Will Brahmaputra and Barak rivers unite or divide Assam?
Fresh unrest is simmering in the north-eastern Indian state of Assam over Prime Minister Narendra Modi government's move to give citizenship to "persecuted" religious minorities in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan. The move dates back to 2016 when the Modi government tabled in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament, the Citizenship Amendment Bill to amend the Constitution for the purpose. It had run into stiff resistance from the Congress party-led opposition parties in the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of parliament, where the BJP lacks majority on its own, following which it was referred to a joint parliamentary committee to examine the Bill and elicit the views of the people of Assam.
The Bill seeks to give citizenship to Hindus, Christians, Parsis, Jains, Buddhists and Sikhs who came to India after facing religious "persecution" in the three countries mentioned above.
The immediate trigger for the latest round of unrest in Assam was provided by the visit of the committee to the state and its meetings there from October 22 to 25. Resenting the committee's visit, a 12-hour shutdown was enforced on October 23 by 46 outfits of ethnic people that paralysed normal life in all parts of the state barring Cachar, Hailakandi and Karimganj districts of Bangla-speaking people, most of whom have migrated from erstwhile East Pakistan and Bangladesh and are in majority in the Barak Valley region of Assam.
The warning by the BJP government in Assam to deduct the pay of those of its employees staying away from office on the strike day and its appeal to traders to keep open their businesses failed to stop the success of the shutdown. Not just that. Even the BJP's ally Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) broke ranks with its ruling coalition partner and backed the strike for political compulsions because the party's main plank rests on opposition to migrants from Bangladesh irrespective of their religious identity.
The supporters of the strike argue that the Citizenship Amendment Bill militates against the tripartite Assam Accord of 1985 which ended six years of violent agitation on the "foreigners" issue in Assam led by All Assam Students' Union. They point out that Clause 6 of that Accord provides for a constitutional and administrative ground "to protect, preserve and promote the cultural, social, linguistic identity and heritage of Assam" which they claim is threatened by the influx of people from Bangladesh.
The indigenous people of Assam fear that the influx of more people as legitimate citizens under the Citizenship Amendment Bill will further erode their numerical superiority in the state. According to one estimate quoting the 2011 census, the number of Bangla-speaking people in Assam has gone up from 21.67 percent in 1991 to 28.91 percent in 2011. On the other hand, the number of Assamese language-speakers came down from 57.81 percent to 48.38 percent during the corresponding period. It is these figures that the indigenous people of Assam are jittery about even though the Citizenship Amendment Bill is not Assam-centric and applies to the entirety of India.
The fear that more influx of non-Assamese people into Assam will upset the existing demography is what had driven the introduction of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) of 1951. The NRC is being updated and the December 31 deadline for the final NRC is drawing near, causing anxiety among the 4.7 million people of the state's population who were left out of the final draft NRC in July this year. The NRC and the Citizenship Amendment Bill have together underlined the ethnic rift in sharper focus dividing Assam between indigenous people in the Brahmaputra River Valley and the Barak valley.
The contrasting response to the shutdown in Barak region and other parts of Assam once again brought out the glaring fault-lines between the Bangla-speaking people and the non-Bangla speaking populace in the state. The shutdown coinciding with the visit of the joint parliamentary committee was obviously aimed at putting pressure on the Indian government to rescind the Citizenship Amendment Bill. The Modi government is keen to secure parliamentary approval for the Bill to burnish its Hindutva ideological plank in the run-up to the coming state assembly elections in five states and the parliamentary polls next year.
The dilemma for the BJP, and for the Congress party as well, has been about how to strike a balance between its concerns for majority indigenous people and its Hindutva plank. It has tried to do that through two separate sets of initiative—updating of the NRC and the Citizenship Amendment Bill. What is common between the two initiatives is that they seek to keep out certain sections of the people in terms of religious, social and linguistic identities in a pluralistic country like India.
In this divisive time, one cannot but recall those immortal opening lines from a song by Assam's and India's cultural icon Bhupen Hazarika: "Ganga amaar maa, Padma amaar maa / O amaar dui chokhey dui joler dhara Meghna Jamuna."
So, will the Brahmaputra and the Barak unite Assam or divide it?
Pallab Bhattacharya is a special correspondent of The Daily Star.
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