Senior leader from Bharatiya Janata Party Sundhanshu Mittal was caught red-handed when he lied to misrepresent the number of Muslims living in Assam. Mittal has been severely criticised on social media for doing the same.
In a story published on media outlet Arab News over NRC (National Register of Citizens) – which is cause of many problems for the Muslims living in Assam – Mittal was quoted saying, “The demography of Assam has changed completely in the last 40 years.”
“There used to be only five percent Muslim population in 1947, which has risen to over 35 percent now,” said Mittal to the Arab News. “This consists largely of illegal migrants who have come from Bangladesh,” he added.
Mittal was commenting over the category of Doubtful voters, called ‘D-voter’ where a person’s name has been struck off from the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and thereby denied basic fundamental rights guaranteed to every Indian citizen. Assam has been facing this condition since decades where ordinary Indian citizens have been marked as D-voter after they failed to produce proof of their citizenship according to the NRC rules.
“Illegal migrant” is a terminology to target Bengali-speaking Muslims who have been settled in Assam for generations.
However, soon after the story was published, Aman Wadud, a Guwahati-based human rights lawyer countered Mittal’s claim by pointing out that the Muslim population of undivided Assam was 24% in 1951, which increased after Meghalaya, Nagaland, Arunachal and Mizoram were separated from Assam.
Soon, the Twitterati started making fun of Mittal for misrepresenting the fact. Mittal got shamed again when he tried to defend himself – or say-troll Wadud and others. In his tweet, Mittal admitted that there was no census in 1947, but he failed to answer a general query that if there was no census in 1947, then how was he able to pull a figure of five percent Muslim population in Assam in the same year?
The so-called mistake of Mittal again exposes the fake rhetoric over which the whole illegal immigrants issue, fuelled and used by BJP, is based. Recently, the Supreme Court of India granted the use of verified Gram Panchayat certificates as the proof of citizenship, but still many Indians are waiting to be counted as one.
Courtesy: Two Circles