Fwd: FW: Looming Humongous Humanitarian Crisis in Assam: Three Significant Write-ups: I. Firsthand Account from a "Victim" II. A Slice of Historical Background III. A Cold Round-up
Aman Biradari
One, in fact, has got also to keep in mind that Assam, in a way, is a unique state in India.
Post-Independence Assam has since, onwards 1970, given birth to (i) Nagaland, (ii) Meghalaya, (iii) Arunachal Pradesh and (iv) Mizoram.
Within the present day Assam, there's the Bodoland Territorial Area Districts (BTAD), an autonomous territory. Apart from that: (i) Dima Hasao Autonomous District Council and (ii) Karbi Anglong Autonomous District Council.
As opposed to the Assamese speaker dominated Bramhaputra Valley, the Barak Valley is dominated by Bengali speakers.
But that doesn't mean that there's a neat geographical division.
And the relations between the Muslim and Hindu Bengali-speakers keep fluctutaing.
In the initial days, post-Independence, the Muslims tried to identify with the Assamese majority.
In the '50s and '60s, the (Bongal Kheda) violence, unleashed by the ethnic Assamese majority, was almost exclusively directed at the Bengali Hindus, mostly urban middle class.
The same was the case with the language riots of early '70s.
(Ref.: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bongal_Kheda>.)
In the late '70s onwards, during the Anti-Foreigners agitations, things changed considerably.
Both Hindus and Muslims were targeted.
In fact, the latter even more.
In early '83, in Nellie, in the Nagaon district, more than two thousand, as per official estimates, Bengali-speaking Muslims, including women and children, were massacred.
The agitation was, however, directed also against the Nepali settlers and, to a limited extent, Indians from other parts of India.
Ethnic conflicts, everywhere are pretty tangled affairs.
So is the case here.
The anger and violence of the ethnic Assamese arise from their sense of insecurity and the desire to dominate in their "own" land.
It gave rise to the independence/separatist movement, spearheaded by the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA), running parallelly, and concurrently, with the Anti-Foreigners Movement, both of which, by now, stand almost subsided.
Of the three write-ups reproduced below, the first one is penned by a Bengali-speaking Hindu from Assam, the last one by an ethnic Assamese.
One has to keep the above in mind.
<<The concerns of the Assam (Anti-Foreigners) Movement were clearly majoritarian. Its language was unabashedly crude. In the torchlight processions that passed by our lanes during the days of the anti-foreigner stir (as we were forced to observe ‘blackout’ or risk our windowpanes being stoned), the Assamese battle cries of ‘Foreigners get out’, ‘Drive out foreigners’, would include a slogan of racial and communal profiling: ‘Ali, coolie, Bongali (Bengali) / Naak sepeta (blunt-nosed) Nepali’. Ali was for Muslims, coolie, for Bihari labourers [perhaps, "coolie" referred to the tea tribes - the tea garden labourers of tribal origins brought from, mainly - but not exclusively, what is now known as, Jharkhand, long time back], the word ‘Bongali’ carried a tone of abuse for the community, and Nepalis who came for livelihood from North Bengal, were also seen as encroachers.
The slogan proves Assamese sentiments were not restricted to being anti-Bengali. All migrant communities were resented, even though they contributed to the economy. The diverse range of migrants bore the brunt of Assamese xenophobia.>>
(Excerpted from sl no. I. below.)
<<There are few parallels to Assam’s National Register of Citizens process in India or, indeed, anywhere in the world. As the state government updated its list of Indian citizens in Assam, applicants had to provide documents proving that they or their ancestors had entered the state before midnight of March 24, 1971. The final draft of the National Register of Citizens, released on July 30, excluded four million people, creating potentially one of the largest stateless populations in the world.
What has led to such a politics of antipathy towards alleged foreigners in Assam? To understand this, it is instructive to go back to 1947.
While the cataclysms of that year are usually identified with the partitions of Punjab and Bengal, the fact that Assam was also divided is little known. The district of Sylhet, majority Muslim and almost completely Bengali, was transferred from Assam in India to East Bengal in Pakistan after a referendum.>>
(Excerpted from sl no. II. below.)
<<If anyone can claim credit for the completion of the draft NRC, it is the coalition of regional political forces in Assam — notably the AASU and the AGP — for relentlessly pushing for it since the days of the Assam Movement. Their decision to turn to the judiciary can only be seen as a positive step. In Assam, there has been much praise for the coordinator of the NRC, Prateek Hajela, and his staff for successfully and competently bringing this enormously complex exercise to near completion.
...
The Supreme Court has been a key player in the NRC exercise. Not only has the two-judge Supreme Court bench closely supervised and monitored the process, it has weighed in on a number of related issues. For instance, the original ruling directed the Indian government to complete the fencing of the border and to maintain “vigil along the riverine boundary… by continuous patrolling.” It had also directed the government to develop, in consultation with the government of Bangladesh, appropriate mechanisms and procedures for deporting those declared illegal migrants.>>
(Excerpted from sl no.III. below.) ]
I/III.
Decades of Discord: Assam Against Itself
The process of the NRC identifying 'foreigners' is by no means a simple bureaucratic exercise. It is a bitterly fought and contested, political issue with a history that spans decades.
Decades of Discord: Assam Against Itself
The bottom line on NRC is not implementation; it is the sniffer-dog idea of the state, hunting down “foreigners”. Credit: PTI
Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee
18 HOURS AGO
I hear echoes of wailing
O’ foreigner friend, ill-fated
~ Bhupen Hazarika, ‘Chameli Memsahib’
Years ago, when I finished reading Sanjib Baruah’s book, India Against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality, I had said that I expected his next book to be titled Assam Against Itself. Since that book never appeared, I am using my own imagined title for this piece.
I am a second-generation refugee from Assam. My paternal roots are in Mymensingh. My father, after a brief stint as a clerk in IIT Kharagpur, had joined the Northeast Frontier Railway as a stenographer in 1951. I was born to Bengali Hindu parents in Assam. I am an Indian citizen. But it will be accurate to designate myself a refugee-citizen, to emphasise the detail of my hyphenated identity, being tied to Partition. This identity – more acutely for the Bengali Muslim refugee-citizen – is today once again under severe pressure to prove its legal credentials in Assam. I do not have any personal ties with Assam today, except for a few cousins and friends who continue to live there. But I am concerned about the fate of every refugee-citizen. They are my only political kin. Our suffering has a similar ring, though I am much privileged in comparison.
I witnessed the peculiar face and language of the Anti-Foreigners Movement in Assam as a schoolboy between 1979 and 1984. I learnt the meaning of “curfew” and “bohiragata” (foreigner, in Assamese), on a cold day in December 1979. It was the first day of many curfews.
We were escorted home from the makeshift central government school by the ghat of the Brahmaputra by an official car. The scenes of that day are still vivid. I remember the grim air, ripe with a strange fear. As we were taken through the streets, I noticed all the shops were shut. Shops would shut every Thursday, but never were the streets so deserted. And never were the streets so full of gun-wielding policemen. Even the doors and windows of houses in ‘Sudden Colony’ (named after a locality suddenly sprang up from an abandoned railway yard), were shut, as if following someone’s decree.
The Brahmaputra as seen in Guwahati. Credit: Aleesha Matharu/The Wire
A friend had whispered to me in the classroom, “The Assamese are at war with the Bengalis.” I was bewildered. I had heard of no such war in these years. Things were fine even that very morning when I left for school. What caused a war within these few hours? I thought the boy had heard some dreadful rumour. I was pursued by a strange fear, because I did not know the reasons behind that fear.
As I reached home, my relieved parents rushed to hug me. They were shaking with worry. What I had thought was a rumour, was on everyone’s lips in the neighbourhood. I was gripped by the faceless animal of fear. I trembled without knowing why I was trembling. I saw black smoke bellowing out of what we recognised as ‘Petrol Pump’, a place few kilometres away. News of stone throwing at Bengali homes was pouring in. The realisation quickly dawned upon me, that home, school, street and neighbourhood, were no longer safe places.
Fear changes the configuration of the world. It occupies your breath and eyesight. Fear was the defining feeling of my entry into history. I learnt I was an outsider in my own birthplace. A status I earned from the Assamese Hindus, who claimed to be the sole natives of Assam. My schizophrenia vis-à-vis my homeland was born.
The ghosts of the past
On July 30, 2018, the Indian government released an updated draft of the National Register of Citizens for the state of Assam. It is meant to classify the legality of citizens living in Assam, on or before March 24, 1971. Four million people found their names omitted from the register, their status turning illegal overnight.
As news of people who claimed their names were wrongly missing from the register trickled in, a flurry of debates appeared. The majority community of Assam – the Assamese Hindus – who spearheaded the Anti-Foreigners Movement in 1979, has largely defended the NRC against its critics.
The liberal section among them broadly forwarded two sets of arguments in its favour: one, that even though the NRC may contain loopholes, it is procedurally sensitive to wrong omissions. Therefore it may be trusted rather than challenged. Two, the NRC was not, as was being made out to be, designed to target any particular community, language or religion. Its sole interest was to help the state husk the legitimate citizens from the illegitimate ones. This would enable the state to unburden the demographic imbalance in Assam and pave the way for peace and prosperity of the region. The point was also made about the necessity to safeguard the lives of Assam’s ‘indigenous people’, whose cultural environment was under threat due to the unchecked influx of refugees from Bangladesh. These refugees then created unwelcome imbalances in the livelihood of citizens, causing socio-political unrest and a perpetual sense of threat.
Before I address these biased concerns, I want to add that all those who made the above arguments either refrained from making any critical remark on the Assam Movement, or upheld its cause. Such tacit or overt display of political fidelity, fuelled by a willing ethnic complicity to an inherently communal movement, puts the efforts made by Assamese Hindus to put forth objective and ethical concerns in favour of NRC under grave doubt.
An undated photograph (taken prior to February 1980) depicts anti-Bengali graffiti which says ‘Assam is for the Assamese’ while abusing the then chief minister of Bengal, Jyoti Basu. Credit: Wikipedia
The concerns of the Assam Movement were clearly majoritarian. Its language was unabashedly crude. In the torchlight processions that passed by our lanes during the days of the anti-foreigner stir (as we were forced to observe ‘blackout’ or risk our windowpanes being stoned), the Assamese battle cries of ‘Foreigners get out’, ‘Drive out foreigners’, would include a slogan of racial and communal profiling: ‘Ali, coolie, Bongali (Bengali) / Naak sepeta (blunt-nosed) Nepali’. Ali was for Muslims, coolie, for Bihari labourers, the word ‘Bongali’ carried a tone of abuse for the community, and Nepalis who came for livelihood from North Bengal, were also seen as encroachers.
The slogan proves Assamese sentiments were not restricted to being anti-Bengali. All migrant communities were resented, even though they contributed to the economy. The diverse range of migrants bore the brunt of Assamese xenophobia.
The language battle
The problem with Bengalis goes back to colonial times. The British had imposed Bengali as the official language in colonially administered Assam between 1836 and 1873. It included the Bengali-majority areas of three districts (Cachar, Hailakandi and Karimganj) in the Barak Valley region. The map of Assam was treacherously drawn by the colonialists, where many languages and communities (ethnic and indigenous) overlapped. The railways also occasioned a mobility of workforce from other parts of India.
With the advantage of an English education, Bengalis monopolised clerical jobs in the railways. On October 24, 1961, Assamese became the only official language of the state. It propelled the ‘Bhasha Andolan’, or ‘campaign for language’, by Sylhet-speaking Bengalis in Barak Valley, who protested the imposition of Assamese. History was playing old games in reverse. Bengali protestors were fired upon by the state police and 11 people lost their lives. The Assam government relented and Bengali was granted official status in Barak Valley. Ethnic violence against Bengali Hindus goes back to the 1950s and 60s. It took a stringent turn in 1979.
The Assamese Hindus were not keen towards sharing official status with Bengali, a language they considered a symbol of cultural hegemony. During the colonial period, the Assamese, aided by American Baptist Missionaries, had to prove the distinct linguistic status of their mother tongue vis-à-vis Bengali, to regain their eventual official status. There was a competition for recognition, and it took political turns. The cultural chauvinism of Bengalis in matters of language (and literature), and their hegemony in government jobs, did not endear them to the native Assamese. All these factors contributed to the vengeful passions ignited during the Anti-Foreigners stir of 1979.
What appears to be clear from the story so far, as I play it back and forth, is that the Assamese people, facing the cruel vagaries of a colonially demarcated region torn by multilingual and multiethnic identities, reacted in the most extreme fashion. A twin battle, on both political and legal lines, was waged against Hindu and Muslim minorities who spoke Bengali. They were termed “foreigners”.
The Assam Movement initially demanded 1951 as the cutoff mark to identify illegal citizens. But the Indian government insisted on 1971. The Assamese leaders acceded to the proposal in 1984, during the Assam Accord with the Rajiv Gandhi government.
Ethics and morality
Today, the issue has returned to haunt minorities as the NRC has created a statistical scandal of identification as many citizens who have enough papers to prove their legality have found their names missing in the register. There are foreigner tribunals for people whose nationality is in doubt. There are detention camps for people whose names haven’t appeared on the NRC. An uncomfortably large number of people may soon be declared stateless. The official process of identification has been held far from satisfactory. The workforce mainly comprises people belonging to the majority Assamese community, and its neutrality is under question. After all, it concerns the future of millions of lives. The process of identifying “foreigners” is by no means a simple bureaucratic exercise. It is a bitterly fought and contested, political issue.
It is strange to read Sanjib Baruah give credit (‘The missing 4,007,707‘, Indian Express, August 2, 2018), to the All Assam Students Union (AASU) and the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) for bringing about the NRC. It is to grant legitimacy to extremely unethical political formations. The Movement had unleashed (and inspired) the crudest xenophobic movement in modern, Indian history.
Baruah should get to hear some stories from Bengali Hindus and Muslims. The murder of a young Bengali doctoral student, who, after he getting off his medical college bus in Maligaon Chariali in Guwahati, was greeted by around 40 boys waiting for him with hockey sticks. My young neighbour, who was about to join the Indian Air Force, was knifed in the street by his childhood Assamese friend. The friend was helped by his mother, who was a nurse. The four young men who tried to abduct my elder sister as she was returning home from tuition. She saved her life with a nib pen. The next day at the police station, she identified the boys as students belonging to Guwahati University.
The minorities whose names haven’t appeared in the NRC, despite the assurance that they can challenge their currently assigned status, are in a state of panic and nightmarish difficulty.
I remember the endless nights of fear of a “surprise attack”. Our hunchbacked, old help from Dhaka would collect some iron grills just in case. I remember, during one of the torchlight processions, as a “blackout” was enforced, a young man broke out of the march and knocked on the door of a Bengali neighbour. The wife came out. The man asked for a glass of water. The woman fainted.
Such was the palpable state of fear. These are stray incidents from a memory cupboard full of skeletons. I remember neighbours shivering from the cold, glued together to the Philips transistor, listening to the Bengali news service of the BBC and Voice of America. AIR hardly aired what was happening in Assam. We were learning about ourselves from foreign radio stations. This, more than anything else, made us feel like foreigners – that we were living in another country. Do refugees deserve the fear they inhabit? The Assam Movement can be granted moral legitimacy only if we agree that refugees are other people.
In the same article, Baruah writes, “The judicialisation of matters that are ultimately political is always a mixed blessing.” I disagree. It is, at best, a mixed curse. But in no uncertain terms, it is a matter of dubious means. The judicialisation of the political is to simply shift the arena of prejudice. A political movement based on chauvinism and hate deflects its strategic energies into the legal realm, seeking to create an authentic discourse of delegitimising “illegal populations”. Such a move turns the legal into the political.
What Baruah calls judicialisation of the political, is actually the opposite: It is the politicisation of the judicial. The minorities whose names haven’t appeared in the NRC, despite the assurance that they can challenge their currently assigned status, are in a state of panic and nightmarish difficulty. There is literally – and legally – no ground beneath their feet. It is true, the “liminal legality” Baruah speaks of, does pose a challenge for democracy. Isn’t it primarily, the ethical responsibility of Assam’s majority community?
Baruah raised more interesting questions in his earlier article, (Stateless in Assam, Indian Express, January 19, 2018), where he quotes Hannah Arendt to define the state of stateless people, caught between the concentration camps offered by their foes and detention camps offered by their friends. The exclamation attributed to Aristotle by Montaigne, “O my friends, there is no friend”, seems to be the current plight of the Bengali refugees in Assam.
It reminds me of Bhupen Hazarika’s song, ‘O Bidekhi Bondhu’ from Chameli Memsahib (1975), which is perhaps the only instance in Assamese popular culture, where the foreigner is spoken of in endearing terms. “You are entrapped in a cyclone/lost your anchor” goes the song, which comes eerily close to the plight of those facing the mess of the NRC.
One of the great cultural figures of postcolonial Assam, Bhupen Hazarika was a man of two cities, two languages and two sensibilities. He belonged to Assam as much as he belonged to Bengal. Did anyone accuse him, the way someone had accused me, holding me roughly by the collar in the middle of the street, of having my heart in Calcutta? Why can’t our hearts belong to more than one place?
Why can’t we, unlike trees, have parts of our roots – elsewhere?
I want to however reiterate here, that the worst sufferers of the Assam crisis are the Bengali Muslims. There is no equivalence among the many victims of the political calamity unfolding in Assam. The Nellie massacre in February 18, 1983, where Bengali Muslims living in fourteen villages faced the rawest violence yet unleashed by the Assam Movement, confirmed the most vulnerable “foreigners” in the state.
Subasri Krishnan’s documentary, What the Fields Remember (2015), made 30 years after the event, recounted the violence through the voices of two old, Muslim men. Their stories are unbearable. What is equally disheartening – and illuminating – is that they have waited in vain for justice. How can people dubbed foreigners, and whose families have been massacred with impunity, expect a hostile place and people to render them justice?
What is true of the Nellie survivors, is a logical fear that can be extended to all those who are facing the trial of citizenship by the NRC. The privileged Bengali Hindus of Assam, whether their names find place in the NRC or not, will not also speak for the Muslims, the way they did not speak for them in 1983. The cruel irony of history makes existentially enjoined sufferers remain separated by the religious narrative of Partition. Many Bengali Hindus are selfish refugees, incapable of forging larger solidarities because of communal considerations. It diminishes them, ethically, as people.
Today, the Bengali Muslim most heavily bears the tag, “Bangladeshi”. The government at the centre is more interested in rehabilitating Hindu refugees. But to simply blame the BJP for being partial is not enough. The impartial communalism of the majority in Assam, eager to drive both Muslims and Hindus away by erecting a legal quagmire, is the primary problem.
The bottom line on NRC is not implementation. It is the sniffer-dog idea of the state, hunting down “foreigners”. A democracy has to determine the costs of a method, legal or political, before unleashing it on people. It is not simply a question of human rights, but of human costs. To throw people into detention centres and camps will perpetually turn them into stateless animals, stripped of enough protection by the state.
Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee is a poet, writer and political science scholar. He is the author of Looking for the Nation: Towards Another Idea of India (Speaking Tiger Books, 2018).
II/III.
NRC debate: How the 1947 Sylhet partition led to Assam’s politics of the foreigner
Till the division, there were more Bengali speakers in Assam than Assamese speakers.
Map of "Bengal" from Pope, G. U. (1880), Text-book of Indian History: Geographical Notes, Genealogical Tables, Examination Questions, London: W. H. Allen & Co. Pp. vii, 574. | Wikipedia
6 hours ago
Shoaib Daniyal
There are few parallels to Assam’s National Register of Citizens process in India or, indeed, anywhere in the world. As the state government updated its list of Indian citizens in Assam, applicants had to provide documents proving that they or their ancestors had entered the state before midnight of March 24, 1971. The final draft of the National Register of Citizens, released on July 30, excluded four million people, creating potentially one of the largest stateless populations in the world.
What has led to such a politics of antipathy towards alleged foreigners in Assam? To understand this, it is instructive to go back to 1947.
While the cataclysms of that year are usually identified with the partitions of Punjab and Bengal, the fact that Assam was also divided is little known. The district of Sylhet, majority Muslim and almost completely Bengali, was transferred from Assam in India to East Bengal in Pakistan after a referendum.
The paradox of colonial Assam
In the 1930s, an unusual demand was raised in the Central Legislative Assembly – the closest thing British India had to a federal legislature. A member, Basanta Kumar Das, moved a resolution to rename the province of Assam as, he argued, Assamese speakers were a minority in the state. Indeed, the number of Bengali speakers in Assam was twice that of Assamese speakers.
This unusual situation was because in 1874, the district of Sylhet – rich in tea plantations – had been transferred from Bengal to Assam to boost the latter’s revenues. Nearly three-quarters of all Bengalis in Assam after this relocation were Sylhetis. This, in turn, gave rise to a demand among Assam’s Assamese leaders to reverse the situation and lob Sylhet back to Bengal in order to given Assam a more homogeneous linguistic character.
Demand for homogeneity
In 1945, the Assam Pradesh Congress Committee released a manifesto, ahead of elections, that spoke of the need for a culturally homogeneous Assam:
“Unless the province of Assam is organised on the basis of Assamese language and Assamese culture, the survival of the Assamese nationality and culture will become impossible. The inclusion of Bengali speaking Sylhet and Cachar and immigration or importation of lacs of Bengali settlers on wastelands has been threatening to destroy the distinctiveness of Assam and has, in practice, caused many disorders in its administration.”
In 1946, therefore, the prime minister (as the head of a province was called under the Raj) of Assam, Gopinath Bordoloi, told a British delegation, which had come to India to discuss transfer of power, that Assam would be quite prepared to hand over Sylhet to Bengal.
The referendum
As a result, Sylhet, along with the North West Frontier Province (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan), were the only places that were allowed a referendum on whether they would like to join India or Pakistan after the British had transferred power. The voting was held on July 6, 1947 and July 7, 1947 amidst flooding as well as allegations of intimidation by Muslim League cadre bought in from North India. Broadly following the Hindu-Muslim population break-up of the district, Sylhet voted to join East Bengal. Other than a small Hindu-majority pocket, most of the district was transferred to Pakistan.
Sylhet in modern-day Bangladesh. Credit: Creative Commons
In the wake of this, some commentators had blamed the Assam government for its hostile attitude towards retaining Sylhet, an allegation that played a bitter part in Bengali-Assamese relations in Assam post-1947. Historian Sujit Chaudhuri writes:
“The Bengali speaking district was regarded as an ulcer hindering the emergence of a unilingual Assam. Hence, when the decision for the referendum was announced, Gopinath Bordoloi, conveyed to all concerned, that the Cabinet was not interested in retaining Sylhet.”
In 1954, as the Cachar States Reorganisation Committee submitted a memorandum to the States Reorganisation Committee to create a new Bengali-dominated state of Purbanchal in the North East, it said, “At the time of Partition in 1947, it is well-known that Assam made no serious effort to win the plebiscite in Sylhet and even allowed propagandists from the Punjab to preach in favour of Pakistan while it harassed men sent from Calcutta to speak in favour of retention in the Indian Union.”
To this was added the charge that “Sylhet leaders were discouraged when they tried to salvage a portion of the district through an effective representation to the Boundary Commission”. Historian Amalendu Guha writes, “It was indeed the lifetime opportunity for the Assamese leadership ‘to get rid of Sylhet’ and carve out a linguistically more homogeneous province.”
Bengali refugees of Partition
While the allegations of the Assam government influencing the vote in favour of Pakistan remain contentious, the exit of Sylhet did fulfil the aim of building a more homogeneously Assamese province. Addressing the Assam Assembly on behalf of the Congress government in September 1947, the governor of Assam said:
“The natives of Assam are now masters of their own house. They have a government which is both responsible and responsible to them. The Bengali no longer has the power, even if he had the will, to impose anything on the people of these hills and valleys which constitute Assam.”
However, this situation was short-lived as just after Partition, large numbers of Hindu Bengalis started to migrate across the border back to Assam, allowing politicians in Assam to eventually frame the pre-1947 question of cultural homogeneity as one of infiltration by foreigners. “Had there been no Partition, there would not have been any ‘foreigner issue’ in Assam,” writes Sujit Chaudhuri. Themes such as evicting immigrants and even the deletion of names from voter lists first emerged in that post-Partition moment.
Linguistic and religious interweave
Assam, at the time, saw a complex interplay of religious and linguistic factors. Linguistic factors drove Bordoloi to seek Sylhet’s separation from Assam. And a communal referendum – in which Hindu Bengalis and Muslim Bengalis voted separately – was conducted in Sylhet for this division to take place. Communal riots took place at the time of Partition, but after the influx of Hindu Bengali refugees into Assam, “it was the language question that was to become increasingly the rallying point of anti-social, divisive forces and vested interests to organise riots”.
To add to this, many Muslim Bengalis in post-Partition Assam cited their mother tongue as Assamese to census officials. As a result, the 1951 Census said that Assamese speakers had grown by 150% compared to 1931. Since Muslim Bengalis were economically and educationally backward at the time, an alliance with them suited the Assamese elite who were competing with the elite Hindu Bengalis. Because of these inflated Assamese numbers, demands – largely by Hindu Bengalis – for a Bengali-majority state to be carved out of Assam were rejected when the states were reorganised on linguistic lines in 1956, allowing the Assamese elite to retain power.
Of course, this alliance would also go through its share of ups and downs. With the numbers of Muslim Bengalis growing and the Hindu Bengali elite losing power, the former are now perhaps seen as more of a threat to Assamese cultural homogeneity than the latter.
From ‘outsider’ to ‘foreigner’
In the late 1970s, as the Assam Agitation to evict undocumented immigrants took off, the memory of Partition was used to invent the term “foreigner” as opposed to “outsider”, the term that had been popular till then. According to Sujit Chaudhuri, while the terms were synonymous, they were used in different contexts. He writes:
“In short, the term ‘outsider’ is still used in non-official conversations within Assam since in sells well in the domestic market, whereas the term ‘foreigner’ is a later innovation for the consumption of the national press and national conscience. Thus the same commodity is being sold with rare acumen under two different brand names in two different markets to suit the taste and demands of two different varieties of consumers.”
This division of labour has been seen in the wake of the National Register of Citizens too, with the Bharatiya Janata Party, at the national level, trying to paint it as an exercise targeting only Muslim Bangladeshi immigrants while many Assamese politicians concurrently argue that the process identifies both Hindu and Muslim Bangladeshi immigrants.
III.
The missing 4,007,707
Can a democracy permit so many to be in a state of liminal legality? NRC poses a political and moral question
Written by Sanjib Baruah | Updated: August 2, 2018 6:26:29 am
Assam NRC Final Draft List The first draft was published on December 31, 2017, and the names of 1.9 crore of the 3.29 crore applicants were incorporated. (PTI)
The possibility — whether immediate or somewhat remote — that at the end of the process as many as 4 million people may lose their legal status as citizens should not be a cause of celebration in a democracy. Nor should it generate a mad rush among politicians competing for political credit.
If anyone can claim credit for the completion of the draft NRC, it is the coalition of regional political forces in Assam — notably the AASU and the AGP — for relentlessly pushing for it since the days of the Assam Movement. Their decision to turn to the judiciary can only be seen as a positive step. In Assam, there has been much praise for the coordinator of the NRC, Prateek Hajela, and his staff for successfully and competently bringing this enormously complex exercise to near completion.
Hajela’s observations are the best argument I have seen in favour of the NRC. When a reporter asked him about the implications of Bangladesh not being on board, he replied, “It is not really my charter.” As an administrator, he believes his job is to implement actually existing laws. Since the number of unauthorised immigrants in Assam has long been a matter of speculation, he considers finding out the actual number to be an important public service. “Once we are sure what we have in hand, a policy will be made.” But it will be naïve to think that the NRC will finally settle Assam’s tangled “foreigner” question. The issues that Hajela rightly considers to be beyond his mandate will ultimately be decisive.
In the contemporary global system, no state can act on illegal immigration unilaterally. Just because one state decides that a person is a citizen of another country, the other country is not obligated to accept that determination. One way in which governments act on deportation is to sign bilateral agreements for the readmission of nationals of the relevant country. Not only is there no such agreement between India and Bangladesh, by all indications India has never approached the subject of deportation with Bangladesh.
There is enough indication that the ruling party would have preferred to pass the Citizenship Amendment Bill, 2016 before the completion of the NRC. But in Assam the bill was seen as deliberately muddling the situation. If Hindu unauthorised migrants from Bangladesh — including those who have come recently — have a path to Indian citizenship, their exclusion from the NRC becomes a matter of no consequence.
The shelving of the bill has given the ruling party a temporary reprieve. But it will probably be re-introduced in Parliament in some form in the near future. If the proposed amendment becomes law, the impact on the actual meaning of the NRC will be huge. While Hindus who are found to be ineligible for inclusion in the NRC will no longer be considered illegal immigrants, the rest of the people excluded from the NRC will remain in a state of “permanent temporariness.”
It is hard not to see the shelved citizenship amendment bill as one that would effectively introduce into Indian citizenship law a distinction between non-Muslim and Muslim immigrants crossing the Partition’s borders. In the eyes of many in the ruling party establishment, this is an unfinished piece of Partition business.
The Supreme Court has been a key player in the NRC exercise. Not only has the two-judge Supreme Court bench closely supervised and monitored the process, it has weighed in on a number of related issues. For instance, the original ruling directed the Indian government to complete the fencing of the border and to maintain “vigil along the riverine boundary… by continuous patrolling.” It had also directed the government to develop, in consultation with the government of Bangladesh, appropriate mechanisms and procedures for deporting those declared illegal migrants.
Significantly, the Supreme Court bench appears to have given the least attention to this part of its original direction. The NRC is now nearly complete without any progress on this part of the process. The judicialisation of matters that are ultimately political is always a mixed blessing. It raises unusually high expectations. But courts cannot deliver political miracles. Only a naïve legalist would expect the Supreme Court to magically settle Assam’s vexed foreigner question — a profoundly political question that is ultimately about the birth of the republic itself.
The public interest will be best served if our politicians now move to end the game of taking credit and assigning blame. The Supreme Court bench said on Tuesday that the complete draft NRC could not be the basis of any coercive action against anyone. The home minister has also given that assurance. But words are unlikely to give confidence to people whose names are not included.
Citizenship is “the right to have rights.” Not to be included in the NRC is serious business. We are in uncharted territory.
I would like to read the silence on the question of deportation — in the diplomatic arena as well as in the Supreme Court’s otherwise proactive agenda — as a positive sign. Perhaps deportation is not what anyone in authority has in mind. Even in that case, can a democracy permit 4 million people to be in a state of “liminal legality”?
In certain circles, there has been talk of giving work permits to those not included in the NRC. But a work-permit regime functions on the premise that the person has full rights of citizenship in another country. Giving work permits to people that India would like to expel but can’t because Bangladesh does not accept them as citizens, is not really a work-permit regime. It only creates a group of right-less people who can work but cannot claim any other rights in India or anywhere else.
Moving forward, we should not rule out amnesty. Surely, if we were considering giving citizenship to minorities on humanitarian grounds, it is not that much of a leap to consider that we expand our moral horizon and extend the humanitarian umbrella to others as well.
The writer is professor of political studies, Bard College, New York
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Peace Is Doable
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Peace Is Doable
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"Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man [woman] whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him [her]. Will he [she] gain anything by it? Will it restore him [her] to a control over his [her] own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj [freedom] for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubts and your self melt away." - MK Gandhi, 1948
Aman Biradari Video | http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhA81PWJYE8