's northeastern blue-collar migrants live. Following last week’s panic exodus aboard packed trains heading towards Guwahati, dwellings in the two areas were padlocked. The gloomy lanes had been overrun by stray dogs and pigs, and all day-to-day human activity had ground to a halt.

In Pune, a major education hub, thousands of students from the northeast packed their bags and headed back home as word got around that certain elements infuriated by the ethnic violence in Assam's Kokrajhar, Chirang, Dhubri and Bongaigaon districts were planning to hit back at the perceived perpetrators.

The worst hit, of course, was the metropolis of Bengaluru, from where nearly 5,000 northeast Indians fled to the safety of their own states in a single day. The city's railway station witnessed a stampede-like situation on August 15 as migrants from Assam made a desperate beeline for unreserved seats, forcing the railway authorities to run two special trains to Guwahati.

True to form, members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the  Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) and the Ram Sena descended on Bengaluru station, started on-the-spot 'helplines' there, and declared that they would stand by the Assamese migrants.

Such blatant attempts to fish in troubled waters only deepened the mistrust in the minds of those on the run. The following day, 4,500 more northeasterners boarded Guwahati-bound trains.

With the flight of their northeast employees, many restaurants and beauty parlours in Bengaluru downed their shutters temporarily or scaled down their operations for want of manpower. The owners of these establishments are hoping that those that have left without warning will return to their jobs soon.

The violent clashes between Bodo tribals and Muslim settlers in Assam, which erupted in the first week of July and continued sporadically for a month, left close to 80 people dead and lakhs were rendered homeless and forced into refugee camps.

Mischief-mongers had a field day: hundreds of websites provided links to morphed video clips and ran chain mails in a bid to equate the attacks on Muslims in Assam with the mistreatment of the community in Myanmar.

When the rumours of reprisals after Eid, fuelled by the inflammatory video clips uploaded on social media sites and distributed through mobile handsets, spread like wildfire, they rattled the shaky resolve of the vulnerable and sparked a mass flight from Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai and Pune.

The violence unleashed by protesters at Mumbai's Azad Maidan by a rampaging mob on August 11 made matters worse. An estimated 70,000 people fled their homes in the above cities fearing a wave of violence against working class migrants from the Northeast in response to the clashes in Assam.

A senior government scientist posted in Pune, speaking on condition of anonymity, says: "Much of the fear psychosis was triggered by the way the media projected the unfortunate developments. It naturally prompted parents, relatives and friends in the Northeast to advise their children and acquaintances to return home on the first available train."

"When parents back home saw what was being reported on television news channels and in newspapers, they panicked and called their children back," says the convenor of the Pune-based Northeast Students' Forum, Rock Lunglenge.

Erika Tamuli, a senior advocate in Bengaluru, was under constant pressure form her parents to return to Guwahati. But she assured them that she faced no threat. Says her father Chandan Tamuli: "We want her to come back because the situation out there is tense. But she insists that there is no need for worry."

It is just this kind of climate in which conspiracy theories flourish. Abhijeet Sarma, the president of Assam Public Works (APW), an NGO, claims that he has personally interacted with 7,000 passengers at the Guwahati railway station and figured out that the miscreants in Bengaluru were determined to scare away blue collar workers (daily wage earners, security guards, hotel boys, et al) hailing from the northeastern states.

"It is not just fear that is driving away these people. All this is part of a larger conspiracy to take jobs away from people of the Northeast," says Sarma. "Comporate executives and IT professionals are not being targetted because the miscreants know that they cannot get those jobs as they require specific qualifications."

Raktim Duwara, a security guard in Hyderabad, has returned to Guwahati simply because many others from his state have done so. "I personally wasn't threatened by anybody," he says, "but I was gripped by fear".

Jorhat's Pankaj Deka, a salesman employed with a company in Shivaji Nagar, Bangalore, told TSI in Guwahati: "I took a train back out of fear. I didn't receive any threatening SMSes or calls. My mates warned me about impending danger. I upped and left. I am not sure I will get my job back when I return."

Stray incidents seemed to fan people's worst fears. Students from the Northeast were assaulted by miscreants in the Kondhwa and Camp areas of Pune. In Hyderabad’s Anjaiah Nagar, a security guard from the Northeast was attacked. In Bengaluru too, several untoward incidents were reported but not all of them involved people from northeastern India.
Says Pranjal Medhi, the general secretary of the Assam Society of Bengaluru: "A few stray incidents did take place but they were not related to any community or group. Only petty goons were involved."

Significantly, in the affected cities, people from both communities stepped in to assuage misgivings. Politicians, in power and otherwise, assured the northeastern migrants that they had nothing to fear. The exodus turned into a trickle by the fourth day and then stopped completely by the time a new week dawned.

Says Medhi: "The situation was brought under control pretty quickly. Both the Karnataka government and the state's Muslim leadership have done their best to restore people's confidence."

Rock Lunglenge says: "Such a thing has never happened before. I hope the police and the government will do everything possible to instill a feeling of security among people from our part of the country.”

In Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh Home Minister Sabitha Indra Reddy and city Police Commissioner Anurag Sharma visited Anjaiah Nagar and Siddique Nagar to dissuade the fleeing populace. Member of Parliament Asaduddin Owaisi, the leader of the All-India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, spoke personally to the migrants to allay their fears.

Pune's police chief Gulabrao Pol appealed to students from the Northeast not to pay any heed to the rumours and stay put wherever they were. The police, he said, would take action against anybody who sought to cause any harm to them.

He told a meeting of elected representatives and senior police officials at Bal Gandharva Rangmandir on August 17: "We are ready for any eventuality. Trouble-makers will be tackled with all the sternness at our command." A day later, the panic subsided palpably, not only in Pune but also in other cities.

Employees of software firms in Bengaluru and Hyderabad, most of them residents of gated communities and cosmopolitan localities, were left largely untouched by the fear psychosis. But those working in the service industry were the ones to panic the most as they lacked the support system that the more educated  outsiders have access to.
Nipul Konch, who migrated from Assam's Lakhimpur district to Hyderabad eight years ago says: "I feel as secure here as in my own state. My family did ask me to return home but I felt no need to so. But yes, many of my colleagues and neighbours hailing from the Northeast fled the city. It is rather sad." The recently married Nipul is a security in-charge of a software company in Hyderabad's Hitech City.

In Tamil Nadu, most migrants from the Northeast work in the construction industry or the hospitality and retail sectors. By a rough estimate, over 25 per cent of the 20,000 northeastern people in the state have gone back home since the exodus began on August 15.

In both Chennai and Bengaluru, beauty salons and bars and restaurants were badly affected by the exodus as a bulk of their employees are from the Northeast.

According to officials of the Chennai division of Southern Railways, trainloads of northeastern migrants left the city over a period of five days, but the situation was back to normal by Monday (August 21).

Says Thotnagachan Khongreiwo, secretary of Pune's Naga Students Union: "Things began to improve when large sections of influential people in this city, both Hindus and Muslims, intervened. I am hopeful the problem will blow over pretty soon and everybody will return."

The exodus has raised worries of another kind in Hyderabad, where at least 4,000 people from the Northeast work as security guards for various agencies. The police are feeling the heat as many software companies have sought deployment of additional security personnel for their facilities in Hitech City.

"We cannot continue filling the breach for much longer. If those that have fled the city do not return within the next few weeks, security in Hitech City would be in serious jeopardy," warns a senior Hyderabad police officer, not willing to be identified.

But that is only a minor irritant compared to the grave concerns that the unprecedented flight of people belonging to one regional group from several parts of the country has raised regarding the readiness of the government and the law enforcement system to tackle emergencies of this nature.

(Reporting by Monalisa Gogoi in Guwahati, Harsha Kumar Kugwe in Bengaluru, Chandran Iyer in Pune, Appanasamy in Chennai and Krishna Sairam in Hyderabad)