A Committee formed by the Assam government has made a proposal that a census be conducted to identify Assamese Muslims and ID cards be issued to them. The proposal is controversial as it seeks to distinguish between Assamese speaking Muslims and Bengali speaking Muslims.

Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma had held a meeting titled Alaap Alochana – Empowering Religious Minorities with 150 intellectuals and respected members of the Assamese Muslim community in July last year. Here several matters related to Assam’s Muslim community were discussed including the “two-child” policy to control the growth of Muslim population, and how to distinguish between “indigenous” Muslims and those who allegedly entered the state illegally from Bangladesh. It was decided at this meeting to form eight sub-committees to come up with a roadmap for addressing a variety of challenges faced by the community.

It was one of these committees that submitted a report on April 21 to the Chief Minister, in which it proposed a definition for “indigenous” Muslims. NE Now quoted Sarma as saying, “The definition of indigenous or Assamese Muslim put forward is acceptable. Once we have accepted that we have a target group. The recommendation put forward by committees’ is can be done. Some may require legislative and executive measures besides financial support.” The same Committee also recommended that a census be conducted to “identify and document” such indigenous Muslims and they then be issued ID Cards or certificates.

According to the NE Now report, there are three main groups of Assamese Muslims – the Goryas, the Moriyas and the Deshis. “While the Deshis are 13th-century converts from indigenous communities such as Koch Rajbongshi and Mech, the Goriyas and Moriyas trace their lineage to converts as well as soldiers, artisans, etc. who came to the region during the Ahom rule,” said the report, adding, “These groups consider themselves distinct from the Bengali-speaking Muslims who migrated from East Bengal.”

The Committee also recommended that along the lines of provisions in Article 333, Assamese Muslims be given greater representation in the Assam Legislative Assembly and Parliament, reported The Sentinel. In response to this a government release, quoted by multiple publications, said, “An Upper House (Legislative Council) may be created in Assam as per Article 169 of the Indian Constitution. Once the Legislative Council is formed, specific number of seats may be reserved for Assamese Muslim community in this Council.”

However, this appears to be a strategy aimed at pitting Muslims against each other along linguistic lines. While, one group could benefit under these provisions, it makes it that much easier to target the other group i.e Bengali speaking Muslims, who have all been summarily clubbed together as “illegal migrants” as part of the ruling regime’s divisive agenda.

Oddly enough, there have been no voices opposing this move, even from Opposition parties in Assam, perhaps indicating either their own deep-seated hatred of the alleged “outsider” or fear of retaliation from voters. Ethno-linguistic equations have always been complicated in Assam. The influx of Bengalis, both Hindu and Muslim, from Bangladesh has been viewed as a threat to the demography of the state. But the regime has over the years added a distinct communal hue to the conflict, with the Sarma himself openly declaring that he did not need votes from Miya Muslims (a term used to refer to Bengali-speaking Muslims) in the run up to State Assembly elections last year.

Related:

Ajmal’s culture is my enemy: Assam CM’s openly anti-Muslim statement

Don’t need Miya Muslim vote: Himanta Biswa Sarma

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Image: Hindustan Times

The misuse of certain statistical ‘facts’ to stigmatise the already marginalised community of the  East Bengali origin in Assam today has become a matter of concern for all democratic Indians in Assam and elsewhere. The higher decadal growth rate of this community has been interpreted as a direct consequence of the bogey of ‘illegal infiltration’ from Bangladesh. A section of the media and a number of organisations are bent upon branding all of them with the much-abused label of "illegal infiltrators" from Bangladesh.  While poverty, illiteracy and lack of infrastructure continue to plague these people who face institutionalised as informal discrimination from the government as well as the entrenched classes. On April 3, 2017 a meeting in Delhi focused on this sticklish issue. It was organised by the Justice Forum – Assam, Delhi Action Committee for Assam.
 
Sabrangindia and Newsclick, in collaboration, bring you this Video Story from the speeches captured at the meeting. Among the prominent guests and speakers at this meeting were
Kuldeep Nayar, Veteran Journalist and Political Commentator, Sanjay Parikh, Senior Advocate, Supreme Court, Prof. Sanjay Hazarika, formerly Jamia Milia Islamia, Prof. Monirul Hussain from the Gauhati University, Prof. Dilip Bora, from the Gauhati University and Prof. Abdul Mannan, formerly from the Gauhati University.
 

The deep-seated antagonism towards these people has spread and taken over every organ of the state administrative machinery including the legislature. Evidently, there is an increasing trend to arbitrarily refer people from these marginalised communities as D-voters (doubtful voters) to Foreigners Tribunal. In a very recent example, 11 family members of the late Muhammad Amiruddin, who was the Assam Legislative Assembly’s first deputy speaker, have been referred by the border police to a Foreigners’ Tribunal as D-voters.

The central executive has stepped up the ‘popular’ resentment against these vulnerable groups, recently, through a proposed Act of Parliament that will amend the provisions of the Citizenship Act of 1955 to discriminate between ‘infiltrators’ from Bangladesh on the basis of religion, and grant citizenship to Hindus who have migrated to Assam from Bangladesh. Through a painfully slow process, various stakeholders and communities in Assam had come to a consensus to uphold the historic Assam Accord of 1985 and in the light of the Accord treat March 24, 1971 as the cut-off date to solve the question of "illegal immigration" from Bangladesh; anyone who entered Assam after midnight of March 24, 1971 would be considered a foreigner. It was also in this context that the National Register of Citizens (NRC) was being updated in Assam under the supervision of the Supreme Court. However, through the proposed amendments to the Citizenship Act the present ruling dispensation is trying to break the consensus built around the Assam Accord and render the updation of NRC meaningless.

The formation of a ‘popular’ consensus against these marginalised groups especially at the behest of the state government has forced the community to a state of utter vulnerability. Forces that advocate an extreme form of nationalism today in Assam have exploited the unenviable situation of these people and they have every chance of further advancing their communal agenda by building on a certain historical construction of the community as ‘outsiders.’

The public meeting was conceived as an intervention in this communally-charged political era that condemns the Assamese Muslims of East Bengali origin to a degraded form of existence and an endless cycle of prejudice and hostility. We aim to reach out to left and democratic circles in the country and initiate a dialogue among concerned groups on how to challenge the various forms of discrimination that these people face today. Our appeal is to invite like-minded organisations and individuals to understand the historical and contemporary condition of a people who has faced assaults on their basic rights for many decades in the state.

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http://www.thehoot.org/media-watch/media-practice/ndtvs-battleground-assam-wrong-on-history-and-facts-9289

Very often, the national media offers the excuse of the “tyranny of distance” to explain their negligence and ignorance about Assam. For most Delhi-based journalists, Assam is still an unknown territory. They go by whatever little is written about the contentious issues in Assam. Very few venture out to check the veracity of these reports. Truth and the ground realities are the casualties.

On Apri 8, NDTV aired a special programme on the Assam state election. It was hosted by India’s best known TV anchor Dr. Prannoy Roy who was joined by Dorab Sopariwala and Shekhar Gupta who spent three years reporting from the North East in the early ‘80s. The programme started with promotional trailer which said “TVs most credible faces come together to tell you who will be the big winner”. A short while later, Roy states “Assam has 31.2 million people and the Assamese are a minority in Assam”.

Sounds familiar? Yes, very often chauvinists and right-wingers say similar things, ie that the Assamese will become a minority in Assam. Some have even projected the year; a recent report that made the headlines was an independent survey done by Indrajit Barua who predicted that the indigenous population of Assam will be reduced to a minority by 2047. But according to Roy, this has already happened. He further states that migrants in Assam number 22 million and the original Assamese number only 10 million.

Then he breaks up the figure. He divides the entire population of Assam into two categories: “Migrants” and “Assamese”. In the first category of migrants are eleven million Muslims (the total Muslim population of Assam), six million Bengali Hindus and five million tea garden workers. In the second category of Assamese, according to Roy, are two million Ahoms (original Assamese as he calls them), 1.4 million Bodos, 1.4 million Christians, 0.6 million Mishing, and 1.6 million other tribes.

Fortunately history is different and so are the facts but Roy seems oblivious of both. The migration of Indo-Aryans to this region dates back to the Vedic period. Many Bengali-speaking Muslims who are indigenous to the lower Brahmaputra valley are converts from lower caste Hindus of Indo-Aryan stock.

The Khasi-Jayantias were the first inhabitants of Indo-Austric stock. The Bodo-Kacharis are of Indo-Tibetan origin and migrated to present day Assam much before the Ahoms (Gait, A History of Assam, 1925). The history books tell us that Muslims came to Assam in the year 1206 AD which is even before the Ahoms who migrated from Yunan Province of present-day China, and from Thailand and Burma in 1228 AD (ibid).
Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khalji was the first Turkish commander to enter Assam while making an effort to invade Tibet in 1206 AD (ibid). This marked the beginning of Muslim settlement in Assam, to be followed by series of invasions first by Afghan rulers and then by the Mughals.
In upper Assam, a large number of people converted to Islam under the influence of legendary Sufi Saint Hazrat Shah Miran, popularly known as Azan Peer who was a disciple of Hazrat Nizamuddin and who settled near Sibsagar after getting married to an Ahom woman (Naqvi, 2013).

The first entry into Cachar by a Muslim was by Jamal Khan, a commander of the Mughal Army which was ruling in Bengal. He entered into the Cachar territory of the Cachar King (Dimacha) but in a midnight ambush, Jamal Khan, along with all his companions, was massacred (Cachar District Record).
In 1799, Mughal adventurer Aga Mohammad Reza entered Cachar  through Sylhet and after defeating the Cachar King, Krishna Chandra, occupied the kingdom of Cachar, particularly the areas now represented by the two sub-divisions of Silchar and Hailakandi. Reza, who entered Cachar with more than 5000 followers consisting of Pathan and Mughal renegades from the then-dismembered Mughal army, settled down in Cachar. He and his followers mingled with local Cacharis, adopted local customs, and practised inter-racial marriage. Very soon, many Cacharis converted to Islam (ibid).
Many people from this stock are now citizens of Bangladesh because Sylhet became part of East Pakistan after partition. Sylhet, including Cachar, was always part of Assam and was under Ahom rule too. But according to NDTV, the entire Muslim population is migrants.

Roy then turns to Sopariwala to say, “So Dorab, it’s amazing, 22 million outsiders or migrants in the state and only 10 million indigenous or local population”. Now it’s Sopariwala’s turn to exhibit his expertise on Assam. He very confidently states: “There is another way of looking into it, most of these, except the Bangladeshi Muslims, have been here for a long time, they been here for 100 years, the Marwaris came, the Bengalis came, people from the tea gardens came from Jharkhand, Orissa Madhya Pradesh and Bengal and so the rest of the migration has taken place slowly and so they have almost been absorbed into Assam. It’s the latest migration from across the border that stands out.”

So if the tea garden workers who have been in Assam since the start of tea industry and the many Bengalis who came with the British have been absorbed into Assam and call themselves Assamese, how is it that they do not fall into the category of ‘Assamese’, according to NDTV?

The Bodos have their distinct culture and separate language, don’t even consider themselves as Assamese, and are fighting for a separate Bodo state. Yet NDTV categorizes them as Assamese. Large numbers of Christians in Assam are Bodos and tea garden workers but NDTV confuses and separates Bodos from Christians and it calls tea garden workers migrants but calls Christians Assamese.

After independence, Muslim immigration has been negligible (Guha, 2011). Those Muslims of Bengal origin who are branded as Bangladeshis (and who Sopariwala was most likely referring to) were either natives of undivided Goalpara (which was always a Muslim-dominated district) or migrated from undivided Bengal and later East Bengal. Many Muslims in undivided Goalpara are also converts from the Koch Rajbonghsi community, from the Mech tribe, the Hajong community and the Rabhas tribe, and now call themselves Deshi Muslims (Barpujari, 2014).

The migration of Muslim peasants of Bengal origin started in the later part of the 19th century under the patronage of colonial administrators according to a well thought out colonial policy. The British promoted such migration as they wanted the hard working Bengali Muslim peasants to cultivate the barren and fertile land of the Brahmaputra valley.  

The migration of these peasants was at its peak in the first three decades of the 20th century. Sanjib Baruah, in his celebrated 2011 book “India against Itself” quotes C.S. Mullan, the superintendent of the 1931 census: “In another thirty years it is not improbable that Sibsagar district will be the only part of Assam in which Assamese will find itself at home.”

Mullan’s prediction, even after nine decades, is yet to come true, but the opposite happened. Those Muslim peasants of Bengal origin who migrated from undivided Bengal and East Bengal gave up their mother tongue, accepted the Assamese language, got assimilated with the local culture, studied in Assamese medium schools, and call themselves Assamese. In fact, in the entire Muslim-dominated area of lower Assam, there is not even a single Bengali medium school. **

Some mainstream Assamese intellectuals call these Muslims of Bengal origin ‘neo-Assamese’. However, chauvinists and right wingers are averse to calling Muslims of Bengal origin Assamese, despite their unprecedented sacrifice of giving up their mother tongue. Sopariwala seems to have fallen into the latter group, intentionally or unintentionally.

Denying the post-1971 migration of Muslims from Bangladesh will be wrong. The formation of human civilization is a result of migration. Every country has illegal immigrants. But branding all Muslims of Bengali origin as Bangladeshi Muslims is grossly unfair, preposterous, and prejudicial and has far-reaching consequences for the lives and properties of people and the history of Assam.

Muslims of Bengal origin have been facing persecution over their identity since independence and, since the Nellie massacre of 1983, mass violence has been cyclic. Every time Muslims of Bengal origin become victims of mass killings, right-wing politicians and jingoists describe them as Bangladeshi Muslims or illegal immigrants and shift the focus from gross violations of human rights to ‘illegal immigration’, thereby giving impunity to the murderers to carry on with further mass murders of Muslims.

No wonder that, from the Nellie massacre to the 2014 Khagrabari massacre, not even a single perpetrator has been punished.

At the beginning of the show, Roy said that, “This is a very complex election and the national media hasn’t really focused much on it and I have learned a lot by coming and traversing the state”. Well, if this is a complex election, so is the history of Assam and he and his team need to learn much more to understand the complexity.

(The author is a Guwahati-based human rights lawyer. He tweets @AmanWadud)

 References:
1. Prantik , Parag Das , 5th issue, 1-15 February, 1987 
2. Chorot Sahitya Sadana, Editorial , Notun Deen, 6th February, 2005
3. Bihu Aru Char Chapori Bakhi, Hafiz Ahmed,  Dainik Batori, 13th April, 2005, Page 7.
 
Other References:
Barpujari, H. K. (2014). The Comprehensive History of Assam (4th ed.). Guwahati: Publication Board of Assam.
Baruah, S. (2011).India Against Itself: Oxford University Press.
Gait, E. (1925) A History of Assam (2nd ed.). Guwahati: Eastern Book House.
Guha, A. (2011). Jagaran (Souvenir of Char Chapori Sahitya Parishad, Assam).
Naqvi, S. (2013, Feb 28) Northeast Review. Retrieved April 11, 2016, from Rhythm of the Brahmaputra: Hajo, Assam: https://northeastreview.wordpress.com/2013/02/28/saba/
 
 
 
 

The post Wrong on History and Facts: NDTV’s Battleground Assam appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Assam enters into polls on April 4, 2016. Unlike previous elections, this time the state has caught some significant attention of the ‘nation’. The ‘nation’ is watching. The competition and stakes are high. The incumbent Congress is contending against a rising power in Assam and its long time contender in national electoral politics, the Bharatiya Janata Party – BJP. BJP’s aggressive drive to expand its mata-led nation building project, riding upon the back of a cow, is in eager and impatient wait to sweep a vast portion of electoral gains in Assam. This gain would establish its crucial presence not only in Assam but also in the rest of the states in the north-eastern region.

This election, with the national parties fighting for supremacy, can be read as symptomatic of  a significant step towards the nationalisation of regional politics, and remarkably so given the marginal status ‘enjoyed’ by the blob of geography known as the north-east of India, which for long has been perceived by mainland India as a habitat of insurgents, secessionists and anti-nationals.

The spectacular performance of BJP in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections where it wrestled 7 out of 14 seats in Assam, promised a rise in its reach beyond mainland India. After all, in a state where it has no organisational grass root presence, the BJP’s performance was unprecedented.

Almost as a boon to the BJP, immediately after the 2014 elections the discontentment within the Congress began to manifest itself out in the open. Himanta Biswa Sarma, who was one of the pillars of the Congress government for 14 long years, joined the BJP along with 12 other rebel Congress MLAs. Sarma’s rebellion against the Tarun Gogoi led Congress government was a smartly carried out performance to gain public support even in an act of defection, as he smoothly went on to the side of a new contender in the political field of Assam. To keen observers of Assam politics, Sarma’s defection to BJP did not come as a surprise as he had already started flexing his muscles before the Lok Sabha polls in 2014. In fact many in the Congress party went to the extent of accusing Sarma of implicitly aiding the BJP in the Lok Sabha polls.

I. Barring the ‘Illegal Immigrant’ from Economic Activity, a Fascist Agenda

In this Election BJP seeks to form the government and has, in a show of strategic political wisdom, drawn alliances with some of the smaller parties of Assam, namely the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP), Bodoland People’s Front (BPF) and the Tiwa and Rabha organizations. Its alliance with the first two does not come as a surprise at least for following reasons – a) in the first case, both the BJP and the AGP identify ‘Illegal Infiltration’ as being the core of the Assam’s problem, b) in 2012, the killings and displacement of a specific section of the population in Bodoland Territorial Area District (BTAD) areas are reflective of the think-alike position of clearing the ‘excesses’ upheld by both the BJP and BPF.

While releasing the Vision document on March 25, 2016, the Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, flanked by Himanta Biswa Sarma and Chief Ministerial candidate Sarbananda Sonowal, announced that “Our priority is the illegal infiltration and detection and deportation of these infiltrators”. This is one of the most sensitive issues that has kept Assam burning for decades.

 
For instance, the Bodos did not purchase anything from Bengali speaking Muslim vendors in Kokrajhar district for some time after the 2012 riots. Posters were put across the district announcing that whoever indulges in economic transactions with “illegal Bangladeshis” would be levied a fine of Rs. 10,000.

The vision document boldly announced the promise of a “law to be enacted to “deal sternly” with industries, businesses, small and medium enterprises or any other agencies employing infiltrators.”  It needs to be pointed out here that this idea of economic boycott of “illegal Bangladeshis” is not the brainchild of just the BJP think-tank; it has been very much a part of the public discourse in Assam for over three decades dating back to the Assam movement (1979 – 1985). In fact, deployment of economic boycott has been unofficially attempted in several cases. For instance, the Bodos did not purchase anything from Bengali speaking Muslim vendors in Kokrajhar district for some time after the 2012 riots. Posters were put across the district announcing that whoever indulges in economic transactions with “illegal Bangladeshis” would be levied a fine of Rs. 10,000.

The xenophobic language, tone and the barely-veiled threat of incitement to violence of this electoral promise sounds as close to fascist propaganda as it can get in contemporary India, because for the first time a political party has promised to turn this widely held idea into a law if it wins the election.

II. Ghar Vapsi, Beef Eating win no brownie points in the campaign

The spectacular success of the BJP in Assam during the Lok Sabha polls of 2014 owed much more to the anti-incumbency fatigue of  people with 14 long years of Congress rule rather than any positive presence of the BJP. The latter’s success was not, and is still not commensurate to its organisational presence in the state. In any case, the spectacular success created a room for strengthening organisational presence and greater possibility of success for the BJP in this Assembly election.

Over the last two years BJP has been seen trying to consolidate its Lok Sabha success into a widespread acceptance of itself in Assam as a political force, and it has attempted to project itself as the upholder of Axomiya jatiyotabaad (Axomiya nationalism) [We use the term Axomiya as an ethno-linguistic category comprising of non-tribal Axomiya speaking caste-Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Sikhs in Assam; we use the term Assamese to connote all denizens of the state of Assam.]

Campaigns like “Ghar Wapsi” or “Love Jihad” didn’t find any resonance in Assam. So it tried to rally around the differentiation of “Illegal Bangladeshis” into Hindus and Muslims, the former to be assimilated into the Assamese – Indian fold and the latter to be detected and deported

It wasn’t unexpected that the issue of “illegal Bangladeshi” became the cornerstone of BJP’s poll agenda in Assam: an issue that has been at the heart of Axomiya jatiyotabaadi politics. However, it didn’t happen without testing the political waters on a few other issues largely derived from the conventional organisational programme that it deploys in various parts of India where communalism is an easy seed bed for escalating conflicts and violence.

Campaigns like “Ghar Wapsi” or “Love Jihad” didn’t find any resonance in Assam. So it tried to rally around the differentiation of “Illegal Bangladeshis” into Hindus and Muslims, the former to be assimilated into the Assamese – Indian fold and the latter to be detected and deported. In the first week of September 2015, the Union government sent a notification to Assam government announcing its decision to allow Hindu Bangladeshis in Assam who sought shelter before December 31, 2014 to continue living in Assam. The Union government’s justification for this benevolent exception was   “due to religious persecution or fear of religious persecution” in their country of origin. The announcement didn’t go down well in Assam as it was seen to be in contradiction with the core principles of the Assam Accord of 1985, and large scale protests erupted across the state spearheaded by jatiyotabaadi organizations like All Assam Students Union (AASU) and Axom Jatiyotabaadi Yuva Chatra Parishad (AJYCP) .

Subsequently, it tried to bring beef on the menu card – an issue which so significantly determined the trajectory of the recent Bihar Elections to the detriment of BJP’s poll ambitions. Amidst an ethnically diverse state like Assam where beef is eaten not only by the Muslims who constitute 34 % of the total population  but also by a substantial section of the tribal groups as well as the Cha Janajaati (Tea Tribes), beef could not establish BJP’s much desired diet plans.

However beef did turn handy in another way, even if it appeared to be a leaf out of Bhisham Sahni’s famous novel Tamas: a new trend (at least in Assam) of throwing beef chunks and cow heads in mostly Kali temples has emerged in past one year. According to local (both social and conventional) media in Assam, there have been at least 22 reported cases of “beef-found-in-temples” since 2015.

However owing to the specific history of being largely secular, throughout Assam where these incidents occurred, the reactions of the public were quite different. Where the presence of Bengali Hindus were significant, communal tensions appeared volatile, unlike in Axomiya dominated areas where such incidents did not become an issue of any significant attention. 

III. Project to Dis-enfrancise the entire community of Muslims of East Bengal Descent

BJP’s forceful thrust on detection, deportation and economic boycott of “Illegal Muslim Bangladeshis” cannot be misread – it is not just about Illegal Bangladeshis. It is an attempt towards disenfranchising an entire community of Muslims of East Bengali descent, irrespective of when their ancestors migrated to Assam from erstwhile East Bengal. In this respect a recent interview given to a national daily by Sarbananda Sonowal is telling where he doesn’t mince words:  

“We have reached out to genuine Assamese Muslims who have been living in the state for 800 years (as against those whose forefathers came from East Pakistan, now Bangladesh). The Assamese Muslims are known by different names such as Garia, Maria, Desi, Jula, Sayed and the like. They are the genuine Assamese Muslims. We have been working towards protecting their interests” (emphasis our own).

The assertion that only those Muslims who have been living in Assam for 800 years are genuine Axomiya Muslims is a cunning deployed to drive home the point that the East Bengali Muslim peasants who migrated to Assam from 1890s onwards and their progenies are not legitimate residents of Assam. It might be worth mentioning here that only between 1901 and 1941, a little over10 lakh East Bengali Muslim peasants settled in Assam.

This assertion, again, is not the original brain child of BJP. It has very much been a part of the consciousness of the present generation of Axomiyas. Despite huge historical complexities involved in differentiating an “illegal Bangladeshi immigrant” from a Muslim citizen of East Bengali descent, to the young urban Axomiya any Bengali Muslim is a Bangladeshi. However the question arises as to how does one identify an “illegal Bangladeshi immigrant”? What are the ways of telling the difference? It is most certainly not difference but the similarities between an “illegal Bangladeshi immigrant” and a Muslim citizen of East Bengali descent which supplies the paraphernalia for slotting people of both the categories in a single category of the “illegal Bangladeshi immigrant”; it is physical and cultural markers, religion and language.

IV. Assamese Exceptionalism could open doors for the BJP

The rise of Sonowal from an Axomiya Jatiya Nayak (Amoxiya National Hero), as hailed by AASU, to becoming an important leader of the AGP and then finally the State President of the Assam BJP and its Chief Ministerial candidate for 2016 elections has been based on the anti-“illegal Bangladeshi” cause.
Both AASU and AGP, even today, vouch by the Assam Accord of 1985 which sets the cut-off date for detection and deportation of Bangladeshis from Assam as 26th March 1971, whereas the current BJP posture of Sonowal supercedes the provisions of the Accord to make a sweeping identification and marking of “illegal Bangladeshis” irrespective of the important dates and deadlines laid down in the Accord and giving it a communal edge.

It was also on the basis of the Assam Accord that the Indian Citizenship Act of 1955 was amended in 1986. Through this amendment, Article 6A was inserted to retrospectively grant citizenship to those who migrated from East Pakistan to Assam before 1st January 1966, and those who came on or after 1st January 1966 but before 26th March 1971 would enjoy all rights as citizenship except voting rights for 10 years.

BJP’s forceful thrust on detection, deportation and economic boycott of “Illegal Muslim Bangladeshis” cannot be misread – it is not just about Illegal Bangladeshis. It is an attempt towards disenfranchising an entire community of Muslims of East Bengali descent, irrespective of when their ancestors migrated to Assam from erstwhile East Bengal.

Sonowal is the Jatiyotabaadi face of BJP in this election. For past six months, in his interviews and speeches Sonowal has been strongly putting forth the BJP magic card of development as one of the main agendas of the polls. It, however, comes with an important rider – this is development for the genuine people of the greater Assamese society, which according to him and Assam BJP, apart from the Axomiyas (Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians) and various tribes, includes Bengalis (read Hindu Bengalis), Marwaris, Punjabis and Nepalis. Sonowal and his party have also been harping that once elected their government will pay special attention to genuine Axomiya Muslims who have been “outmaneuvered by Muslim migrants”. 

A substantial section of Axomiya Muslims have taken BJP’s bait. Out of three lakh Axomiya Muslim members of BJP, two lakh seventy thousand have joined the party in past one year. BJP’s election thrust of rooting out “illegal Bangladeshis” from Assam goes down well with this section of the population. Axomiya Muslims and Muslims of East Bengali descent might share the same religion but cultural difference, real or perceived, has always pitted the two communities against each other.
 
The anti Bengali Muslim sentiment among Axomiya Muslims is as pervasive as it is among the caste-Hindu Axomiyas and many other communities like the Bodos. In fact organisations claiming to represent Axomiya Muslims like the Federation of Indigenous Muslim Organisations of Assam (FIMOA), All Assam Goriya Moriya Desi Jatiyo Parishad, Axomiya Muslim Kalyan Parishad, All Assam Goriya Yuva Parishad have long been demanding special development package for the community and have long asserted that they not be equated with Bengali Muslims just because of a shared religion. These organisations have also been a vocal critic of Badaruddin Ajmal’s All India United Democratic Front (AIDUF) (which is perceived by Axomiyas to be a party exclusively of Muslims of East Bengali descent) and on several occasions accused Ajmal and his party of protecting illegal Bangladeshis, condemning him of trying to foment religious communal divide in an otherwise “secular and tolerant society”.
 
An important question arises here: what explains the fact that BJP and its Hindutva fascist politics doesn’t make a substantial section of Assamese society wary? There seem to be two plausible explanations.
 
Firstly, in Assam there exists a very strong sense of Assamese exceptionalism, that the Assamese are inherently tolerant, easy-going, secular and peaceful people. This sense of exceptionalism is pervasive among not just the Axomiyas but also among various tribes. A common refrain that can be very frequently heard is that “Assam is different. BJP can do a Gujarat or a Muzzafarnagar in other parts of India, but here in Assam BJP cannot and will not foment riots against Axomiya Muslims in Assam”. Another refrain that is often heard is that “Assam has never witnessed any violent conflict between Axomiya Muslims and Hindus”. It is a fact that there has been no history of violent conflict between Axomiya Muslims and Hindus; not even in the aftermath of the demolition of Babri Masjid, except for one small flare-up. However, this history will not stand as a guarantee that if BJP wins this election it will not turn Assam into a Hindutva laboratory in the garb of rooting out “illegal Bangladeshis”.
 
A good illustration of this confidence in the sense of exceptionalism is the curious case of the dynamic peasant leader Akhil Gogoi who leads the largest left-leaning social movement under the banner of Krishak Mukti Sangram Samati (KMSS). KMSS has also been the de-facto opposition to the Congress government for the past one decade albeit outside the legislative assembly.
 
Amidst an ethnically diverse state like Assam where beef is eaten not only by the Muslims who constitute 34 % of the total population  but also by a substantial section of the tribal groups as well as the Cha Janajaati (Tea Tribes), beef could not establish BJP’s much desired diet plans.

Though Akhil Gogoi and KMSS are now at the forefront of the fight against what he calls BJP’s Hindutva fascism, during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections the need to defeat the Congress took precedence and Akhil Gogoi released a list of ‘who to vote for’, for his supporters and he also appealed to the people of Assam to consider his list. The list comprised of one CPM candidate, one CPI-ML candidate, three AGP candidates, two AIUDF candidates and 7 BJP candidates. This political blunder on part of Akhil Gogoi stems precisely from this flawed sense of Assamese exceptionalism.  
 
On the contrary, one of the composite features of this exceptionalism has created a public sphere that denounces any regressive general communal slogans and statements; any overarching anti-religious minority statement made in Assam is met with hostilities and protests by people in general, including the jatiyotabaadi groups. One of the reasons for such political behavior could be because Axomiya religious minorities have had equal investment in the jatiyotabaadi project. Assam BJP is cognizant of this fact and has played it to its own advantage. To give a recent example, in 2015 Subramanian Swamy gave a statement in Guwahati that Mosques are merely a place of religious congregation and hence can be demolished. Theologically speaking Swamy might have been right, but the statement didn’t go down well in Assam. Effigies were burnt and protests were organized by various groups of people including the jatiyotabaadis; even Assam BJP condemned and distanced itself from Swamy’s statement.

V. ‘Genuine Assamese Muslims’ allies of the BJP in Assam?

The 2016 Assam election is a litmus test for the non-communal population of Assam to withstand the rightwing agenda of bringing religion and religious identity to the fore; it simply does not require another reason to burn. The ‘genuine Assamese Muslims’, however genuinely anxious they may be, are in the danger of allying and becoming complicit in the spread of a politics and ideology whose history talks more than loudly its destructive, divisive will. The BJP’s utilisation of the religious separation is derived from a specific Hindutva project unlike the sons-of-the-soil who have strongly and for long basked in the idea of Assamese exceptionalism. The exceptionalism may be present, may have been there, but times have changed.

It is crucial to recognize that BJP’s focus on Assam latches on to the most convenient and available issue of illegal Bangladeshis immigrants. Initially, as we have noted earlier, BJP tried to play its classic Hindu-Muslim segregation of the “illegal Bangladeshis”, although unsuccessfully.

The Bangladeshi problem in Assam does not fit into the mainstream Hindu rightwing understanding along the lines of religious identities and binaries, though it will be fallacious to say that such an element is not present in the ‘Assamese’ understanding.

With the twin combination of ignorance (about Assam and northeast) and desire ( to bring the northeast into its nation building project), the BJP is trying to create something of an optical illusion, especially to the people of Assam – the image of a flexible national party with concerns for the regional specificities, willing to go soft accordingly on hard core communal agenda which it deploys in other parts of the country, and take a hard line position on the main issue of Assam, pitting themselves against the ‘protectors’ of ‘illegal Bangladeshis”- AIDUF and the Congress. If not beef, Bangladeshi will do – B for BJP.

(Amrapali Basumatary teaches at the University of Delhi and Bonojit Hussain  is an Independent Researcher in Delhi)
 

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