Why is Assam on the Edge: The Citizenship (Amendment) Bill 2016
About fifteen days ago I had come across some of my friends using a certain Facebook profile pic frame. It is a tool that has been, with some success, used to raise awareness about several issues over the past few years now. This particular frame, however, caught my attention more than any of the previous ones I had seen. It had a red background, a colour synonymous with many protest movements. As if to confirm the first impression, it had "Do Not Be Silent, Do Not Be Violent" written towards the right end with a message in Assamese that roughly translated to "Come Out (on the streets)". The clenched fist on which the Assamese words were marked is internationally recognised as a symbol of unity and resistance. The cause unambiguously and unmistakably read: "I oppose the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill 2016".
The social media campaign gained some traction, with hundreds of Assamese youths, including me, keeping the frame for seven days. What appeared to be a mild internet movement was only an online manifestation of a much larger agitation in the streets of Assam. The state has been seeing hundreds of organisations and thousands of young and old indigenous north-easterners taking to the streets holding out placards and chanting slogans that criticised the central government's decision to introduce the Bill. A Joint Parliamentary Committee which was tasked to hear the concerns of the people of Assam regarding the Bill in the first half of May received memorandum opposing it, signed by political and non-political bodies: one was even signed in blood. A grim undercurrent of simultaneous defiance and dejection can now be felt throughout the Brahmaputra Valley with sorrowful memories of the violent Assam Agitation of 1979-1985 being freshly aroused again.
What has lead the Assamese citizens and the ruling NDA government to go loggerheads at each other and AGP, BJP's key ally in the state, threatening to break the coalition? Are the fears and the anger of the indigenous citizens of this much-neglected part of India justified? This is an attempt to look at the issue dispassionately and objectively.
The Bill:
The key provisions of the Bill have been put in the appendix at the end of this article for ready reference. The Bill concerns the entire country and not just the Hindu Bangladeshis or the state of Assam. However, it is with Bangladesh that the country has been facing its largest illegal infiltration problem for the better part of the last five decades. Also, it is in this north-eastern state that major protests are being carried out by the citizens: protests which are currently bordering on violence. The focus would, therefore, be restricted to this region and that community.
Two major takeaways from the statement of objects and reasons for the Bill as stated by the Union Minister Rajnath Singh are:
1. An illegal migrant would not be imprisoned or deported if she is able to prove that she is Hindu/ Jain/ Christian/ Buddhist/ Sikh or Parsi and has been living in India since before 2014, even if she does not have any valid travel document or passport on her.
2. An illegal migrant of any of these six religious communities can apply for Indian citizenship if she can prove that she has lived in the country for 12 months immediately preceding the application and 6 of the 14 years preceding the 12-month period.
To be fair to BJP, the Citizenship Amendment Bill has been at the core of their manifesto in the 2014 elections. The Bill does appear to be a genuine humanitarian effort to protect the persecuted minorities in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan at first glance.
Why Citizenship Amendment Bill?
Among the promises made by Narendra Modi in his election manifesto for 2014, granting citizenship to Hindu refugees and making India "a natural home for persecuted Hindus" was one. Modi, in a 2014 election rally, specifically promised citizenship to Hindu-Bangladeshis, saying that they would be removed from the migrant camps [a]. This sounds slightly pro-Hindu and majoritarian, as do so many of BJPs steps and promises. Apart from the political reason, there also was a humanitarian cause which triggered the creation of the proposed amendment.
Bangladesh has been a Muslim-majority country since its inception. A history of bloodshed against Hindus prevailed even before the independence of India: it was a common phenomenon in the then East Bengal and today's Bangladesh because Hindus were a historically religious minority. At the time of independence, due to the partition of the country, genocide against Hindus on the basis of religion reached regrettably high levels. After the 1947 genocide, Hindus were persecuted the most in 1971, due to which a large-scale migration of Hindus to India took place. According to estimates, at the time of Bangladesh Liberation War, almost 30,00,000 Hindus were butchered in one of the biggest genocides of the century [b].
The Hindu population of Bangladesh has declined steadily over the years and it currently dwindles at 8.5 percent of the total population. The community still suffers from rape, loot, arson and murder in the name of religion. A majority of the Hindu population has already migrated to India to escape the wrath of the Bangladeshi extremists. However, a large portion of the Hindu community still dwells in terrible conditions, has experienced and lives under a constant fear of religious atrocities. At 8.5 percent of the total Bangladeshi population, their number stands at 1.3 crore people. The Indian government through the amendment wants to provide an asylum for the group of people who have managed to escape to India.
Bangladeshis In Assam: A Silent Invasion or An Unnecessary Paranoia?
Assam has been grappling with the fear of a cultural wipe-out ever since 1978. Back then, the death of Hiralal Patowary, an MP from the Mangaldoi constituency of Assam forced a by-election and observers noticed that the number of registered voters had gone up dramatically. They demanded the elections be postponed. A review by the Election Commission revealed that 45000 illegal foreigners were listed in the electoral roll of that district alone. This incident sparked six years of struggle and protests by the citizens of Assam that lead to an official death toll of 855 persons, the actual number is feared to be much higher. The agitation was ended when the historic Assam Accord was signed on 15th August 1985 in the presence of the then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi [c].
It was hoped that the bloodshed and the complete paralysis of economic activities of the state over the six years would result in a conclusive effort from the central government to curb the immigrant problem. However, the Assam Accord is largely seen to have remained only on paper. The current process of creating a National Register of Citizens for Assam has already missed a number of deadlines and the accuracy of the process is being questioned repeatedly. Although there still isn't any comprehensive record to irrefutably quote the number of illegal Bangladeshis living in the country, the government stated in 2007 that the number was up to 2 crores. In 2012 Mullappally Ramachandran, the minister of state for home claimed that nearly 14 lakh Bangladeshi migrants entered India in the previous decade alone. Another estimate was provided by the Task Force on Border Management (established in the Wake of Kargil Conflict) headed by Madhav Godbole, former Union Home Secretary. This group went into painstaking details to examine this issue. In its report submitted to the government in August 2000, the Task Force places the overall figures at 1.5 crores with about 3 lakh Bangladeshis entering India illegally every year [d]. If we extrapolate the numbers to the current year, the number would have reached 2.1 crores. The two countries share a 4096 km long border through the states of Assam, West Bengal, Tripura, Meghalaya and Mizoram and the former three states are said to have the most porous boundaries. What percent of these approximately 2-4 crore illegal immigrants have seeped into Assam is highly debatable, as there is no system in place to accurately determine the number.
Religious Analysis:
There have been several estimates and methods to determine the number of Bangladeshi immigrants present in the state. The most popular of them is evaluating the population trend of Muslims in Assam. Bangladesh is a Muslim-dominated country with over 90% of its population practising Islam. On the other hand, the Assamese speaking community is primarily Hindu (75.52%), with Muslims being the largest minority (21.34%). Hence the logic is that an abnormal growth in the Muslim population in the state would correspond to a large-scale infiltration of Bangladeshis. From the perspective of an indigenous resident of Assam, the signs are ominous, if such a premise is even partially accurate. According to the 2011 census, the 29.59% growth rate of the Muslim population is almost double that of the state's total population growth rate of 16.93%. Indeed, the growth rate of the Muslim population has only once in the last century been below the state population growth rate. That was under the unnatural circumstances of 1971, during the time of the East Pakistan liberation War, which had lead to a mass exodus of Hindu population from the new country of Bangladesh to India. After that, the Muslim population has grown at a rate which is well above the state's average population growth rate.
It is not much of a surprise then, to see that the religious composition of the state has been changing steadily, with the Muslim population fast moving towards a majority. As of 2011, 34.22% of the state's population practised Islam while 61.47% of the people were Hindus. The Hindu population percentage has been on the decline since 1971.
The lines seem to be intersecting in the near future. In fact, a statistical analysis conducted by Dr Dilip C Nath, a professor of the Department of Statistics of Gauhati University, along with Dr Bhupendra Kumar Nath, statistician and assistant professor of Jorhat Medical College, shows that the Muslim population would be a religious majority in the year 2040. The regression analysis which they conducted showed an immaculate R-square of 1.
It can be argued that the high Muslim growth cannot be attributed to the infiltration of illegal Bangladeshis and that the abnormally fast growth rate is caused by the bona fide Indian Muslims residing in Assam. Abdul Mannan, former professor of statistics at Gauhati University, in his book Infiltration: Genesis of Assam, argues that Assam's Muslim population has increased because of the community's high birth rate and not due to illegal Bangladeshi infiltration. All of this makes one wonder: Where exactly is the Muslim population located within the state? Is it uniformly distributed across Assam? Or is it concentrated in a few areas?
In all probability, the Muslim population of these nine districts may comprise of indigenous people of Assam. A religious evaluation on its own standing can in no way establish a growing presence of an illegal immigrant population. Analysing the issue through the lens of another crucial dimension apart from religion, viz. language, would give a clearer picture on the topic.
Linguistic Analysis:
It is a fact that 98 percent of the Bangladeshi population speak Bengali, which is also the official language of the country. The Assamese community, by definition, speaks the Assamese language with varying dialects according to the region. The linguistic census released by the Indian government shows that the proportion of Assamese speaking population (people whose mother tongue is Assamese) has declined by 8.45 percent, in contrast to a rise in the Bengali population (people whose mother tongue is Bengali) by 6.06 percent between 1991 and 2001. The data of the 2011 linguistic survey is yet to be released by the government.
Again, it is possible that the rising Bengali population may indeed be legal Indians who have migrated to Assam or because of the high birth rate of that community. Conversely, it may be due to an infiltration by a neighbouring country, 98 percent of whose population speaks the language. Either way, it makes one curious if the region-wise composition of the Bengali speaking population is related with that of the Muslim religion.
Surprisingly, or perhaps unsurprisingly, depending upon the perspective, the districts which have a higher Bengali-speaking population than the state average, all lie in the south-western part of the state. If one can recall from the earlier analysis, this is the same region where the Muslim-majority districts are located, near the border of Bangladesh. 8 of the 9 districts in Assam whose Muslim population is higher than 50% also have a Bengali speaking population that is higher than the state average of 27.57%. The linguistic data is that of 2001 and the Bengali population in the region is guessed to have risen manifolds over the past 17 years.
The government still does not have an official number to ascertain the presence of Bangladeshi immigrants settled in Assam and a few souls claim that Bangladeshis being present in Assam is a myth. However, there were 2-4 crore Bangladeshi immigrants in India as of 2014 with 3 lakhs entering the country each year. 9 districts of Assam which are the closest to Bangladesh have a majority of the population who practise the same religion as Bangladesh's official religion. 8 of those 9 districts have a percentage of speakers of the official Bangladeshi language that is higher than the state's average. These are all official government numbers available in public domain. Hard numbers show that the percentage of Assamese-speaking people is declining while Muslims and Bengali-speaking people are rising rapidly in the state. To borrow a quote from the author Emery Allen, "Some things are too strange and strong to be coincidences."
Concerns for the Bill:
Social:
Indian states are organised along linguistic lines. Although subsequent changes to India's state boundaries have been made, the State Reorganisation Act of 1956 on the basis of spoken language is still the most extensive change in state boundaries since 1947. In Tamil Nadu, the Tamil language is considered to be a source of pride rather than simply being a medium of communication. In Karnataka, people have raised voice against the imposition of the Hindi language on the state. The protests picked up pace and intensity since the ‘Namma Metro Hindi Beda' campaign, to oppose the Hindi signs put up in Bengaluru's metro stations [e]. The local residents, not without reason, expect migrants from other parts of the country to learn the language. In Punjab, 91.69% of the people speak the Punjabi language, while in Maharashtra 68% of the population have Marathi as their native tongue. As mentioned earlier, 48% of the people in the Assam were Assamese speakers in 2001. 3 lakh Bengali-speaking infiltrators enter the country each year. With 1.3 crores Bangladeshi Hindus in the neighbouring country looking to find a way out of their pitiful living conditions, the Citizenship Amendment Bill 2016 would figuratively open the floodgates for these people to settle in India. The central government has provided no roadmap whatsoever regarding the geographic distribution of the prospective immigrants within the country. However, if one looks at the convenience of the issue in terms of logistics and linguistics, it is easy to see that the majority of the people would prefer to settle either in the north-eastern states or in West Bengal. If 50% of the immigrants settle in Assam, a figure estimated through the trends in Bangladeshi influx and the central government's continued apathy towards the state's dying indigenous population over the years, it is estimated that the percentage of Assamese people in the state in 2021 would be a paltry 27.02% (Exhibit 1).
Like the other states of the country, its language and culture is the identity of the state of Assam. The residents fear, understandably so, that Assam would be forced to become a Bengali state, that too because of successive waves of illegal infiltration.
Patriotic People's Front of Assam (PPFA), a civil society organisation, has put forward a statement which said that the Bill offers benefits to only the people who had already taken shelter in India prior to December 31, 2014, and there is no provision to bring more Bangladeshi (or Pakistani and Afghan) nationals after the said date. In one of the most corrupt region of the country which relies on vote bank politics, where getting a voter ID card for an illegal immigrant is as easy as paying a few hundred rupees and a promise to vote for a particular party, forging documents that prove a person has been residing in the country before 2014 would seem like a cake-walk. Moreover, since these immigrants theoretically do not have any valid papers on them, they can quite simply adopt a Hindu, Christian, Sikh, Jain, Parsi or Buddhist name while practising their own religion in private. If India or the state of Assam had a mechanism in place to correctly detect the time of infiltration or the religion of the infiltrator, the region would not have been facing such a large scale illegal influx problem in the first place. The Bill does not legalise a future influx of the Bangladeshi people to India, but it sure makes it a lot easier for them.
Political:
Even before coming to power, it was BJP's intention to introduce the Bill in Parliament. It was shown as a measure out of concern for the minority population in the neighbouring countries. At the same time, the party's majoritarian policies catering to Hindus and Hindi-speaking population while ignoring the religious minority within India is well known. The addition of Christian and Buddhist population may very well be an attempt to give the Bill a secular look. However, excluding a major religion like Islam from the contents of the Bill hints towards it being another Hindu majoritarian move. The state, which already faces a divide between Hindus and Muslims, has now split in half along linguistic lines. The two major valleys of Assam where most of its population is concentrated: the Barak Valley and the Brahmaputra Valley, have diametrically opposing views regarding the Bill. While the former is for the passing of the Bill, the latter vehemently opposes it. It is to be noted that the Barak Valley, which contains 3 of the current 33 districts of Assam, mostly comprises of Bengali-speaking people and many of them were refugees of the East Pakistan Liberation War in 1971. Most of such people do not have the necessary papers to get themselves included in the NRC and are afraid of being deported back to Bangladesh. The Bill would provide them with a "Get Out of Jail Free Pass", or in this context, a "Stay Out of Bangladesh Free Pass". The people of the Brahmaputra Valley, on the other hand, are older residents of this region and are primarily Assamese-speaking, who see the existence of their language and culture being in danger. It would be cruel, indeed inhumane, to turn a blind eye to the concerns of the refugees of either the 1971 war or the more recent victims of religious atrocities in Bangladesh. At the same time, the well-being of foreigners should not come at the expense of the country's own people and a middle ground needs to be reached, rather than opening the floodgates without keeping in mind the possible consequences that may come out of it.
Economic:
Bangladeshis who are not supposed to be in India continue to flourish in Assam. A look at the numbers presented earlier more or less ascertains this. State government reports do not simply affirm that fact, but also point out the kind of problems this poses. One such report was submitted in 2018 by the Committee for Protection of Land Rights of Indigenous People of Assam formed by the BJP-led state government and lead by former Chief Election Commissioner HS Brahma. The following is an excerpt from The Telegraph issue of 13th May 2018, which directly quotes the content of the report:
In a state whose 69 percent economy is agrarian, the land is the most vital resource to sustain and prosper. Encroachment of land by illegal immigrants is a classic case of already scarce resources being depleted even further unnecessarily and illegally.
As with the rest of India, Assam is struggling with a high unemployment rate. In fact, according to the Fifth Annual Employment-Unemployment Survey 2015-16 conducted by the government, the 6.1% unemployment rate of Assam is higher than the national average of 5%. As of 2017, there were 15 lakh educated youths in the state who were unemployed [f]. An injection of foreigners to the state would undoubtedly increase avoidable and unnecessary competition among the job-seekers, heaping further misery upon the local residents.
Legal:
The Bill is seen as unfair by the indigenous people of Assam. It may well be unlawful as well. It makes illegal migrants eligible for citizenship on the basis of religion. This clashes with Article 14 of the Constitution of India which provides for equality before the law or equal protection within the territory of India and prohibits discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth, or any of them. The Bill gives more than just a gentle tug at the secular fabric which binds the country.
Apart from the Constitution, the Bill also overrides the provisions of the Assam Accord and fixes the citizenship cut-off date as December 31, 2014. However, as per the Assam Accord, immigrants — irrespective of faith — who entered Assam after the midnight of March 24, 1971, will be deported. Indeed, only the non-Muslim Bangladeshis would enjoy the exemption. Then again, the provisions of the Accord do not discriminate Bangladeshis on the basis of religion. As such, the Citizenship Bill is being seen as a gross violation of the Assam Accord, which the All Assam Students' Union (AASU) had signed with the then Rajiv Gandhi government in 1985 at the end of the six-year Assam Agitation [g].
Environmental:
Assam has a great potential for tourism and the recent recruitment of Bollywood actress Priyanka Chopra for the government's "Awesome Assam" campaign shows that the state has started to take the industry seriously. Among the major attractions of Assam are the three wildlife sanctuaries and the three national parks. The Kaziranga National Park is among the last surviving natural ecosystem for the Indian one-horned rhino. To keep the charm of the state alive, it is imperative to preserve its forest cover. Increase in population, in terms of both legal residents and illegal immigrants, has repeatedly lead to the encroachment of land as mentioned earlier. Large areas of forest land have been encroached upon by the immigrants for settlement and cultivation. The state experienced declining percent of the land area under forest from 39% in 1951-52 to about 30% in 2016 [h]. A spike in the state's population could only mean further forest area being cut down, and a variety of wildlife, including the one-horned rhino, losing its habitat.
The Way Forward:
Protests and criticism have been pouring in against the Bill from all quarters of the Assamese community. Intellectuals, students, social activists, political parties and working-class families, who used to disagree on several issues, seem to have come united in opposition to the Bill. The BJP leadership is doing a careful job of skirting away from any question related to the Bill. Party chief Amit Shah, who held a meeting of the North-East Democratic Alliance (NEDA) in Guwahati on 19th May, spoke on a vast range of topics other than the Amendment Bill.
As the country with the largest Hindu population in the world, it is a moral obligation for India to provide asylum to Hindus who faced dire situations in a neighbouring country. At the same time, it should not destroy the cultural identity of a community or put intolerable economic pressure on a state where a large portion of the population lives in abject poverty. To find an analogy with European countries providing asylum to the Syrian war refugees, even the developed nations put a cap on the number of refugees that they would take in. Moreover, they agreed towards a judicious distribution of migrants across the continent so that simply one or two countries need not carry the burden of sheltering the victims. A statement released by PPFA proposed a similar solution for the Bangladeshi immigrant problem, with their population being distributed over the states of the country, including Assam. Moreover, the segment of immigrants who continue to live in the state should openly embrace the Assamese culture. By accepting the medium of instruction to be Assamese the settlers would allay the fears of the indigenous people pertaining to the threat on the Assamese culture. The central and the state governments need to come to agree on a framework and procedure for the same, to modify the content of the Bill accordingly before introducing it in the winter session of the Parliament.
An old fire has been rekindled by the Citizenship Amendment Bill 2016 among the people of Assam which traces its origin back to the late 70s. The NDA government needs to depart from its current silent standpoint and become proactive in its measures to prevent this fire from consuming the entire state again.
Appendix:
The Citizenship (Amendment) Bill was introduced in the Lok Sabha in July 2016, to amend the Citizenship Act 1955, with an objective to make the illegal migrants from six communities, viz. Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan, who arrived in India on or before December 31, 2014, eligible for Indian citizenship. However, to get this benefit, they must have also been exempted from the Foreigners Act, 1946 and the Passport (Entry into India) Act, 1920, which enable the central government to imprison or deport illegal migrants to regulate the entry, exit and residence of foreigners within India. This implies that these groups of illegal migrants will not be deported or imprisoned for being in India without valid documents.
The 1955 Act allows a person to apply for citizenship by naturalisation if he meets certain qualifications. One of these is that the person must have resided in India or served the central government for a certain period of time: (i) for the 12 months immediately preceding the application for citizenship, and (ii) for 11 of the 14 years preceding the 12-month period. For people belonging to the same six religions and three countries, the Bill relaxes the 11-year requirement to six years [i].
Reference:
[a] “The Trouble With India's New Citizenship Bill”. The Diplomat. (Mar 11, 2017).
[b] Mohapatra, Atanu & Sahoo, PC (Jul 28, 2014). Violence Against Minority Hindus in Bangladesh: An Analysis. Vivekananda International Foundation.
[c] Baruah, S. (1999). India Against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality. University of Pennsylvania Press. p. 115. ISBN 081223491X.
[d] Sharma, R. & Bhushan, A. (Jul 2014). Illegal Immigration of Bangladeshis into India: (National Security Challenges). 23rd World Congress of IPSA, Montreal, Canada.
[e] “Anti-Hindi Imposition Protesters Blacken Signs in Bengaluru Metro”. The Quint. (Jul 27, 2017)
[f] "Assam has over 15 lakh educated unemployed youths: Minister". HindustanTimes. (Feb 8, 2017).
[g] “Citizenship Bill, A Bitter Pill in Assam”. The Indian Express. (May 13, 2018)
[h] Das, J & Talukdar, D (Mar 5, 2016). Socio-Economic and Political Consequence of Illegal Migration into Assam from Bangladesh. Journal of Tourism and Hospitality.
[i] “Legislative Brief: The Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016”. PRS Legislative Research.
The Assam Tribune and its contributors through their articles over the last two months have provided me with invaluable perspectives and opinions to evaluate. A vote of thanks to the journalists and intellectuals who have an affiliation to the daily.
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