Assam in a quagmire

To end the seven-year-long 'anti-foreigner agitation' in Assam (1979-85), an agreement called Assam Accord was signed by the organisations leading the agitation on the one hand and by the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi on the other in 1985. Para 5.8 of the Accord stated: "Foreigners who came to Assam on or after March 25, 1971, shall be expelled in accordance with law. Immediate and practical steps shall be taken to expel such foreigners."

The significance of March 25, 1971, was that Bangladesh declared independence and the liberation war started on that day. It was presumed that those who had come to Assam before that date were either victims of religious persecution (Hindus) or entered Assam due to economic reasons (Muslims). They would be allowed to stay on in Assam.

It needs to be mentioned that the present BJP Chief Minister of Assam, Sarbananda Sonowal was, at that time, a leader of the All Assam Students Union, one of the organisations spearheading the anti-foreigner agitation, and the AASU was one of the signatories to the Accord.

BJP – and before it its earlier incarnation Jan Sangh – had all along accused successive Congress Governments in Assam of deliberately encouraging immigration of Muslims from East Pakistan/Bangladesh and allowing them to settle in Assam in order to increase the party's 'vote bank.' Now the BJP is being accused of indulging in vote bank politics by granting citizenship to Hindu Bengalis from Bangladesh.

Before the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP's Prime Ministerial candidate Narendra Modi himself promised in public meetings that if the BJP came to power at the Centre, it would take steps to drive out all the illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, irrespective of their religion. In the 2016 State Assembly elections, the BJP emerged as the single largest party but it failed to get a majority on its own. It had just 60 legislators in a House of 126. It had to rope in the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) with its ten members to form a coalition government. It needed to expand its vote bank.

The party moved for the amendment of the Citizenship Act. This evoked a strong protest from the Assamese people of the Brahmaputra Valley who feared that if this process continued, then they would be eventually outnumbered by the Bengalis in their own land. The result was that the age-old Assamese-Bengali antipathy which had ended, was revived by the short-sighted policy of BJP. Whatever support BJP earlier had of the Assamese people was in the danger of evaporating.

Then, in its desperate bid to saffronise Assam, it made another costly faux pas. Himanta Biswa Sarma, an ULFA man turned Congressman turned BJP man who now holds Finance and several other portfolios in the Sonowal Cabinet, announced that the State Government would open twenty-two new 'model' colleges in Assam, all named after the late BJP leader Deen Dayal Upadhyaya.

Immediately, there were angry protests from the civil society from all over the State. The first question was: Who is Deen Dayal Upadhyaya? We have never heard his name. Then, when his identity was known, people asked, why name the colleges after someone whom none knows in Assam and who had no contribution in any field in Assam. Assam has a galaxy of luminaries. Why not name the colleges after them? There is Krishna Kanta Handique, the renowned scholar and Indologist, who was the first vice-chancellor of the Gauhati University. There is Lakshminath Bezbarua, the eminent litterateur. Then there is Birinchi Kumar Barua, the well-known historian and linguist. There is Padmanath Gohain Barua, who is considered the pitamaha (grandfather) of modern Assamese literature. Why not any one of them but an unknown man who had nothing to do with Assam? Faced with this volcanic eruption of indignation and sense of outrage, the Sonowal Government hastily retreated from its decision to name the proposed new colleges after Upadhyaya.

The AGP, which is the coalition partner of the BJP Government, is now in a fix. Several organisations are opposing the move to grant citizenship to Hindu Bengali immigrants from Bangladesh. The AGP is also with them. Its allies are asking it to come out of the BJP-led coalition government by withdrawing its two ministers from the Sonowal Cabinet. But the ministers do not seem to be enamoured of this idea at all. If the movement against citizenship gathers steam, the AGP may be in a serious crisis.

The BJP has also suffered another embarrassment recently. The firebrand peasant leader of Assam, Akhil Gogoi of the Krishak Mukti Sangram Samity, was arrested under the National Security Act and charged with sedition for delivering a speech in a public meeting at Moran in Upper Assam tearing the Modi Government to shreds for its decision to grant citizenship to the Hindu Bangladeshis in violation of the Assam Accord. He was put in Dibrugarh jail. On December 21 last year, the Gauhati High Court quashed the sedition charge under the NSA and set him free.

(The views expressed are strictly personal.)