Ethnic and religious tensions in the Indian North East had led to massacre of Bengali-speaking Muslims in Nellie in February 1983. The greatest carnage against immigrants occurred on 18 February when 990 in Neille and 585 in Barbori were killed. Villages were burned while women and children identified as immigrant Muslims were hacked into pieces. Smuggling and illegal immigration along the Indian-Bangladeshi border has been identified as major cause of killing of more than 3,000 people in the massacre. The Neille Massacre has been argued as one of the cases of ethnic cleansing with the complicity of state, that was followed by similar incidents of carnages in Delhi (1984), Bhagalpur (1989), Kashmir (1990s), Mumbai (1993) and Gujarat (2002).