Decades of illegal migration from Bangladesh to be tackled with NRC

On 30 July 2018, the Assam state government published a draft of the National Register of Citizens (NRC), aimed at identifying Indian citizens and legitimate residents following repeated protests and violence over irregular/illegal migration from Bangladesh. The register only lists those people as citizens who can prove that they or their ancestors entered India before midnight on 24 March 1971 —the day when Pakistan Army opened fire on Bengali demonstrators in Syedpur, Rangpur and Chittagong, killing more than a thousand people and the beginning of the struggle which eventually led to the creation of Bangladesh. On demands by various political parties and ethnic groups in Assam, the process to update the register is being monitored by the Supreme Court.

Reportedly, the potential exclusion of over 4 million people, many of them Muslims, raises concerns over “arbitrary detention and possible statelessness without due process”.

The Assam government has said that this is a draft list and those whose names are missing from the register, have until 28 September 2018 to seek a correction. Assam’s finance and health minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma stated: “No one will be sent to detention camps… Rights or privileges will not be taken away from them just because their names have not appeared in the draft NRC.” The Central government has also said that after the final list is published in December 2018, applicants left out will have an opportunity to seek a correction from the foreigners tribunals. Even some Assam-ese persons including a few security forces personnel are reportedly affected so far.

However, the government has not formulated an official policy for those people who are excluded from the NRC and declared foreigners by the tribunals. In December 2017, Mr Sarma had said: “The NRC is being done to identify illegal Bangladeshis residing in Assam….all those whose names do not figure in the NRC will have to be deported.”

Bangladesh has not agreed to claims that these people are irregular migrants, making deportation to Bangladesh unlikely. India does not have an agreement on deportation with Bangladesh.

Irregular migration from Bangladesh has long been a volatile issue in Assam and concerns over the inclusion of these so-called “illegal immigrants” in electoral rolls has grown in recent years. In May 2018, protests erupted in Assam over a Citizenship Amendment Bill, which would grant citizenship to Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. While the proposed law deliberately excludes Muslims, including Shia and Ahmadiyya who also face persecution in Pakistan, many groups in Assam fear that this will increase influx of Hindu Bangladeshi migrants to the state.

Decades of illegal migration from erstwhile East Pakistan, later Bangladesh, into Assam eventually led to the bloody anti-foreigner agitation in 1983, in which at least 2,000 people were hacked to death at Nellie, a few hours from Guwahati. Those killed were Muslims, accused of being illegal migrants and occupants of land that belonged to Lalung tribals. The agitation culminated in the Assam Accord signed by the Central government and representatives of All Assam Students Union (AASU), which was largely an economic package.

Also in 1983, the ruling Congress, clearly driven by the political agenda of vote banks replaced the Foreigner’s Act of 1946 with the Illegal Migration Determination by Tribu-nal (IMDT) Act, which virtually regularised illegal migrants from Bangladesh who migrated into India up to March 1971 and even beyond. While peace was bought through a financial package, it was also ensured that the status-quo prevailed in terms of accepting Bangladeshis who migrated before March 1971 as Indian citizens. The vote bank was saved. The constitutionality of an accord between a students union and the Central government was never questioned.

The IMDT Act made it almost impossible for a Bangladeshi migrant to be deported from Assam. Under the act, the onus of establishing nationality rested not on the illegal migrant, not on the government, but on an individual who had to pay a fee to lodge a complaint to a stipulated jurisdiction. It took 22 years for the Supreme Court to repeal IMDT Act as unconstitutional in 2005.

Initiated by AASU, the agitation produced a political party called Asom Gana Pratishad (AGP), and an armed wing called United Liberation Front of Asom (Ulfa), which, by late 1980s had penetrated all departments of the state government and had developed into a deadly menace, extorting money and killing with impunity. In late November 1990, when President’s rule was promulgated and the army was launched against it, its boss, Paresh Barua and close cohorts fled to Bangladesh, thereby betraying that very cause.

Barua and gang soon came under the strong grip of Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) detachment in Bangla-desh. The Ulfa escapees not only became conduits for the ISI to enter India’s northeast region to establish contacts with other violent groups there, but also became its great assets for anti-India activities. Ulfa became an effective tool of ISI for pursuing its aim of inducting and settling illegal Bangladeshi migrants in various parts into Assam, raising new madarassas and controlling old ones and trying to convert ethnic Assamese Muslims to fundamentalism, creating communal tension, circulating fake Indian currency, trafficking arms and narcotics and sabotaging installations.

When late Lt. Gen. S.K. Sinha was Governor Assam, (1997-2003), he had presented a paper to the President of India, elaborating that in at least five states of Assam, there had been a demographic shift resulting in Bangladeshi illegal migrants outnumbering the Assamese populace.

A book titled Assam Terrorism and the Demographic Challenge (Centre for Land Warfare Studies-Knowledge Wor-ld), authored by this writer and published in 2009, dwells upon how the demographic pattern of at least eight districts in Assam got adversely altered over two decades of terrorism by Ulfa, when its leaders were hiding in Bangladesh and under the grip of ISI, during the long tenure of Bangladesh Nationalist Party, under Mrs Khalida Zia.

This book assumed greater relevance in the light of the 2012 riots in Kokrajhar and all the more so, now, as at least eleven districts of Assam are affected by the demographic change mentioned.

While, most ironically, the Ulfa group in Bangladesh under Paresh Barua, was aiding the move of Bangladeshis illegally entering Assam, making a mockery of cause of the Assam Agit-ation against the influx of Bangladeshis to Assam, Congress leaders in Assam were actively legalising the Bangladeshi migrants by issuing them ration cards from their briefcases, with the aim of substantially enhancing the Congress vote bank in the state.

What is further ironic is that during UPA’s tenure, both the Centre and Assam government, led by chief minister Tarun Gogoi, were releasing from jails the so-called pro-talks faction of Ulfa for enthusiastically negotiating with them. These members actively catalysed and greatly boosted the illegal migration by Bangladeshis and also got them settled in many areas by terrorising/massacring Assamese and non-Assamese-speaking communities and also ensured the Congress being voted to power in Assam for three terms.

It is now a complex problem. Fact-finding reports by civil society groups and the media indicate that the NRC process is not free from error or bias.

According to several reports, even people with legitimate documents proving their citizenship status were not registered because of technical reasons like spelling mistakes or different names were being used in the various documents. Sometimes, several people with the same name show up in old records, creating confusion.

Millions of Indians in Assam, often surviving on basic subsistence, have no access to historical documentation to establish citizenship claims. Changes in requirements for documents and notifications from the NRC authorities have also plagued the process.

For instance, in March 2017, the Gauhati high court ordered that a residency certificate issued by the panchayat secretary — an elected local official at village level — has no statutory basis and cannot be used as a linking document. This was a considerable setback for over 5 million married women who had reportedly used it to establish their connection to their parents. In December 2017, Supreme Court modified it, allowing the use of the document, subject to verification for its authenticity.

NRC allows those deemed “D” or “doubtful” voters to apply for inclusion but does not include their names unless the foreigners tribunals declare them as non-foreigners. However, in May 2018, the state coordinator for the NRC sent a notice to all districts saying that siblings and other family members of “declared foreigners” will also be put on hold and not included in the NRC until the tribunals decide their fate.

He also sent an order to the border police authorities, requiring them to refer family members of “declared foreigners” to the foreigners tribunals. The order did not mention the police’s duty to conduct a prior inquiry before referring someone to a tribunal.

Once a person’s case is referred to a tribunal, they can no longer be included in the NRC until their citizenship has been determined. The vital issue now is that while obviously deportation is not an option, at least the process of identification of the illegal Bangladeshi migrants must be done and they should be disenfranchised to ensure that Assam remains Assamese and Indian and not an extension of Bangladesh.

Thoroughness and great political statesmanship will be much required. While there remain other related issues, suggestions and conclusions are also popping up that the NRC should be made applicable to many other/all states of India.

The writer, a retired Army officer, is a defence and security analyst based in New Delhi