DISPLACING THE CONFLICT - ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION IN BANGLADESH ANDETHNIC-CONFLICT IN INDIA

Recently, a substantial amount of research has been devoted to establi shing that environmental destruction itself may be the cause of confli ct. Conflicts may arise directly due to scarcity of resources caused b y environmental destruction, and can also be the potential consequence of environmentally forced population migration. India and Bangladesh are in a long-standing dispute over the sharing of the waters of the R iver Ganges. Since 1975, India has been diverting most of the dry-seas on flow of the river to one of her internal rivers, before it reaches Bangladesh. At Farakka, this has affected agricultural and industrial production, disrupted domestic water supply, fishing and navigation, a nd changed the hydraulic character of the rivers and the ecology of th e Delta in the down-stream areas. These trans-border human-inflicted e nvironmental changes have resulted in the loss of the sources of livin g of a large population in the south-western part of Bangladesh and ha ve necessitated their migration in the pursuit of survival. The absenc e of alternatives in the other parts of the country has left no other option for these Bangladeshis but to migrate into India. The large-sca le migration, from the late 1970s, of these Muslim migrants into Hindu -dominated India has culminated in a number of native-migrant conflict s in the receiving society. The Indian state of Assam, which received a large proportion of these migrants, was the first to experience conf lict. Conflicts between natives and migrants have now spread to other parts of India and have become a major issue for politically rising Hi ndu organizations. As this study determines, environmental destruction not only creates resource scarcity conflicts, it can also force the p eople to migrate, thus leading to native-migrant conflicts in the rece iving society.