[Though the tension, at times turning violent, between the (majority)
ethnic Assamese and the (minority) Bengali-speaking inhabitants is the
major conflict, as the sl. no. I. and II. below amply bring out, that's,
however, not the only one.

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.
(Ref.: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellie_massacre>.)
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.
(Ref.: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assam_separatist_movements>.)

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.
https://thewire.in/rights/assam-nrc-anti-foreigner-bengali-assamese

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.
https://scroll.in/article/889905/citizens-register-how-the-1947-sylhet-partition-led-to-assams-politics-of-the-foreigner

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.
https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/assam-nrc-draft-list-names-citizenship-5287213/

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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