NRC back in political focus in Shah-Mamata battle
After a brief hiatus, the issue of the NRC in Assam and "illegal migrants" from Bangladesh seems to have returned to the focus of political discourse in India.
The issue figured prominently in the speeches of political rivals Bharatiya Janata Party President Amit Shah and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee at separate events on November 15. Addressing two poll rallies in BJP-ruled Madhya Pradesh where assembly polls are due soon, Shah said his party, if voted back to power at the centre in next year's parliamentary elections, would trace and drive out "infiltrators" from Bangladesh. Shah said infiltrators were coming to India since 1971 and formed the "vote bank" of opposition parties like Congress and Trinamool Congress.
Scaling up his diatribe against opposition leaders, Shah said that after over 40 lakh people were left out in the final draft of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam, leaders like Congress president Rahul Gandhi, Mamata Banerjee, Telugu Desam Party president N Chandrababu Naidu and Samajwadi Party patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav "whined as if their granny had died". In raking up the NRC issue, Shah has picked up from where he left till a few days ago when he, during his speeches at different functions, was quoted by Indian media reports as terming the illegal migrants as "termites" and said the BJP would detect, deport and disenfranchise illegal migrants.
Interestingly, the word "termites" never figured in the excerpts of Shah's speech posted on the party's website. It may be recalled that the BJP had adopted a resolution at a meeting of its key decision-making forum the National Executive in New Delhi on September 8, congratulating Modi and Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal for implementing NRC in the state. The "illegal migrants" issue figured in Shah's speech to BJP workers as late as November 12.
On the same day when Shah spoke at rallies in Madhya Pradesh on November 15, Mamata alleged at a meeting close to the border with Bangladesh that "dirty politics" is going on in the name of the final draft of National Register of Citizens which left out 4.7 million people, in Assam as names of "genuine" voters have been struck off the list. While Mamata's strident criticism of the NRC was familiar, what was significant was that she chose to air it during her visit to Thakurnagar in West Bengal's North 24 Parganas during the birth centenary celebrations of Binapani Devi Thakur, the nonagenarian matriarch of the community who is revered among the Matua Hindu sect which originally hails from what now constitutes Bangladesh and migrated to West Bengal and Assam in large number after the Partition in 1947 and afterwards. Besides conferring the West Bengal government's top award, "Bangabibhusan", on Binapani Devi, Mamata announced a number of sops to woo the Matua community including allocation of land for a proposed university to be named after the founders of the sect Harichand Thakur and Guruchand Thakur.
A large number of people belonging to the Matua community in Assam has been left out of the NRC in Assam. Trinamool Congress legislator Mamata Bala Thakur is a Trinamool Congress legislator in West Bengal. Mamata Banerjee made it a point to recall in her speech at Thakurnagar that Mamata Thakur, along with seven other party leaders, were not allowed to enter the Bangla-speaking majority Silchar town in Assam when they had gone there soon after the publication of the final draft of NRC.
Mamata has in the past accused the BJP of mounting a polarising narrative on the NRC issue and the Modi government of trying to make millions of people "stateless" in Assam. And she kept up the trend on Thursday too. Apparently in riposte to Shah, Mamata said in Thakurnagar that many people from erstwhile East Pakistan had come to India as refugees and that all those who came to India before 1971 are very much Indian citizens. Under the 1985 Assam peace accord, the cut-off year for deciding the issue of Indian citizenship in Assam is 1971.
Mamata, who has been highly critical of the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi since the publication of the final draft of NRC on July 30, has been making full use of the emotive issue of linguistic and ethnic fault lines that were revived in Assam by the NRC and the issue of Indian government's move to grant citizenship to "persecuted" religious minorities in Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan. As part of her efforts, she had also sent a team of her party leaders, including Mamata Bala Thakur, who met the families of five Bangla-speaking persons that were shot dead by suspected United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA-Independent faction) in Tinsukia district of Assam.
The reasons for Mamata to reach out to the Matua community are two-fold: i) The community is estimated to constitute the second largest group of "namashudra" castes which form the backbone of Trinamool Congress' core support base and; ii) More importantly, it may help her efforts to counter a perception, created in certain quarters in West Bengal by the BJP's sustained campaign, of her government being soft towards "illegal migrants" from Bangladesh which, for the saffron party, is an euphemism for Muslims.
It is the sustained Hindutva narrative of the BJP that has forced the Congress party to adopt a soft Hindutva posture. With its President Rahul Gandhi beginning to visit temples since the Gujarat state assembly elections late last year, and his party promising, among other things, in its manifesto for the coming Madhya Pradesh state polls, certain steps with religious overtones like building a route taken by Lord Rama during his exile, setting up cow conservation centres, commercial production of cow urine and opening a spiritual department in the state administration. There is a recognition among the major parties in India that politics has to be based on a blend of developmental agenda and nationalism and sub-texts of nationalism in different forms.
The pitch of the political rhetoric over the NRC and the illegal migrants issues is likely to rise further as the parliamentary elections draw closer.
Pallab Bhattacharya is a special correspondent at The Daily Star.