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place to study for northeastern students, with many buying tickets to Assam or destinations in nearby West Bengal, officials said. Police estimate that there are 240,000 people from the seven north-eastern states in Bangalore, which has a population of nine million. The chief ministers of Assam and Karnataka, the state that is home to Bangalore, also appealed for calm and said there was no reason for the exodus, as police took to Twitter and the local airwaves to knock down the rumours. "Our police will offer full protection to you all. There is no reason to worry. Believe in our government and not in rumours," Karnataka chief minister Jagadish Shettar told about 200 northeastern students. The unrest between Muslims and Bodos in Assam, which has repeatedly flared up in previous decades, is blamed by the Bodos and some politicians on an influx of illegal immigrants from nearby Muslim-majority Bangladesh. Muslims there claim they have been targeted by well-armed Bodo militias, which had previously been fighting their own separatist war. Some 5,300 homes have been torched in the riots. Anirban Das, a software engineer from Assam, told AFP that he had decided to flee Bangalore after hearing rumours about the danger. "We heard we could be attacked and so boarded a train and reached Guwahati," he said. The chief minister of Assam, Tarun Gogoi, urged students to stay where they were and not return home. -AFP/ac
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