On a recent Sunday afternoon, the women committee of Badulipara, a village of ninety-three Bodo families in western Assam’s Chirang distric...
On a recent Sunday afternoon, the women committee of Badulipara, a village of ninety-three Bodo families in western Assam’s Chirang district, convened to elect its new office bearers (and eat a fish-and-rice lunch). The venue was a football field on the edge of which stood a “library” with no books.
This reporter from Guwahati was offered a chair, but questions about the imminent elections were not met with much enthusiasm. “Are you from the BJP?” one woman asked, referring to the Bharatiya Janata Party. “There is no BJP here, there are only Bodo people in our village.”
The youngest in the group, 23-year-old Dorely Bodo, stepped in to explain: “He wants to know about our problems.”
Then, the floodgates opened.
‘We are all UPPL’
“First, see the library,” said a middle-aged woman who would not reveal her name. “It’s falling apart so bad that we can’t even sit inside.”
Another woman stretched her hands as wide as she could to show what she said was the size of the potholes in the road leading to the village. “If someone is dying, we have to carry them on our shoulders till the main road because the ambulance can’t reach the village,” she said. “Other people may have got a lot of things, but...
