The Chakma are too few to be so fragmented and scattered, but there is little incentive for anyone to try and redress their condition.

by Sanjoy Hazarika

On 15 August 1947, the Indian tricolour went up a flagpost in Rangamati, the main town in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. The Chakma leaders had believed during the tortuous negotiations leading up to Partition that, given the religious composition of the largely Buddhist CHT, their district would be parcelled out to India.

Not so, decided Sir Cyril Radcliffe, head of the commission with the task of apportioning the territories, and the Hill Tracts were awarded to (East) Pakistan. On 18 August, Pakistani troops marched into Rangamati, pulled down the Indian flag, and sent up in its place the star and crescent of Pakistan.

The days of travail had begun for the Chakma, a minority which, over the following half century, has had more than its share of fragmentation, even by South Asian standards. Today, their own homeland, the CHT, is overrun with Bengali settlers from the overpopulated Bangladeshi mainland, and divided groups survive under trying circumstances in Tripura, Mizoram and Arunachal.

However, for all the tragedy they have suffered, the world knows too little about Chakmas. Within Bangladesh, they pale to insignificance before the size of the mainland population and the suffering that regularly visits it. In India, Chakmas make up three segregated groups whose problem is one among so many in the increasingly violent Northeast, itself a region that suffers neglect from India’s rulers.

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