Political equations are being struck anew in Assam, ahead of Assembly elections in the state in the summer of 2016, largely centred around the issue of illegal migrants from Bangladesh.
The ruling Congress seems to be the loser in the matter of forging such equations. First, Himanta Biswa Sarma, the protege and once right-hand man of Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi left the party with a bunch of MLAs to join the main Opposition party in the state, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Then, perfume baron and All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF) President Maulana Badruddin Ajmal spurned Gogoi's offer to fight the Assembly elections jointly with the Congress.
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But is it all for the best?
On September 7, the Narendra Modi government at the Centre issued a notification that it would grant citizenship to all those from Bangladesh's minority communities - Hindus, Jains, Christians and others - who had crossed over to India (Assam or elsewhere) before December 13, 2014.
The Centre's rationale was that Hindus in Bangladesh and Pakistan had fled those countries due to religious discrimination and had nowhere else to go, so it was India's duty to offer them shelter.
The Centre's decision prompted two influential students unions - the All Assam Students' Union (AASU) and the Asom Jatiya-tabadi Yuva Chhatra Parishad (AJYCP) - to launch state-wide protests. They said the decision was an attempt to shelter illegal Bangladeshi immigrants and alleged that this was in violation of the Assam Accord, which was framed after a long struggle and the loss of many lives in Assam. The accord was signed in New Delhi on August 15, 1985 between the government of India and the leaders of the Assam movement. It states that those who had settled in Assam from Bangladesh after March 25, 1971, were illegal migrants, not citizens.
Caught on the defensive over the notification issued by the BJP-led government at the Centre, the party's Assam unit has not been able to respond. Meanwhile, the AASU and the AJYCP are holding large rallies.
Against this backdrop, Ajmal's announcement that his party would fight the elections alone because it wanted no share of the blame for the Congress' 15-year 'misrule' in the state is significant. The Congress, which used to have a prominent presence in Muslim-dominated areas, has lost ground to the AIUDF over the years. Muslim votes can only be divided between these two parties when they do not tally in total.
Add to this, discrepancies in the voter lists and growth in the Muslim population, and illegal migration becomes an emotive issue. Way back in 1979 when the names of 45,000 illegal migrants were found on the Mangaldoi Assembly election voter list, the issue of illegal Bangladeshi Muslim migrants becoming Indian citizens had taken root. Between 1994 and 1997, out of 126 constituencies in Assam, 57 showed a 20 per cent rise in the number of voters whereas the average all-India rise for the same period was 7.4 per cent.
In 1998, then Assam governor Lt Gen (retd) S K Sinha flagged the issue in a letter to then President of India K R Narayanan. Sinha wrote: "The influx of illegal migrants is turning the lower Assam districts into a Muslim-majority region. It may only be a matter of time before a demand for their merger with Bangladesh is made… The loss of lower Assam will sever the entire land mass of the Northeast from the rest of India and the rich natural resources of that region will be lost to the nation."
Parliament enacted The Illegal Migration Act in December 1983, which is applicable only to Assam. It stated that anybody settled in Assam before March 25, 1971, was a legal citizen. For the rest of India, the cut-off date for acquiring Indian citizenship was July 19, 1948. The Act also put the onus on the complainant rather than the accused to prove the latter's citizenship status in contrast to The Foreigners Act, 1946.
The Act failed to effectively identify and deport illegal migrants. In 2005, a three-judge Supreme Court bench, including then chief justice R C Lahoti and justice G P Mathur, observed that the Act had "created the biggest hurdle and is the main impediment or barrier in identification and deportation of illegal migrants". The Bench also noted that despite the fact that inquiries were initiated into 310,759 cases under the Act, only 10,015 people had been declared illegal migrants and only 1,481 physically expelled as of April 30, 2000.
With the Modi government's order, while people from Bangladesh's minority communities, who had migrated to India illegally, become legitimate, there is no effort to address the problems of Muslims of that country, who had taken the same path.
Ajmal believes he can capitalise on the Muslim disaffection in Assam. The BJP is not in a comfortable position: it is unable to explain why it seems to be discriminating between illegal Muslim migrants and those from other minority communities. Such questions of identity and citizenship are likely to become the biggest issues in the 2016 polls in the state.