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| All Assam Minorities Students' Union (AAMSU) activists hold placards and
shout slogans during a protest against Citizenship Amendment Bill in
Guwahati on Saturday. |
The Assamese-speaking population feels they will be outnumbered
within their own state by the newly legalised the Bengali-speaking
illegal Hindu and Muslim immigrants
The Union government is likely to introduce the Citizenship Amendment
Bill, 2019 in Parliament today, one that has been a source of serious
contention in the Northeast-especially Assam. The bill aims to provide
Indian citizenship to Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian
refugees from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan. A person belonging
to any of faiths, who entered India on or before December 31, 2014, for
having faced religious persecution in those three countries can apply
for Indian citizenship. If the person can prove religious persecution,
he or she will be granted citizenship by the government of India.
On
principle, there is nothing wrong in giving shelter to refugees who
have faced atrocities in any particular country, but some have raised
their voices against excluding Muslims from this special provision. The
government's counter is that Muslims are unlikely to face persecution in
the three countries-Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh-as they are
Muslim-dominated. Interestingly, the government makes no provision for
Hindu refugees coming from Sri Lanka or the Rohingya people from Myanmar
who follow Islam. Several BJP leaders have gone on record to say that
the Rohingyas are a threat to national security and even
Muslim-dominated countries such as Saudi Arabia are pushing them away.
They have also pointed out that while there are several Muslim-dominated
countries, there is only India for Hindus. These leaders also go out of
their way to point out that the bill seeks to provide shelter not to
Hindus only but five other religious groups, including Christians.
MORE FROM INSIGHT | Implementing NRC and Citizenship Bill fraught with challenges
Taking
note of the protests in the Northeast, the revised version of the bill
has exempted certain areas in the region. It states: "Nothing in this
section shall apply to tribal areas of Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram or
Tripura as included in the Sixth Schedule to the Constitution and the
area covered under 'The Inter Line' notified under the Bengal Eastern
Frontier Regulation, 1873." So, in effect, the bill excludes Arunachal
Pradesh, Nagaland and Mizoram, almost the whole of Meghalaya, and parts
of Assam and Tripura, but keeps all of Manipur under its ambit. The
government is likely to announce some remedial measures for Manipur as
well.
While these exemptions have calmed down other areas of
Northeast, massive protests are going on in Assam, particularly in the
Brahmaputra valley. In Assam, the Bodoland Territorial Area Districts,
Karbi Anglong and Dima Hasao have been exempted from the purview of the
bill, and the Bengali-dominated Barak Valley has welcomed the bill.
Though the BJP has tried to hard sell the Bill in Brahmaputra valley,
projecting it as a strategy to protect the Hindu identity of Assam
against the influx of Muslims from Bangladesh, it failed to take into
account the fear among the Hindu Bengalis in Assam.
When
the British occupied Assam in 1826, they had Bangla-speakers coming in
from West Bengal to do the clerical work. The Bangla-speakers convinced
the British administration that Assamese was a distorted form of Bangla
and eventually got Bangla imposed as the official language of Assam. The
Assamese language gained its rightful place only in 1873 thanks to the
intervention of the Baptist missionaries, but the insecurity of the
Assamese people over the dominance of the Bangla language lingered. The
Assamese fear that if Bangla-speaking illegal immigrants are granted
citizenship, these immigrants may outnumber the locals, as it has
happened in Tripura where Bengali-Hindu immigrants from East Bengal now
dominate political power, pushing the original tribals to margins. It is
why protests against the bill, headed by the royal scion of Tripura,
Pradyot Manikya Debbarma, who represents the tribals of the state, have
been going on in Tripura.
MORE FROM INSIGHT | Pragya Thakur and the power of controversy
The
linguistic data of the Census 2011 has also widened the already
existing fault lines between the Assamese and Bengalis. According to it,
the percentage of people speaking Assamese decreased from 58 per cent
in 1991 to 48 per cent in 2011, while Bengali speakers in the state went
up from 22 per cent to 30 per cent in the same period.
In Assam's
Barak Valley, dominated by Bengali Hindus, Assamese is still not
accepted as the state language. What has added to this fear are
campaigns, such as 'Miyah Poetry' and 'Chalo Paltai'. A section of
educated Muslims of immigrant origin, who are fluent in Assamese but
speak a Bangla dialect-locally called Miyah-among themselves, have
started writing poetry in that dialect. These poems talk about their
pain of living as a suspect in the place where they were born. What's
lost in this debate is the fact that Hafiz Ahmed, the most controversial
among these poets, is the president of Char Chapori Sahitya Parishad,
which has been promoting the Assamese language and literature among the
residents of Assam's over 2,000 Char Chapori areas mostly populated by
Miyah-speakers.
And if Miyah poets were not enough to add fire to
the already volatile situation, Garga Chatterjee, an Assistant Professor
at the Kolkata-based Indian Statistical Institute and TMC sympathiser,
has apparently launched a campaign asking all Bangla-speaking people in
Assam to write their mother tongue as Bangla in the next Census, so that
together, all Bengalis can overthrow Assamese dominance in Assam.
Ahmed, however, opposed this and also wrote against it in Assamese in an
Assamese daily.
MORE FROM INSIGHT | A Downward Spiral
The
Assamese fear that if Bengali Hindus and Bengali Muslims join hands,
Bangla-speakers will easily outnumber Assamese-speaking people in the
state. This has also been fuelled by some misleading facts spread by
social media, for example, that more than one crore Hindu immigrants
will come to India to take benefit of this bill. However, this bill
provides relief only to those who have entered India on or before
December 2014.
Ironically, the BJP increased its tally in the Lok
Sabha by one seat in Assam, the epicentre of all protests against the
bill. In contrast, the Asom Gana Parishad, which had quit the alliance
with BJP in protest against the bill and had fought the Panchayat polls
independently, lost heavily to the saffron party. Later, in the Lok
Sabha polls 2019, the AGP could not win a single seat.
BJP
leaders, such as Assam finance minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, use these
electoral results to dismiss the massive street protests going on in
Assam against the bill as the handiwork of a few vested interest groups.
However, Assam has a history of mass emotional movements for protection
of language and culture. This may be the beginning of another one.
