Displacing the Conflict: Environmental Destruction in Bangladesh and Ethnic Conflict in India

Recently, a substantial amount of research has been devoted to establishing that environmental destruction itself may be the cause of conflict. Conflicts may arise directly due to scarcity of resources caused by 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 River Ganges. Since 1975, India has been diverting most of the dry-season 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, and changed the hydraulic character of the rivers and the ecology of the Delta in the down-stream areas. These trans-border human-inflicted environmental changes have resulted in the loss of the sources of living of a large population in the south-western part of Bangladesh and have necessitated their migration in the pursuit of survival. The absence of alternatives in the other parts of the country has left no other option for these Bangladeshis but to migrate into India. The large-scale migration, from the late 1970s, of these Muslim migrants into Hindu-dominated India has culminated in a number of native-migrant conflicts in the receiving society. The Indian state of Assam, which received a large proportion of these migrants, was the first to experience conflict. Conflicts between natives and migrants have now spread to other parts of India and have become a major issue for politically rising Hindu organizations. As this study determines, environmental destruction not only creates resource scarcity conflicts, it can also force the people to migrate, thus leading to native-migrant conflicts in the receiving society.