India - Here,the riot victim is a day old

Sushanta Talukdar

Burigaon High Madrassa Relief Camp (Darrang): As Nuruda Amin lay bleeding after giving birth to her sixth child – a baby girl — at Khoirkata village in Udalguri on Sunday night, she suddenly heard her family members and villagers hurrying. Before she realised what was happening, Nuruda found that her house had been set on fire by a mob.
Nuruda managed to crawl to a nearby paddy field to pass a sleepless night. Her five other minor children — four sons and a daughter — and her frail husband Kalachand were by her side watching helplessly. The family — from this backward village of immigrant settlers — walked about 12 km to take shelter in Burigaon High Madrassa Relief Camp under Dalgaon police station in adjacent Darrang district.
On Monday, a visibly frail Nuruda was sitting with her one-day-old baby on a tarpaulin sheet inside the madrassa. Her husband was being administered intravenous fluids for his severe weakness.
Doctors and the nurse attending on Nuruda told The Hindu that they had given her an injection to control bleeding. The trauma of having been nearly burnt alive along with her newborn was evident in Nuruda’s eyes. While Nuruda and other inmates of the camp had tales of violent attacks by mobs from surrounding Bodo villages to tell the visitors, inmates of the Bodo relief camp at Udalguri College too had traumatic experiences to narrate.
Altogether 7,460 Bodo families from 28 violence-affected villages in Udalguri district have taken shelter in the relief camp after immigrant settlers attacked their villages and torched houses on Friday night in which seven persons were killed and 35 injured.
While the relief camps of both the communities were overcrowded with people fleeing their villages, burnt houses along National Highway 52 bore testimony to the destruction and violent retaliation by both the sides. At Aminpara village under the Udalguri police station, some villagers could be seen trying to salvage rice from the granaries that were gutted when attackers set ablaze their houses along the national highway, less than a kilometre from a police outpost.