MOIRABARI, India, July 29, 2005 (IslamOnline.net &
News Agencies) Like thousands of Muslim settlers in India's northeastern
state of Assam, Sarifa Begum is living in fear of deportation or even
death.
"We are the targets of ethnic
Assamese. They will kill us if they get a chance," said
Begum, Reuters reported Friday, July 29.
The gaunt 42-year-old Begum, a mother of four children
and her family's only breadwinner, has lost her job as a housemaid and is
now struggling to feed her family.
"We are starving because I can't go out to work,"
Begum said.
Begum's descendants were among hundreds of thousands
of Muslim migrants who moved from former East Pakistan now Bangladesh --
to Assam decades ago in search of a better life.
Resented by the Muslim influx,
local Assamese, led by student leaders, killed some 3,000 Muslim settlers
including women and children in 1983.
In response to that massacre, the Indian government
granted citizenship in 1985 to all settlers from the former East Pakistan
who came to Assam before 1971.
In a stroke, millions of migrants became Indian
citizens. But hundreds of thousands of others, who came after 1971,
remained illegal.
Since then, hundreds of thousands more have swamped
Assam, trying to escape grinding poverty in Bangladesh.
The lush paddy fields and the sandy, shifting plains
of the mighty Brahmaputra river that divide India and Bangladesh are
natural transit routes for the Muslim migrants.
Hundreds take rickety boats each week to cross the
river, which at some places is five km (three miles) wide, into
India.
The legal migrants, who now form almost 30 percent of
Assam's 26 million population, are mainly farmhands or river fishermen in
rural areas. In towns, they work in construction, as rag-pickers, rickshaw
pullers or maids.
Plight
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Hundreds of Bangladeshi Muslims take
rickety boats each week to cross the river into India in search for
a better life. (Reuters)
|
As the national register of citizenship has not been updated
since 1970, many Muslim migrants fear that whatever documents they possess
will not be recognized, a matter compounding the plight of the Muslim
migrants in the Indian state.
Begum, herself, has an Indian birth certificate but some
Assamese groups have dismissed it as a forgery, a common complaint among
legal Muslim migrants, many of whom are now calling for identity
cards.
In response to the Indian authorities' failure to get to
grips with the problem, ethnic Assamese groups began in May a new campaign
to oust illegal Muslim migrants.
The campaign has seen thousands of Muslims flee their homes
and threatened to snare millions of legal Muslim migrants like
Begum.
Matters have become worse for Muslim migrants after India's
highest court issued a ruling this month scrapping a law that made
deportation difficult because it put the onus of proving a suspect
migrant's citizenship on the complainant.
The law was mainly framed in 1983 to prevent a witch-hunt
against legal Muslim migrants in the Indian state, but ethnic Assamese
claim that the law ended up protecting illegal Muslim migrants.
The court ruling has left the Muslim migrants more
apprehensive, according to Reuters.
"We are afraid, today or tomorrow, we will be kicked out of
Assam," Nasiruddin Ahmed, a 90-year-old retired college principal whose
family came to Assam from East Bengal, now Bangladesh, more than a century
ago, told Reuters.
Fozili Rahman, a cook who came to India before 1971, echoed a
similar concern.
"We hardly move out of our settlements after dark," he
said.
Counter-Campaign
Legal Muslim migrants, who have been facing discrimination
and persecution because of their origins, are now campaigning to obtain
identity cards to prove their Indian citizenship.
"We have been here for generations, but our persecution
hasn't stopped. Let there be some way of telling the legal migrants from
illegal settlers," Haroon Al-Rashid, chief of a Muslim students'
organization, told Reuters.
Assam's authorities and student leaders insist that they
would offer protection to the naturalized Muslim citizens.
"We are determined to push back those foreigners who have
come after 1971. But at the same time, we will ensure safety and security
to those who have settled earlier," said Shankar Prasad Rai, an Assamese
student leader.
In 2002, India's then home minister Lal Krishna Advani of the
nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, said there were 20 million illegal
Bangladeshis in India, calling them a security risk.
But Dhaka denies Bangladeshis cross into India in large
numbers, saying New Delhi is harassing Indian Muslims.
