Why Assam is protesting against the Citizenship Amendment Bill?

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.

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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.

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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.


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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.