Some 48 hours after the scramble by over 20,000 frantic north-easterners to board trains heading for Guwahati from Benga-luru, top intelligence officers warned that the exodus is part of a plan by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence to use the violence in the Northeast to spark communal riots nationwide.
Intelligence officers have told this newspaper that the mass flight, despite the fact that no major incident of mob violence was reported (barring the knifing of a Tibetan and the assault and verbal abuse heaped on several north-easterners), is the “grand design of the ISI to divide Indians, disturb communal harmony in a hitherto peaceful state and destabilise the country by other means”.
“It’s fingerprint-less terrorism,” he said as the north-easterners continued to stream into Beng-aluru railway station from across the state even as Karnataka home minister R. Ashok — contrary to eye-witness accounts — insisted bogies were leaving empty.
Though the Bengaluru police was aware of the rumour-mongering, they were caught off guard by the doctored MMS wrongly portraying violence against a particular community by the Bodos in Assam. This was circulated among sections of a particular community, triggering hate SMS by that community, verbal threats and the resultant panic and mass exodus. The Centre, meanwhile, ban-ned the sending of bulk SMSes and MMSes for 15 days. “There’s a pattern emerging in the conspiracy, which began with the violence in Assam, spilled into the violent protest in Mumbai, the attack in Pune, the exodus of the NE people from Bengaluru, and now from Hyderabad and Chennai. They (ISI) have used the social networking sites and mobile phones to create panic in the community and, unfortunately, it has worked for them,” the officer added,
On Friday, some 6,000 people boarded four trains for Guwahati, including three specials. The railways has requisitioned eight special trains from the Railway Board and are running them on the tracks of goods trains, some of which have been stopped to facilitate the special trains.