The issue of illegal migrants, locally referred to as “Bangladeshis”, has dominated Assam’s electoral landscape since 1979 and was brought to the national political discourse in 1983 when a controversial Assembly election led to the massacre of 2,191 Muslims in Nellie and neighbouring hamlets, about 70 km east of Guwahati.
That incident occurred against the backdrop of the ferment due to the anti-foreigner Assam Agitation whose trigger was a Lok Sabha byelection that had to be put off in 1979 because of alleged large-scale inclusion of new voters on the State’s electoral rolls.
Almost 40 years down the line, the issue refuses to die down despite an ongoing expensive exercise to update the 1951 National Register of Citizens (NRC) that was expected to help bring closure on the issue. The primary reason, political observers say, was the Bharatiya Janata Party’s bid to get the controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016, passed in Parliament.
The Bill sought to hasten the process of granting Indian citizenship to non-Muslims who fled religious persecution in Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan till December 31, 2014. The BJP’s aggressive push on the Bill also led the regional Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) — born in 1985 as a product of the sub-nationalism that rode on the six-year-long Assam Agitation — to walk out of the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government headed by Sarbananda Sonowal of the BJP.
But on March 12, the two parties buried their differences over the Bill and came together again, surprising the Opposition Congress as well as jaatiyatabadi (Assamese nationalist) groups. These civil society groups had hailed the AGP’s January 7 decision to part ways with the BJP, which they had accused of trying to make Assam a dumping ground for “Hindu Bangladeshis” in pursuance of its Hindutva agenda.
“Rejoining the BJP is perhaps suicide for the AGP brand of regionalism, which could have made the Bill a major issue especially after it triggered widespread protests in Assam and elsewhere in the northeast,” said Dilip Chandan, editor of Asom Bani , one of the oldest Assamese periodicals. “But then, people at the grassroots were practically immune to this issue that fanned a few sentiments in small towns. The outcome of the panchayat polls in December made this apparent,” Mr. Chandan said.
The BJP won the rural polls with more than 41% of the votes. And while the Congress came second, the once locally powerful AGP, which contested alone, was virtually wiped out, as was the All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF) led by perfume baron Badruddin Ajmal.
“The Bill will be an issue to an extent that will vary from region to region,” said Haider Hussain, a social worker and member of an anti-Bill forum. “For instance, in eastern Assam, where the resentment against the Bill was high unlike in western Assam. But, it is a fact that the issue does not bother the villagers.”
Confusion seems to have gripped the Bengali-dominated Barak Valley too in the wake of the BJP-AGP alliance.
“Unless there’s mass amnesia, the alliance seems as much illogical and absurd as it is for exigency of votes,” said Tapodheer Bhattacharjee, former Vice-Chancellor of Silchar’s Assam University. “How else can one explain the reunion between a party seen as pro-Bengali and another with contrasting views. The voters have a choice between opportunistic parties of varying degrees.”
The Congress, though, is confident that the Bill and the handling of the NRC would spell the BJP’s doom. “The people have seen through the BJP’s polarising agenda of saffronisation and bid to sell Assam to a set of industrialists,” asserted State Congress president Ripun Bora. “As for the AGP, the Assamese people will not pardon them for the betrayal,” Mr. Bora said.
The stakes are high for the Congress, which won three of Assam’s 14 Lok Sabha seats in 2014, its worst ever performance in a general election. The BJP in turn won seven seats, opening the floodgates to a region that had hitherto been considered incompatible to its ideology.
The BJP won the Assam Assembly election in 2016 too, took over the reins in Arunachal Pradesh and went on to form alliance governments in Manipur, Meghalaya, Nagaland, and Tripura. Assam Finance Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, the BJP’s main poll strategist, asserted the NDA would win at least 20 of the 25 seats in the northeast.
