Stir shows all is not well with citizens' list update

Guwahati: Assam has been on the boil. Over the past few weeks, the state has been rocked by protests as the Joint Parliamentary Committee on the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill 2016 visited it to hold public consultations on the Bill which has become a bone of contention for several stakeholders.

Protests have spread to other north-eastern states, particularly Meghalaya and Tripura. The North Eastern Students' Organisation, a conglomerate of various student bodies, has also launched an agitation.

The tussle over the Bill threatens to reopen old wounds as the proposed contentious Citizenship (Amendment) Bill overrides the provisions of the Assam Accord in case of non-Muslim migrants who have illegally entered Assam from Bangladesh since 1971.

The Bill seeks to allow illegal migrants who are Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh to get Indian citizenship.

It is significant that through an amendment to the Passport Act in 2015, the government had already granted refugee status to those Hindu immigrants who entered the country without a passport or a visa and overstayed.

In Northeast India, politics for decades has revolved around its fears of being swamped by illegal immigrants. It was this fear that had provoked the violent Assam agitation in the 1980s and led to the signing of the Assam Accord in 1985. However, the Accord has proved difficult to be implemented by all subsequent governments of all political hues, and the current exercise of updating the National Register of Citizens by the BJP alliance led by former agitation leader Sarbananda Sonowal was seen as a step towards its belated implementation. Notwithstanding the widespread hullabaloo on the issue, the Central government has maintained a studied silence. The proposed Bill has been disruptive in many ways. First, it contradicts the exercise to update the National Register of Citizens in Assam. Second, it has also revived the old wounds between the Brahmaputra Valley and the Barak Valley, home to a large Bengali-speaking population that  supports the Bill.

Assam, Meghalaya and Tripura have openly opposed the Bill, but the brouhaha is bound to engulf other states of the region. There are Buddhist Chakmas from the Chittagong Hill Tracts who have in the past fled persecution in Bangladesh and taken shelter in Arunachal Pradesh. Even Christians are not spared from such persecution in Bangladesh. There are minority Khasi and Garo communities in Bangladesh, who had difficulties in the past when governments friendly to the Muslim Right-wing were in power in Dhaka.

Apart from “jatiyobadi”, meaning race-based political forces, the Opposition Congress has also joined the protest with the regional Asom Gana Parishad (AGP), a constituent of the BJP-led alliance government. While ruling the state, the Congress had not only advocated political asylum for Bengali Hindus but also passed a Cabinet resolution proposing citizenship to those who came to India because of religious persecution in Bangladesh.

The spokesperson of the Assam BJP government and Cabinet minister Chandra Mohan Patowary appeared before the media recently to expose the “double standard” of the Congress on the Bill, and said, “We will make our view public only after the completion of the NRC.”