By MEGHA BAHREE
BALAJAN, India—Nearly 200,000 refugees, mostly Muslim, have been crowded since July into a couple of hundred makeshift camps in a pocket of the Indian state of Assam, waiting in deteriorating conditions to return home while the government verifies their citizenship status.
They have been stuck here, often in squalid conditions, after ethnic violence drove them from their homes in this northeastern corner of India, tucked between Myanmar and Bangladesh. Many say they want to go home but are too frightened to go back because of violence like the riot this month in the town of Dhubri, in which a mob took to the streets after an alleged theft at a Hindu temple. One Muslim was killed; a curfew has since been imposed.
The government has promised the refugees protection and rehabilitation—after they prove their credentials in a bid to reduce tensions over migrants to the region.
The process of verification "has delayed their rehabilitation, but at least it will be a firm thing and no one will be able to use it again for another round of violence," said Gyanendra Tripathi, Assam's top internal-security official.
At a Muslim relief camp in Assam state, India, children gathered edible leaves.
The clashes started in July between Muslims, including migrants from Bangladesh, and a local indigenous group called Bodos—many of whom are animists who believe souls inhabit all living things—along with some Christians and Hindus.
Photos from the Refugee Camps in Assam
Refugees boarded buses to move from one camp to another.
The violence has claimed 97 lives and caused hundreds of thousands to flee their homes, filling at the peak of the crisis more than 300 relief camps across four districts, including Kokrajhar and Dhubri, a largely Muslim district. The camps are basically local schools that were opened to the villagers. School has been halted and can resume only when the buildings empty out.
The current wave of violence was sparked in July by the killing, in separate incidents, of two Muslim and four Bodo youths in Kokrajhar, the capital of Bodoland.
Takimari, one of the few Bodo villages in Dhubri district, is now an abandoned shell. The houses have been burned, leaving charred piles of clothes, books and a few half-burned pieces of furniture. Members of both communities, nearly 500,000 at the peak of the conflict in August, fled amid fears of reprisals.
There will be more clashes, predicts Rajeev Bhattacharyya, managing editor of the Seven Sisters Post, a local daily in the Assamese capital of Guwahati, because, he says, the government hasn't figured out how to "stem the menace" of migrants.
The roots of the ethnic tensions date back several decades. The Bodo community has an autonomous territory within the state known as the Bodoland Territorial Autonomous Districts. Bodos complain they have been displaced from ancestral lands by a growing wave of immigrants, whom they allege are largely illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.
Mamna Bibi, a slim 29-year-old mother of six, was staying in the classroom at a camp in Balajan village in Dhubri district. Nearly two dozen women and children sat around her in the dark room. The electricity was out. Their belongings, tied up in pieces of cloth, replaced books on the shelves next to the blackboard. Black plastic sheets were tacked along the walls to guard against the drenching rain. Outside, refuse and sewage floated in puddles of water.
Ms. Mamna, a Muslim from near the camp, used to clean houses for a living while her husband worked as a laborer. She says the family's two-room tin shack was destroyed by Bodo attackers. "We are poor people, but our tin home was better than this place," she said. "We have nothing to eat here, nothing to wear. Are we going to spend the rest of our lives like this?"
The conditions in the camps are grim. Each family gets one sari and one piece of cloth that the men wear like a sarong. No clothes have been given for the children. Food is supposed to be rice, lentils, cooking oil and salt. In interviews across several camps, however, residents said they weren't getting daily rations. At one camp last month, residents said they hadn't received any rations from the government for 12 days.
Mr. Tripathi, Assam's internal-security official, said no relief camp had complained of inadequacy of food, but said he would look into the question. Of the camp where resident said they had received no rations, he said: "It may be that this was an illegal camp. But 12 days of no ration is a very sensitive matter and I will check it out."
Mr. Tripathi also acknowledged problems with sanitation. The camps began with one toilet for 200 people, a ratio that has been halved since to one toilet per 100. The government is now building additional toilets to push the ratio to one per 30.
The government says it is verifying the credentials of the nearly 200,000 Muslim refugees still in the camps to end such concerns.
Speaking at a conference of police officers earlier this month, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said "the increase in the communal incidents in the country in the past few months and the revival of ethnic tensions in the North East in recent weeks have been particular causes of concern to all of us."
Muslims make up 8.2 million of the Assam's 26.6 million population. They have been arriving in phases ever since Assam was made a part of India's eastern Bengal province in 1905 with Dhaka as the capital. There was another influx in the 1940s when the British brought in Muslims to farm the lands as part of a policy to grow more food, followed by another wave in 1947 when India was partitioned to create Pakistan, and another at around the time that Bangladesh was carved out of Pakistan in 1971.
Assam has a history of protest against these immigrants, starting in 1979. In 1983, more than 2,000 Bangladeshi Muslims were killed in a matter of six hours. In 1985, the national and state governments signed an accord with the leaders of the protest that declared all foreigners who migrated to Assam after March 25, 1971, as illegal.