By Ananya S Guha
The Citizenship Bill proposed in Assam with amendments, has, as expected raised a furore. Or was it expected? However, it has certainly created an uproar among Non Governmental Organizations, Public Bodies and Student Unions. The bill proposes to seek legitimacy of those nationals entering India from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan etc even as late as the present time. However the Assam Accord signed by the Govt of India and the All Assam Students Union says categorically that those migrants entering India after 25th March 1985 are deemed to be illegal. So, obviously the question is why this turn around now? Is it to protect only minority Hindus? This is a question raised by some. Immigrants are immigrants and they should be treated on an equal and common footing. This is the main argument.
So let us analyse the entire matter. In trying to enforce a new Citizenship Bill the government is certainly reneging on the Assam Accord. This shows a clear bias towards Hindus only, but the government may give a rejoinder that it is also meant for Christians and other minority groups such as Jews, Sikhs, Parsis and Buddhists. However the people of North East India view it mainly as a case of Bangladesh immigrants, as the region, particularly Assam is inundated with them. By echoing protests, civil society and social bodies in Assam have thrown caution to the winds in the belief that Hindu migration will be acceptable and not just Muslim migration. This a very just appropriation of matters, and will certainly take the central government by surprise. Moreover it might have thought that after the victory of its main party in Assam, there would be no reaction to the Bill. The reaction however has been quite cohesive and not knee jerking. In fact the Chief Minister of Meghalaya has opposed the Bill and so has a Bharatiya Janata Party MP from Assam. The AGP has threatened to withdraw support to the BJP in Assam, and extremist groups who are in the midst of peace talks, have threatened to revive their ultra movements.
The scene then is more than ticklish: it is charged with emotion, and potentially possessing a threat to the supposed peace that is there in North East India. The peace apparently is very fragile and again, fractious groups can take over.
The fact is, as journalist Anirban Roy has pointed out in his writing in The North East Today, a BJP resurgence in Assam, cannot be equated with a Hindu resurgence of the Sangh Parivar, in North India. The complex social- religious- ethnic diversity of Assam has not apparently been comprehended by those at the helm. Moreover, Assam has a large section of Assamese Muslims who historically are as much a part of its ethos, literature and culture as the Assamese Hindus. That the Barak Valley people of Assam may not be opposed to the idea of the central government has thrown a spanner in the works and has tangled it with ethnic/ linguistic divides. One fervently hopes that this is not so, but the objective of raising issues by the people of Assam in particular, and the people of North East India in general has shown clearly that it is not a Hindu Muslim binary – something that was nonchalantly thought of, in the past. Moreover people even say this is a political and fundamentalist aspiration of the Central Government, raised on supposed dialectics of the Sanghis.
So, the Hindu Muslim divide though in an unexpected manner; is raised to a torpedo to facilitate the Center’s plans. Has it to do with demography, of one linguistic group prevailing over the other ?. Even if it is not so, it is unfair that Assam should bear the brunt of immigrants, irrespective of religion. The Central Government cannot simply overlook the finery of the Assam Accord a fall out of the Assam Movement in the eighties, and implant a new act or bill, to harvest more votes, the Hindu votes. This is a policy which is corrosive and divisive, acting against the interests of the country.
So the matter is not only sensitive, but also totally misconstrued and misinterpreted by the Central Government. The people do not want it as, one religious group pitted against another, it is the nature and volume of the migration which poses demographic, linguistic and cultural threats which is central to the issue. Central Governments over the past and not only now have indubitably failed to perceive the North East Indian ethos in its proper diverse, cultural, linguistic and historical antecedents. They have resorted to simplification, black and white and not as a riot of colours. They have also failed to see historical processes of cultural assimilation.
However that, nothing or very little was done to implement the Assam Accord, even decades after its signing is of course another wider matter. Was identification of the illegal immigrants carried on? Or are we now to wait for the much debated National Register Of Citizens to answer that question.