Bangladesh impervious to tensions in Assam

Unrest rocks Assam, just on the other side of the Bangladesh border. While there are no tangible signs of concern within Bangladesh about the situation, there is tension in Assam, with 22 thousand soldiers deployed and India’s central armed forces on alert too.

Today is a crucial day when a declaration will be made as to who are citizens of Assam and who are not. This is locally known as NRC or National Registration of Citizens. Today the NRC of Assam’s 32.9 million residents will be published and they will thus be divided in two. Despite living there down the ages, a section of the residents will be categorised as ‘foreigners’. There are speculations about the number of these ‘foreigners,’ but the bottom line is that in India, any such ‘foreigners’ are considered to be Bangladeshi.

The benchmark or point of reference in the NRC process is 24 March 1971. This is a very significant date in relation to Bangladesh’s history (25 March 1971) which has been linked to the citizenship of Assam’s local residents. There is all reason to verify whether such initiatives akin to NRC have been taken up in other states of India.

A number of political parties in 1985 forced the Indian government to take this decision. It was the National Congress that first made this into a political issue. Then when BJP came to power, they used this deal made by Congress to take forward the process of identifying ‘foreigners’. Even the Supreme Court put on pressure to accelerate the issue. The court’s stance lent moral strength to BJP’s political position. Whether all this is linked together is a matter of speculation.

Many of those who fear being dropped from the NRC are, historically, Bangla-speaking. There are both Hindus and Muslims among them. It is quite easy for the Indian media and policymakers to ‘stamp’ residents of Assam with the ‘Bangladeshi’ seal. This is quite similar to the predicament of the Rohingyas in Arakan or Myanmar. Before the Rohingyas crossed over into Bangladesh in thousands, Bangladesh failed to inform the rest of the world about what was happening. It is bewildering why Bangladesh is maintaining a similar silence concerning the impeding humanitarian disaster of Assam.

Fear prevails in Assam that the moment anyone is officially declared a ‘foreigner’, they will be detained or attacked. Losing citizenship doesn’t just mean losing the right to vote, it also raises questions regarding the legitimacy of property ownership. Some are even questioning whether these persons, once stripped of their citizenship, will be able to sell the assets they have accumulated down the years. What about their children who are studying in various educational institutions?

Already, in a downright offensive move, 300 foreigners’ tribunals were formed and these have already identified 20 thousand persons as foreigners. And thousands of more cases remain pending.

The detention centres for foreigners in six prisons are spilling over and the central government has made allocations for a new detention centre to contain the burgeoning numbers.

Before coming to power, one of the election pledges of Narendra Modi and his party was to ‘evict Bangladeshis from Assam’. BJP also implied they were interested in evicting ‘Muslim foreigners’. But in the drawing up of the final NRC list, many Bangla-speaking Hindus also stand to lose their citizenship and the initiative has taken on the form of an anti-Bangla-speaking move.

Faced with the prevailing fear, alarm and unrest all over Assam, local senior minister Hemanta Biswasharma has said that this is just a draft report and the citizenship rights of those who have been identified as foreigners will not be snatched away immediately. There is scope for amending the list. Applications can be submitted for a re-evaluation of their status. Chief minister Sarbananda Sanwal issued similar assurances.

These assurances reveal a vacillation in policy of the local and central government. Has the Indian central government or the Assam state government decided upon the next steps to be taken after thousands of people are declared to be foreigners? The adjacent states have asked their police to be on top alert. There is trepidation that the Assamese stripped of their citizenship, will flee into these states. Only Bangladesh remains silent on the issue, quite impervious to the impending possibility of a massive influx of stateless people from across the border.

* Altaf Parvez is a researcher in South Asian history. This piece has been rewritten in English by Ayesha Kabir