Dr Walter Fernandes
Senior Fellow,
North Eastern Social Research Centre
One has in hand the final draft of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) for Assam published on 30th July. It is a good document with some shortcomings. But the real problem arises less from the NRC than from the fear mongering in many media outlets in India outside the Northeast and of political elements trying to exploit the issue to their own advantage. Some TV channels even spoke of a possible bloodbath in Assam because lakhs of its residents have been left out of the NRC. Even before its finalisation statements were made that seven million Muslims will be excluded from the NRC. I kept getting calls from some European human rights groups asking me whether they will be jailed and eventually sent to Bangladesh. I told them that the census 2011 indicates that the number of alleged “Bangladeshi” migrants and their children cannot exceed 40 lakhs. But some leaders speak of every Muslim as “illegal” Bangladeshi. That takes it to 7 million.
In fact, the NRC was born because of this need. In response to agitation by students’ unions that feared that “illegal immigrants” would outnumber the indigenous people of Assam, in 2015 the Supreme Court (SC) ordered that an NRC be prepared. Its first list was out on December 30, 2017 and the final draft on July 30, 2018. Those indulging in fear mongering ignore the fact that it is the final draft, not the NRC itself. Its effort is to exclude all illegal immigrants from the register of citizens. To include their names every resident had to apply for it and prove that the names of their ancestors were found in the 1951 NRC, in other words prove that their grandparents lived in Assam. That is where the first problem arose. How does one provide a birth certificate in India that does not have birth, marriage and death registration? Many citizens being illiterate are unable to produce any record. Some others are too poor to argue their case and do not have enough legal assistance to prove their citizenship.
That has created serious problems for many Muslim and even some Bengali speaking Hindu residents. The draft includes 2.89 crores and excludes 40,07,077. Those excluded include former president Fakruddin Ali Ahmed’s brother’s family that claims to have lost its documents in the floods in 2000, Azmal Haque who retired from the Indian army after serving for 30 years, two MLAs of the Assam Assembly, both of them Hindu and many others. These and other anomalies can lead to much injustice. So the next question is “What happens to people excluded from the NRC?” The Supreme Court has said that no coercive action is to be taken on them because it is the only a draft. Action has to wait till the final list due on 31st December 2018. Thus fear mongering and talk of bloodshed are not justified but are problematic and dangerous. Equally dangerous are statements of some central ruling party leaders that their party completed the NRC while the Congress that began it in 2005 did not do it since they supported the immigrants who are a threat to national security.
I do not want get into the BJP-Congress dynamics but focus on facts. Firstly the NRC was not born out of the initiative of any political party but is the result of a Supreme Court order in response to a students’ organisation. The second myth being created is that “illegal” immigration began after the Partition and that it is a Pakistani conspiracy to destabilise the Northeast. The reality is that immigrants from Bangladesh began to come in response to the 1891 British policy that encouraged East Bengal peasants to migrate to Western Assam to grow more food to offset the famine (caused by land takeover for tea gardens) by cultivating what they called wastelands. They were in fact the common lands and livelihood of the Bodo and Rabha tribes inhabiting the region. Hence, from the outset the conflict is around land. Secondly, 90 percent of the East Bengal peasants were Muslim and that was their proportion among the immigrants too. It added a communal dimension to the land issue. Their number kept growing because they were landless labourers coming in search of fertile land. But in the 1930s in the context of the debate on the Partition some leaders of the freedom movement feared that Assam was becoming a Muslim majority province. So they encouraged Hindu peasants from Bihar to migrate to Assam. It added to the communal dimension.
Immigration has continued after the Partition from Bihar, Nepal and Bangladesh. Today, Hindu Nepali and North Indian immigrants are around 60 percent of them and Bengali speakers are around 40 percent. Even today the people of Assam are concerned mainly about their land and identity. But the focus of Central leaders is on “illegal” Muslim immigrants as a threat to national security. One of them has said that all of them will be deported. The same government has, based on the electoral promise of the present prime minister, introduced an amendment to the citizenship act making citizenship easy for minorities (read Hindu) who flee Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan “to escape persecution”. The people of Assam oppose it because they fear that the Assamese speakers who are only around 60 percent of its population will be reduced to a minority mainly because more and more land hungry Hindus may migrate to Assam, declare themselves victims of persecution and become citizens.
But some political leaders want to expel the “illegal Muslims” to Bangaladesh. Many of them may be Indian nationals who cannot prove their citizenship. More importantly Bangladesh will not accept them and they have nowhere else to go. Migration from Bangladesh with its density of more than 1,200 per sqkm to Assam with a density of less than 500 can even be a mode of demographic balance. Moreover, around 20 percent of Bangladesh is expected to submerged by climate change within the next two decades. Where will its people go? Detention camps can be a temporary solution. A long-term plan is required. In do not support continuing migration but believe that ways have to found of accommodating them perhaps with a work permit without voting rights. After all, a major attraction for the Bihari as well as Bangladeshi migrants to Assam is unskilled work. More importantly the defective land laws that make encroachment easy have to be changed. Many migrants get pattas for their encroached land by bribing government officials. One can also ask whether such large scale cross border migration can be possible without bribing the border guards. It means that corruption has to be tackled. The economy has to be developed in order to provide a livelihood to everyone and that can satisfy the Supreme Court definition of Article 21 on right to life as everyone’s right to a life with dignity. Bloodshed and fear mongering are not the answer.
Dr Walter Fernandes is founder-director and at present Senior Fellow at North Eastern Social Research Centre, Guwahati. walter.nesrc@gmail.com
