Genesis of anti Bangladesh politics in Assam

Jehangir Hussain

How two police officers with RSS links made traditionally friendly Assamese people hostile towards  Bangladesh                                          

Jehangir Hussain

Xenophobia generated by two police officers with Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) links made the traditionally friendly Assamese people hostile towards Bangladesh in the 1970s.

In 1979, All Assam Students Union (AASU) launched mass agitations against Indians from other provinces, but soon two police officers with RSS links changed the course of the protests against imaginary Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh.

AASU was against the other Indians who they said controlled Assam’s economy and marginalized the Assamese in their own state. 

Within months, the two police officers twisted the course of the protests against the so called foreigners, specifically ‘illegal immigrants from Bangladesh’.

In his book, ‘Infiltration: Genesis of Assam Movement’, a former professor of statistics at Guwahati University Abdul Mannan wrote the forgotten memoir of one of the police officers to show how the AASU leaders were persuaded to change the popular anger towards imaginary immigrants from Bangladesh.

Mannan wrote his book drawing from police officer Premkanta Mahanta’s memoirs, ‘Rajbhaganar Para Kal Thokalike’ in English, ‘ From Dethronement to the Plantain Grove’.

Mahanta himself published his memoirs in 1994, to ‘help historians with some truth that might be forgotten’.

Mahanta recounts his accounts from 1978, when Golap Borbora’s Janata Party swept the polls in Assam and ousted the Indian National Congress from power once for all.

The Janata Party was formed by a group of Parties including what was then the Jana Sangh, now Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), originally the Hindu Mahasabha, founded by  Syama Prasad Mukherjee in Calcutta.   

The other police officer was Hiranya Kumar Bhattacharya.

On October 1, 1978, the new government appointed Bhattacharya as deputy inspector general of police to head the Border Police Division.

In his memoirs, Mahanta wrote that he was appointed in the Boder Police Division in the following Februarry.

Mahanta wrote that ‘out of zealousy’ Bhatacharya got him transferred from the post of head of Police Training  Camp to the post of Superintendent of Police of the Border Police Division.

‘By that time, Bhattacharya had begun identifying and expelling Bangladeshi immigrants, Muslims and Hindus, from Nalapara, Mangaldoi and Tamulpur in Rangia, kicking off a political storm’, wrote Mahanta in his memoirs.   

Mahanta recounts, ‘I affirm that …the six-year-long Assam movement (1979 to 1985) would not have taken place if we hadn’t come together.’

In March 1979, about a month after Mahanta joined the Border Police Division, the All Assam students Union held a conference in Sibsagar, now Sivasagar,  when Prafulla Kumar Mahanta was elected as the president of All Assam Students’ Union and Bhrigu Kumar Phukan was elected as general secretary.

The conference adopted 21 resolutions, one of which spoke of the ‘menace posed to the existence of the Assamese by the outsiders who controlled Assam’s economy’.

The idea of the so called Bangladeshi immigrants was not there in the resolution until then.

In the same month, Hiralal Patowari, MP from Mngaldoi died, requiring a bye-election.

On April 27, 1979, the customary notice was issued to revise the voters’ list.

Bhattacha wanted more time to delete the names of many voters, therefore, he persuaded chief secretary R S Paramasivam, to ask chief election commissioner S L Shakdhar to give more time to revise the voters’ list.

The chief election commissioner granted an extra week and Bhattacharya used the time to strike of many voters from the electoral rolls of 1978.

As it needed a cumbersome process, and the deleted voters could submit complaints, Bhattacharya and Mahanta launched a media campaign against the so called ‘foreigners’ and the media began tracking the identification process.

Mahanta called for roping leaders to sway public opinion on the issue and accordingly Bhattacharya hosted a dinner for  Purbanchaliya Loka Parishad leader Nibaran Bora and Assam Jatiyatabadi Dal leader Nagen  Hazarika, both known to Mahanta since their school days.

In the memoir, recalls Mahanta, they decided to rope in the All Assam Student Union leaders.

Almost about the same time in March, Prafulla Kumar Mahanta was elected as the president of All Assam Students Union and   Brigu Phukan as the general secretary, recall Mahanta in his memoirs.

‘The 21-Point  Charter of the All Assam Students Union carried an alarming point of unbridled influx of outsiders into Assam. At our suggestion , the two student leaders were brought from their University dormitories in order to motivate them about the problem caused by foreign nationals. .. We provided them with adequate data and information. Then onwards, they agreed to treat the issue of foreigners with priority and delete theirs names from the voters’ list.’

At the executive committee meeting of the All Assam Students Union on    May 23, 1979, AASU adopted a resolution calling for a state-wide 12-hour shut down in June demanding ‘Expulsion of Bangladeshi infiltrators’. 

By this time, the names of many voters were deleted from the electoral rolls, drawing protests that the ‘police had hatched a conspiracy to identify Indian citizens as foreigners,’ recalls police officer Mahanta.

‘By then, the Indian Election Commission received protests from 47,658 voters that 36,658 Assamese voters had been identified as foreigners,’ wrote Mahanta.

The controversy over Mangaldoi’s voters’ list became the new driving force for the Assamese agitations and the All Assam Students Union’s new war cry became ‘Three Ds’ –Detection of Bangladeshi immigrants, Deletion of their names from the voters’ list and their Deportation.

Assam went into shutdown for almost a year.

One day, Bhattacharya went to Mahanta’s residence, writes Mahanta, ‘We were overjoyed, sensing the possibility of  such a great success. With rapture and passion we awaited the sun to rise.   That night we imagined a bunch of thoughts and ambitious plans. Rented buildings of a Maruwari, where the office of the border Police Division was housed from where the foreigners expulsion movement originated, we decided to buy to construct a memorial there.’

‘If we two had not come together, the movement called ‘Assam Movement’ would not have happened,’ recalls Mahanta.

In 1983, India Today journalist Chaitanya Kalbag met Bhattacharya at his luxurious house ‘Wilderness’.

Later, India made a controversial National Register of Citizens (NRC) for Assam, under an equally or more controversial 2003 amendment to the Citizenship Act 1955, apparently to document legal citizens as well as to identify and deport ‘illegal immigrants’.

The plan was aimed at ousting an unspecified number of Assamese people after branding them as ‘illegal immigrants from Bangladesh’.

It has been implemented in the Indian province of Assam since 2013.

The Indian government plans to implement the controversial law in the rest of the country to divert public attention from the real issues hurting common people.

The Indian government drew heavy domestic criticism for its intentions to use the register or list of citizens to mark people as doubtful citizens for asking them to prove their citizenship.

India, however, is silent about immigration of Indian Muslims into Bangladesh at different times since 1946.

India also finds it quite convenient to maintain silence about five lakh or more Indians working in Bangladesh, legally and illegally, who in 2013 sent home $ 3.17 billion as remittance, according to official statistics.

They sent an equal amount or even more to India using the illegal hundi channel.

Bangladesh stands 5th among 15 countries from where Indians send remittances to India after UAE, USA, Saudi Arabia and UK.

On 18 June 2014, then Home Minister Rajnath Singh issued instructions ‘to take National Population Register (NPR) project to create a National Register of Indian Citizens.

On 24 December 2019, the government of India approved Rupees 3,941 crore (equivalent to $550 million) for updating the NPR, as a  first steps in implementing the NRC.

In December 2019, prime minister Narendra Modi stated that ‘there has been no discussion on NRC anywhere... we only had to implement it in Assam to follow Supreme Court directives.’

CPI (M) leader Prakash Karat criticized the Indian government’s double speak as a ‘disinformation ploy’ and described the NPR as the first step of the NRC process.

The issue is drawing electoral debate in India after the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) promised in its election manifesto that the controversial system would be implemented throughout India.

In the 1980s, Assam witnessed six years of violent agitations against ‘the outsiders’ or the Indians from the other provinces.

Bangladeshi think tank, the CENTRE for Policy Dialogue (CPD) has recommended to the Bangladesh government to form a committee to investigate the large remittance outflows to India.

A section of Indian media and politicians harp on the propaganda that Bangladeshis had illegally migrated to India to take jobs in that country.

Some of these Indian political parties are known for creating a politically charged atmosphere on the imaginary issue of ‘illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and refer to them as ‘vote bank’ particularly when elections are on the corner.

Their allegations may be true to some extent, but what about the Indians living in Bangladesh, legally and illegally, to earn their bread and send money back home in hard currencies through legal and illegal channels?

Indians, are employed in Bangladesh for ordinary administrative work for which there is no shortage of Bangladeshi candidates.

Bangladesh does not recognize that any infiltration ever took place from its territory to India.

The NRC, being implemented in Assam, has its roots in a Memorandum of Settlement or the Assam Accord signed between the All Assam State Students Union and the Government of India in 1985.

As the accord could not solve the issue, the NRC was initiated in 2010 as a pilot project in two districts of Assam — Barpeta and Kamrup.

But this process was stalled after four weeks of violent clashes in Barpeta.

The work of the NRC was revived following intervention of the Supreme Court of India, after an NGO, Assam Public Works in a petition sought steps for the deletion of the undocumented migrants from the voters’ list and updating the citizens’ list as a step to control the alleged illegal migration. 

In 2015, the Assam government resumed the work of preparing the NRC.

The NRC was published in three segments, the first list called the Part Draft, published on the midnight of December31, 2017, included only 19 million plus  people out of 30.29 million applicants. 

The second list, termed as the Complete Draft, published on July 30, 2018, included 28.98 people leaving another 40.71 million applicants out.

As this list was not the final draft, people who were not included were given an opportunity to file their claims. The expectation is that the number of people that have been excluded will come down in the final list.

The exclusion of people in such large numbers has led to criticism of the NRC exercise as people fear that they might become stateless. What worries people  is that is there has been no specific policy in ascertaining their fate. The possibility of deportation to Bangladesh is very bleak as the people excluded from the list should be proven citizens of Bangladesh, and that will require cooperation from Bangladesh.

Bangladesh categorically stated time and again that there was never any infiltration from its territories as India wrongly claims.

There is also criticism in India against push-back on the ground that previous push-back efforts had backfired as those who were pushed back, returned to India within a few days.

Many political parties in India opposed heavy-handedness on this issue as it could harm the ties between India and Bangladesh.

The Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) 2016 was made by India to grant citizenship to Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Parsis, Jains and Christians from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The CAB is opposed in the North-Eastern States of India, including by  some of the allies of the ruling BJP, like the National People’s Party and Asom Gana Parishad.

For those born after the adoption of Constitution, the Indian Citizenship Act 1955 grants citizenship based on birth date: (i) Anyone born between 26 January 1950 and 1 July 1987 is a citizen by birth; (ii) A person born between 1 July 1987 and 3 December 2004 is a citizen by birth if either of his parents is a citizen at that time; (iii) Those born on or after 3 December 2004 is a citizen if both of the parents are citizens of India at the time, or if one parent is a citizen and the other is not an illegal migrant (a foreigner who entered India without valid documents, or stayed beyond the allowed period).

India made the  controversial National Register of Citizens for Assam to deport its people branding them as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

Assam had a register of citizens created for it in 1951 based on the 1951 census data but the register was not maintained after India enacted the Illegal Migrants’ Determination Tribunal Act 1983.

Under the IMDT Act passed by Lok Sabha, the lower house of Indian Parliament, a tribunal was created for identifying illegal migrants in Assam.

The law had taken away the arbitrary powers of the Superintendents of Police , the head of district police to identify and deport Indian citizens in Assam from complaints from two local residents, after even Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, former Indian President, was identified as a foreigner or illegal immigrants in Assam.

After the IMDT Act had stopped the arbitrary deportations by the SP, the government of prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee had taken the IMDT Act to the Supreme Court of India which in 2005 struck down the law after which the government of India began updating the controversial National Register of Citizens for Assam.

The final updated National Register of Citizens  for Assam, published on August 31, 2019, contained 31million people out of its population of 33 million  leaving out 1.9 million applicants, rendering them potentially stateless.

India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party which backed the NRC exercise, did not find the results satisfactory as it believes that many legitimate citizens were excluded while many illegal migrants were included.

The BJP promised to implement the NRC for all of India in its election manifesto for the 2019 general election.

The Indian Citizenship Rules Amended in 2003 empowers the central government to issue an order to prepare the National Population Register (NPR) and create the NRC based on the data gathered.

The 2003 amendment also empowers local officials to decide whether or not  to include persons’ names in the NRC, in other words the rules amended in 2003 empowers local officials to decide the citizenship status of Assamese people.

The Citizenship (amendment) Act 2003 or Act 6 of 2004 added the following clauses to the Citizenship Act 1955.

The Citizenship (Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards) Rules 2003, formulated under the Act also requires:

The government of India to prepare a National Register of Indian Citizens  through a house-to-house enumeration for collection of specified particulars relating to each family and individual, residing in a local area including the Citizenship status.

Since 2014, the government of India stated in Parliament several times that the National Register of Indian Citizens (NRIC) or NRC is based on the data collected under the NPR, after the verification of the citizenship status of every individual.

In 2010, the NPR was created for the first time with the names of 119 crore residents of India.

‘A BJP government will pick up infiltrators one by one and throw them into the Bay of Bengal,’ declared the then BJP president Amit Shah in April 2019.

On 24 December 2019, the government of India approved Rupees 39.410 billion (equivalent to $550 million) for updating the NPR, as a  first step in implementing the NRC.

Border wise Bangladesh is India’s largest neighbour, sharing 4,096 kilometres of land boundary, the longest border in the world including 262 kilometres with Assam.

With China India shares 3,488 kilometres of border.

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