Kokrajhar/Guwahati: There are no Bangladeshis here,” says Abdul Sayeed Sheikh, a 49-year-old primary school teacher of Matiapara village in Kokrajhar district, roughly 180km from Dispur, Assam’s capital. “The Bangladeshi bogey is being used to prevent us from going back to our homes.”
add_main_imageSheikh’s home was ravaged during the July violence in western Assam, forcing him, like many others, to take shelter at a relief camp at Failaguri village, in the same district.
The orgy of violence in the region claimed about 100 lives and triggered the largest internal displacement in Indian history since Partition, forcing nearly half-a-million people out of their homes.NextMAds
The conflict was the result of long-simmering tensions between Bodo tribals and Bengali Muslims living in the region.
The Failaguri camp housed 2,300 villagers at the peak of the violence but now hosts fewer than one-tenth. Many of the remaining expect to leave for their villages soon after getting a nod from the district administration.
There was an exodus from the camp in September after the leadership of the Bodoland Territorial Autonomous District (BTAD)—a special administrative region that includes Kokrajhar—demanded that land ownership documents be verified before rehabilitating camp inmates, to keep away illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. The demand found support in influential youth organizations such as the All Assam Students Union (AASU).
Such demands frustrate Sheikh, who has been running a makeshift school in the camp. “They have not helped us in our hour of crisis. Instead, they are making lives difficult.”
The exodus of camp inmates fuelled speculation about the presence of significant numbers of illegal immigrants in the ranks of the displaced. That rekindled old fears about unchecked immigration in the region, and has led the AASU and student bodies in other north-eastern states to renew a vigorous anti-foreigner campaign. The emotive campaign has polarized Assam and cast a shadow over the rehabilitation process.
Although the campaign is ostensibly against foreigners, it is perceived to be discriminatory towards Bengali Muslims who share ethnic similarities with the Bangladeshi immigrants. It has revived memories of the Assam agitation led by the AASU in the early 1980s, which had paralysed the state for six long years and had reached its peak when more than 2,000 Bengali Muslims were massacre at Nellie in 1983.sixthMAds
Then, as now, the lines dividing the legal and illegal migrant were blurred and the indiscriminate use of the word foreigner generated immense resentment among people of immigrant origin. AASU’s campaign has elicited an aggressive response from outfits such as the All Assam Minority Students Union (AAMSU), which sees the anti-foreigner campaign as a diversionary ploy to deny justice to the victims of the violence in western Assam.
Some inmates of the Failaguri camp have gone back to their villages and others have moved outside the BTAD region fearing harassment, said Sheikh. A substantial section of the inmates were landless while many others purchased lands in tribal belts and blocks or in forest reserves and, hence, do not have land titles.
Still others lost documents when their houses were set ablaze, he said.
“Many citizens, including the Bodos, do not have land documents. Does that make them Bangladeshis?” Sheikh asks.
Divisive politics
The crisis in Assam has brought simmering tensions between so-called natives and people of immigrant origins to the forefront, reopening old wounds and threatening to rupture the delicate social fabric of an extraordinarily diverse state. The fear among the indigenous people of being culturally and politically marginalized by the so-called immigrants, on the one hand, and the growing sense of alienation among Bengali Muslims on the other appear to have given wings to divisive identity politics in the state.
“I get a sense of déjà vu, looking at Assam today,” said Sanjoy Hazarika, who heads the centre for north-east studies at Jamia Milia Islamia university in New Delhi. “There is a need to devise a rational response to the problem of immigration in Assam, or else the tide of emotions will just lead to another big mess.”
Analysts fear the crisis can push Assam back to the dark days of the 1980s and further delay the revival of its economy, which was limping back to normal the past few years after having been ravaged by successive agitations and insurgencies in earlier decades. The latest upheaval could also reshape the political landscape in the state, analysts said.
The crisis is turning out to be among the toughest challenges for the 76-year-old Tarun Gogoi, Assam’s three-term chief minister from the Congress party, as it has united his Bodo allies and wide sections of his political opponents against him. In an unprecedented move, Gogoi published a white paper on illegal immigration in October but that has barely dented the anti-immigrant rhetoric in Assam.
The latest Census data seems to suggest a decline in immigrant influx but opposition parties as well as organizations such as the AASU are hyping up the issue, Gogoi said in an interview. The opposition is fixated on the issue as they have little else to talk about, he said.
“Parties such as the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) and the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) accuse me of playing vote-bank politics, but it is they who are playing vote-bank politics in their attempt to polarize the Hindu vote,” said Gogoi.
Apart from the AGP and the BJP, the anti-foreigner campaign has found a new and influential supporter in Akhil Gogoi, a political activist and the leader of Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti (KMSS), a farmers’ organization. The 36-year-old Gogoi, who wears many hats—a peasant leader, an anti-dam activist, and an award-winning anti-corruption activist and Team Anna member—has emerged as the most effective opponent of the government in recent years.
“Akhil has been setting the agenda for political parties in Assam, and his role will be crucial as a conscience-keeper,” said Nani Gopal Mahanta, associate professor of political science at Gauhati University in Assam. “He does his homework on the issues he highlights, which AASU leaders often don’t.”
Gogoi of KMSS, among the few leaders in the region to eschew identity politics so far, agreed with the chief minister that the fear of foreigners is often hyped up but pointed out that the Congress party has done little to resolve the issue and allowed discontent to fester in the past 11 years of its rule in Assam.
“Assam’s political elite have a history of using the foreigners’ issue to further their own vested interests and to detract attention from the economic demands of the masses,” he said. “They find it useful to keep the issue unresolved.”
Policy flip-flops
The migration of Bengali Muslims to Assam began in the 19th century after the British annexed the state, and was initially welcomed by the Assamese gentry as a source of cheap labour. In the 1920s, their unabated influx caused alarm, and led to the introduction of the so-called Line System, which demarcated the areas in which immigrants could settle. In the years after independence, the Muslims of Bengali descent, who decided to stay back in the Brahmaputra valley, adopted the Assamese language and were accepted as the neo-Assamese.
As the conflict between Muslims of immigrant origin and others have sharpened, a growing section of the neo-Assamese have begun to identify themselves as Bengali-speakers once again.
The influx from across the border continued though. Apart from political refugees such as the Bengali Hindus who fled persecution in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), Assam also hosted economic refugees: poor Muslims who came chasing the dream of a better life in India.
A clear-cut policy on refugees might have nipped the immigration problem in the bud, wrote political scientist Sanjib Baruah in his book, India against itself, but that was not easy.
The state’s desire to protect Hindus and reluctance to distinguish between refugees on religious lines led to a series of flip-flops on immigration into Assam. The decadal growth rate of Assam’s population at 35% during the 1950s and 1960s was significantly higher than the national average, causing disquiet in the state.
When election officials voiced concerns about the presence of the large numbers of illegal immigrants in 1979, it triggered a six-year-long agitation led by the AASU. The student leaders managed to embarrass the state by quoting from government reports and pointing out the inconsistent stand of the state on refugees, wrote Baruah.
The movement brought national attention to Assam’s burden of immigration but it also proved divisive. It had begun as an anti-outsider movement before the target narrowed down to foreigners, and the harassment of linguistic minorities became a constant feature of the movement.
There were several episodes of violence, of which Nellie is only the most widely known. The movement had two faces—one, non-violent and democratic, turned towards New Delhi; and the other, coercive and often violent, turned towards the dissident minorities, Amalendu Guha, former professor of history at Gauhati University, argued in his writings.
The agitation alienated the two communities at loggerheads in western Assam today—Bengali-speaking Muslims and Bodo tribals, who, among others, perceived the movement to be exclusionary.
AASU leaders exaggerated claims about the number of illegal immigrants in Assam, wrote Hazarika in his book on illegal immigration, Rites of Passage. The hyped-up claims were matched by sharp rhetoric directed at people of immigrant origins. Many Bengali-speakers, both Hindus and Muslims, who had settled in the state before independence, were branded foreigners and served notices to quit the state.
The centre adopted a two-pronged strategy to end the crisis. It enacted the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunal) Act (IMDT), a special legislation to detect foreigners in Assam, with safeguards to protect minorities from harassment. In 1985, the centre signed a pact, the Assam Accord, with AASU leaders to address their key concerns.
Although the immediate crisis dissipated, the endurance of the conflict 27 years after the accord shows the limited success of that strategy. The accord achieved a consensus across political groups about accepting March 1971 as the cut-off date for deporting foreigners from Assam. As most of the other clauses regarding protection of the indigenous people were left open-ended, very little has been actually implemented, breeding discontent.
Tinderbox of fears
Student leaders who formed the AGP and rode to power in the 1985 state elections on the primary plank of evicting foreigners had very little to show on that front at the end of their term. They adopted the same vote-bank politics they had railed against, wrote Hazarika in his book. The IMDT also made detection of foreigners extremely difficult, and was eventually struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2005.
The apex court judgment in 2005 was projected as a threat to minorities in Assam, and led to the rise of a new political party, the All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF), led by a perfume merchant and preacher, Maulana Badruddin Ajmal, and backed largely by Bengali Muslims.
The party successfully played upon the past fears of harassment to polarize the immigrant vote and, in 2011, became the state’s largest opposition party, eclipsing the AGP and the BJP.
The rise of the AIUDF fed into Assamese fears of being marginalized. The strident anti-immigrant rhetoric by both AASU and Bodo leaders in the wake of the July violence, in turn, has antagonized the Bengali Muslims, who feel discriminated against.
Organizations such as the AAMSU have capitalized on such feelings and led protests across the state. An AAMSU-sponsored protest in August led to communal clashes and attacks on media personnel, even in towns outside the BTAD, inviting a media boycott of the organization.
The gap between the two communities has only widened since then, with identity politics of one kind feeding off the other.
“The problem often lies in how the anti-immigrant campaign is framed,” said Hazarika. “If you constantly dub neo-Assamese Muslims as Bangladeshis, resentments will soar and can be mobilized politically. It’s a tinderbox of suspicions, fears and bitterness.”
The low economic growth in the state and a high proportion of educated unemployed provide a fertile ground for such conflicts to thrive, said Dilip Kumar Baruah, economist and former principal of Guwahati’s Cotton College. Although the growth rate in the state has picked up over the past decade, it needs to roughly double from the current rate of 6.5% for income levels to attain parity with the rest of the country by 2020, he said.
Many analysts say that a majority of the illegal immigrants in Assam are those who crossed over between 1971 and 1991, and the pace of influx from Bangladesh has likely declined in the past two decades. But the lack of reliable estimates of the number of illegal immigrants leads to intense speculation and politicking on the issue.
“We will not allow the campaign to turn communal this time,” said Gogoi of KMSS. “We will fight for equal rights for all those who came before 1971.”
The primary step to solve the dispute is identification of all residents so that the legal and illegal immigrants can be differentiated, said Mahanta. Deportation might not be feasible but foreigners can at least be disenfranchised and further immigration can be prevented, he said.
Unless the government takes urgent steps this time, the state will head towards more violence, warns Mahanta.
This is the last of a two-part Mint series exploring the roots of the simmering territorial and economic insecurities that resulted in the violence in Assam earlier this year.
Catch all the Politics News and Updates on Live Mint. Download The Mint News App to get Daily Market Updates & Live Business News.