Some 48 hours after the mad scramble by over 20,000 frantic north-easterners to board trains heading for Guwahati from Bengaluru, top intelligence officers have warned that the exodus from the nation’s premier IT city is part of a plan by Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) to use the violence in the North East to spark communal riots nationwide.
The 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 at several North-easterners - is the “grand design of the ISI to divide Indians, disturb the communal harmony in a hitherto peaceful state and destabilize the country by other means.”
“Its finger-printless terrorism,” he said as the north-easterns continued to head into Bengaluru City railway station from across the state, even as Karnataka home minister R Ashok - contrary to eye-witness accounts - insisted that bogies were leaving empty.
Though the Bengaluru police were aware of the rumour-mongering, which created mass hysteria among the North Easterners studying and working here, they were completely 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 the hate sms by that community, the verbal threats, and the resultant panic and mass exodus from the night of August 15.
The stabbing of an innocent Tibetan youth, Tenzin Dhargyal in Mysore by unknown assailants is part of the “conspiracy,” the officer said.