The process of delimitation can provide the safeguards that the exercise to update the National Register of Citizens (NRC) could not, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said on January 1, 2023.
But he was critical of the criterion of delimiting Assembly constituencies on the basis of population, which he said was akin to punishing those who abide by the government’s two-child policy and rewarding those who disregard this policy to “produce 12 children”.
“The NRC was unsuccessful and the Assam Accord did not live up to expectations. Delimitation for redrawing Assembly constituencies can be one exercise through which we can safeguard the future of Assam for two decades by at least ensuring the State Assembly is less affected by demographic changes,” Mr. Sarma told journalists during a New Year interaction.
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His party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had opposed the last delimitation exercise in 2008, insisting that it should be carried out only after the NRC exercise to weed out “illegal immigrants” was completed. The term is often used to mean Muslims who came or relocated from present-day Bangladesh.
Started in October 2013, the Supreme Court-monitored NRC exercise worth ₹1,602.66 crore resulted in the publication of the complete draft of citizens in August 2019. The draft list left out 19.06 lakh people out of 3.3 crore applications for failing to submit documents proving their citizenship “beyond reasonable doubt”.
The BJP and NGOs batting for indigenous people rejected the NRC draft list as faulty and petitioned the apex court for a revision. The general belief is that more than 40 lakh “Bangladeshis” have been living in the State illegally since August 25, 1971 – the cut-off date for detecting, detaining and deporting such people according to the Assam Accord of 1985.
The Assam Accord prescribes constitutional, legislative and administrative safeguards to eventually reduce the political representation of non-indigenous communities.
“Delimitation is being done in the interest of Assam and its (indigenous) people. But the exercise is non-political, based on the 2001 census data,” Mr. Sarma said, panning critics of the exercise for being emotional and not logical.
“After the emotions associated with the Assam Agitation and NRC, it is time to follow logic and take tough decisions for the sake of race and the country. The calculation is simple: each of Assam’s 126 constituencies should have 2.11 lakh voters if the 2.55 crore people as in 2001 are divided equally with a margin of 10%,” he said.
“We cannot but undertake the delimitation this time on the mandated policy of going by population. But I believe Parliament has to debate the population benchmark for the next exercise, as it invariably rewards some people for having more children against government policies and punishes others who follow the rules to have smaller families,” the Chief Minister said.
Ahead of the delimitation exercise, the State government on December 30 remerged four new districts with those they were bifurcated from “for administrative expediency and in the interest of public service”.
Three of these pre-merger districts – Bajali, Biswanath and Hojai – have a sizeable population of Bengali-speaking or Bengal-origin Muslims while the fourth, Tamulpur, has had issues between the tribal and non-tribal indigenous communities.
