Above: Members of the All Assam students’ Union at a rally in Guwahati/Photo: UNI

Updating the National Register of Citizens in Assam was part of an accord in 1971 but with progress being slow, the apex court has said that work be completed by May 31, leading to panic among Bengali Muslims

~By Seema Guha

Who is a foreigner and who is a genuine citizen is a debate which has dominated Assam’s politics for several decades. Today, with the National Register of Citizens (NRC) being updated in the state, there is panic among Bengali-speaking Muslims that they may be dubbed foreigners.

The Assamese fear that they will be reduced to a minority in their own state by illegal Muslim immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh. This resulted in a massive popular movement to weed out the illegal immigrants in the late 1970s, led by the All Assam Students Union.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS

The popular agitation, which also led to widespread violence and blockade of the state’s oil going out to the rest of the country, came to an end in 1985 with the signing of an agreement between the  student leaders, the centre and the state government. The state and the centre promised to throw out illegal foreign nationals residing in the state. All alleged Bangladeshis who entered Assam before the midnight of March 24, 1971, were accepted as Indian citizens. The cut-off date was chosen because on March 25, 1971, the Pakistani Army had started operations in Dhaka, marking the start of the Bangladesh War. All those who came in after that date were considered illegal and would be deported back to Bangladesh. Updating the NRC was part of the accord.

Though the student leaders of the agitation formed a brand new political party (Asom Gana Parishad) and came to power in 1985 on the promise of ridding the state of illegal migrants, very few “foreigners’’ were deported. In short, once the students came to power and formed the AGP government, they did little to throw off the alleged Bengali Muslim migrants. In the meantime, the anxiety of the Assamese continued as the Census figures of 2011 showed a massive increase in the Muslim population of the state.

As in all cases where the Executive flounders, the Supreme Court stepped in and the Assam government was ordered to begin work on the NRC, which would determine a person’s nationality. Several documents, including land records as well as voter identity, had to be produced. The family tree had also to be traced. Genuine middle class Assamese-speaking citizens have had problems finding all the papers needed. One can imagine the plight of the illiterate rural poor, many of them landless, and moving from one part of the state to the other. If these people happen to be Bengali-speaking Muslims who have lived in the state for several generations, they are at once targeted as illegal migrants from Bangladesh. Considering that most of the officials checking the papers are already suspicious of Bengali Muslims, complaints of harassment are widespread.

A pilot project to start work on the NRC began only in 2010. But because protests by the All Assam Minority Students Union during the rule of Congress Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi led to violence, the effort was soon abandoned. The updating exercise resumed in March 2013. In October 2014, the Supreme Court ordered that work on the NRC be completed by January 31, 2016, but the NRC authority missed the deadline and the apex court is now directly monitoring  the exercise.

FIRST DRAFT

On December 31, 2017 midnight, Assam released the first “partial” draft of the NRC. This was thanks to the Supreme Court order, which made it mandatory for the state to deliver. The Court has decreed that the work of updating the NRC be completed by May 31, a Herculean task considering the numbers involved. The first draft, recognising 1.9 crore of the 3.29 crore applicants, was published in December. This draft, done in a hurry, left out the names of many genuine citizens. But the state government has promised that this initial draft will be corrected.

The centre approached the Supreme Court for more time to prepare the final draft. But a two-judge bench comprising Justices Ranjan Gogoi and RF Nariman turned down the request of Attorney General KK Venugopal.

A delegation led by Assam Pradesh Congress Committee President Ripun Bora met NRC state coordinator Prateek Hajela recently. The Congress complained that ordinary people were being harassed in the process of verification. The poor and illiterate are running from pillar to post to verify documents and are being summoned on the flimsiest grounds for questioning their antecedents. While it is understandable that all documents need to be checked, there must also be volunteers who can guide the illiterate. “The system put in place by the state coordinator of NRC is fundamentally flawed,” the Congress said in a memorandum submitted to Hajela.

“No one is sure what will happen. There are a number of cases before the constitutional bench of the Supreme Court, challenging the 1971 cut-off of the NRC in Assam. They say that Assam must also follow the all-India norm of 1951 as the date for citizenship,’’ said Guwahati-based analyst Haider Hussain. The hearings will begin sometime this month, he added.

WHAT’S THE SOLUTION?

The problem is that even if through this flawed system people get identified as Bangladeshis, what will Delhi do with them? Can they be sent back to Bangladesh? Dhaka will ask for proof before a single person is admitted back. None of the illegal migrants have papers to prove their nationality. Even the friendly government of Sheikh Hasina Wajed will not agree to welcome people who left Bangladesh after 1971, and have no documents to stake a claim.

Will thousands of migrants then be declared stateless? Will they face the same fate as the Rohingya Muslims of neighbouring Myanmar? The BJP government in Assam is already marginalising the Bengali Muslim immigrant. Himanta Biswa Sarma, the rising BJP star in the North-east, has already ensured that families with more than two children will not be eligible for government jobs, or any other facility provided to citizens by the state. This is an attempt to limit the size of families of poor Bengali-speaking Muslims. Or will they be confined to certain areas with restrictions on travel?

No one is sure if the authorities have thought about how they will tackle the fate of non-citizens. With Hindutva forces active in the region, and BJP governments both in the state and the centre, the aim is to ensure that Assam remains a Hindu-majority state. The government has the support of the Assamese. Most of the Hindus of Assam are originally from north India. The state was inhabited by tribals and adivasis in ancient times. So if the Hindutva forces who love to hark back to the past apply the same principles here, Assamese-speaking Hindus would also be considered outsiders.

Once the complicated NRC process is completed and non-citizens identified, a humanitarian crisis may be at hand.