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Assam register: politics, citizenship and beyond

pallab Bhattacharya
THE draft final list of citizens in the north-eastern Indian state of Assam is out. But the controversy over the fraught exercise continues. A little over four million people—mostly Bengali Muslims and some Hindus—have gone missing from the list, leaving them staring at an uncertain future and all sorts of anxiety. Savour just one example of how fraught the whole exercise was. A former colleague of mine, who comes from Silchar, figures in the list and so do her in-laws. But the name of her husband has gone missing. There are umpteen examples like this.
Understandably, there is consternation that more than ten percent of Assam's population is not in the list. No less is the worry of those whose names figure because some of their close relatives do not. There is time still—December 31 this year—for those omitted to get their names in the National Register of Citizens (NRC). It is quite possible that the deadline may be extended beyond that date.
The exercise to update the NRC, first made in Assam in 1951, four years after the independence of India, was always going to be a gigantic task with the accompanying pitfalls even though it was mandated by India's apex court. Ethnicity and migration of people, often undocumented, into Assam from across Bangladesh has always been a very emotive issue in the state.
The ethnic and religious fault lines have over the years become sharper in Assam which has long remained mired in the debate as to who is a native and who is a "foreigner', forgetting that human civilisations across the world constitute a fascinating story of migrations from one part to another. The native versus foreigner tussle had seen the state roiled by years of violent street protests and blood-letting by All Assam
Students Union (AASU) in the 1970s and 80s with the key demand for deportation of 'illegal migrants”. The target of that agitation was all those who came from Bangladesh irrespective of their religion. That agitation also gave birth to the political party Asom Gana Parishad which rode on that emotive issue to storm to power in Assam. The Assam Accord of 1985 between AASU, Assam government and the Indian government put a lid on the agitation by seeking to address the issue of "foreigners”. The updating of the NRC is a part of that process.
The native-migrant faceoff became more complicated with the arrival of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Assam's political stage in a journey that was aided as much by Ahoms as by non-Ahom Bangla-speaking
Hindus in the state. The BJP has been harping on about the "illegal' migration for several years and made it part of its key plans in the 2015 state assembly elections that brought the party to power in Assam for the first time. Polarisation along religious lines added a new dimension to the native vs foreigner subject in the state. The polarising narrative got magnified when the BJP government at the Centre came up with the Citizenship Amendment Bill 2016 that would give Indian citizenship to "persecuted" Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Christians and Parsis from Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The Citizenship Amendment Bill comprises a key part of the BJP’s Hindutva ideology and a whole electoral strategy. In the native vs foreigner debate, the party has
been coy about supporting Hindus from Bangladesh fearing alienation of the majority Ahoms but abandoned that shyness in the context of the Citizenship Amendment Bill, which completes the BJP’s two-pronged political and electoral strategy in Assam, along with the NRC. For the BJP, the NRC provides the opportunity to come down hard on migration of Muslims from Bangladesh due to economic factors and the Citizenship Amendment Bill creates the space to speak about Hindus as political refugees facing persecution in neighbouring countries. The BJP’s detractors, however, point out that such a narrative ends up keeping the communal cauldron on the boil.
Not only in Assam but also in other parts of India, the party hopes to cash in on this strategy in the coming parliamentary elections due early next year and is targeting to secure as many seats as possible from Assam and six other small north-eastern states to help bridge the shortfall that may crop up in major Indian states, where the BJP either faces anti-incumbency or has reached a saturation point of growth. Assam has 14 parliamentary seats, the highest in the northeastern region. The party would like the NRC issue to play out at least till the coming general elections because the authorities have already announced a timeline of December 31 this year for those omitted from the NRC to seek relief. It is possible that the deadline will be extended. Besides, those excluded from the final approved list of citizens have the option of moving the Foreigners Tribunals and the regular courts. This, according to experts, is going to be a long-drawn process.
That the issue of the NRC is becoming a political game is also clear from the fact that Rahul Gandhi, president of the main opposition party Congress, took to the Twitter on July 30 to take credit that the NRC
was a scheme launched by the party-led previous UPA government in keeping with the Assam Accord signed during the tenure of his father Rajiv Gandhi as PM. In order to insulate the Congress from criticism, he also faulted the BJP government for not executing the scheme properly. True, the final draft list of citizens left out both Muslims and Hindus. But can Congress counter the polarisation dimension by focusing on the native vs migrant aspect?
There are reasons why the NRC updating exercise and the omission of names of four million-odd people from it should not worry Bangladesh. First, there is an acknowledgement in the BJP that it is not possible to deport such a big number of people. Secondly, India has to keep in mind its relations with Bangladesh. The Narendra Modi government will not do anything to put the government of Sheikh Hasina, which has extended great security cooperation to put down insurgency in Assam, in the soup by any action at a time when Hasina faces anti-incumbency in the coming general elections of Bangladesh.
However, the biggest challenge is, what happens to the people who exhaust all options of getting their names in the list of citizens and fail? This is a question that goes beyond all short-term political and electoral considerations. Under the NRC process, the onus of proving citizenship falls on the applicants seeking to include their names in the NRC. This is a daunting task particularly for the poor in villages in a country like India not known for a meticulous documentation culture, whether it relates to humans or land. In this scenario, it is anybody's guess how one can procure documents to prove their domicile status dating back four decades.
Pallab Bhattacharya Is a special correspondent to
The Dally Star.