New Delhi: For over a year, the process to update the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam has garnered a lot of national attention. While many think that the BJP-led government’s claims to replicate a similar process in the rest of India may usher in a new age of xenophobia in India, a large section of Assamese people think of it as a logical end to the Assam Accord that put an end to the tumultuous six-year agitation against ‘illegal immigrants’ in the state.
Given the Hindutva thrust of the BJP, NRC was also discussed as the saffron party’s programme to advance its majoritarian agenda.
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However, most of these debates were set as contemporary polemic that lacked historical understanding. As a result, multiple doubts and incoherence around the process of NRC updation in Assam. A new book on the shelves attempts to clear the air around it.
Assam: The Accord, The Discord
Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty
Assam: The Accord, The Discord by Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty was launched at the India International Centre, New Delhi, on September 11. The book has been published by Penguin.
Pisharoty, who is a deputy editor with The Wire, said the book is a breakdown of the “the making of the Assam Accord and its long shadow on the state, through political gamesmanship between principle players, periods of ULFA and Bodo militancies, and right-wing propaganda that has split the state along communal lines.”
The Assam Accord was signed in 1985 between the members of the All Assam Students Union (AASU), which led the agitation, and the then Congress-led state and central governments. AASU leaders went on to form a political party Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) and won the assembly elections held in the same year. However, since then key clauses, including the critical emotional issue of updation of NRC, remained unimplemented, leading to much discord in Assam.
BJP-led Centre’s initiative to start the process of updating the NRC in 2015 catapulted the party to power in the 2016 state assembly elections. In December 2017, the first list did not include 40 lakh people and the final list left out 19 lakh names, making it the centre of a stormy debate.
A discussion on the issue by a distinguished panel – comprising one of the founding editors of The Wire Siddharth Varadarajan, The Print’s Shekhar Gupta, Supreme Court’s senior advocate Upamanyu Hazarika, professor of political science at JNU Anupama Roy, former Union home secretary G.K.Pillai and Pisharoty herself as the moderator – followed the launch.
The conversation focussed on how the Assam Accord cemented the idea of Assamese “linguistic, cultural, and ethnic” identity, the reflection of which one sees in the state-wide support for updation of NRC even after 30 years of the Accord. The panel agreed that the NRC isn’t a communal issue but has been deliberately communalised through a polarised debate on the matter. All panelists said that the updation of NRC process was subverted, leading to a final list that is far from being ideal.
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Varadarajan said that the NRC issue and the undocumented migrants issue has played differently in Assam and the rest of India. “It is tempting to lay the finger of blame on the BJP for the sense of an exaggerated fear of the outsider, but this has a much longer history in Assam.,” he said.
He added that the final list only projects around 1.9 million as illegal migrants, but governments and political parties had been projecting “fictitious numbers” to magnify the problem of illegal migration from Bangladesh.
Varadarajan also hit out at the BJP’s excessive use of the term “infiltrators” for economic migrants. He said that one can trace the history of the demand for updating the NRC in Assam but to have a process like that to weed out the so-called “infiltrators” will be like “injecting poison” in Indian society.
Gupta said that as a young reporter, he understood the need of Assamese leaders to cement their regional ethnic identity but has moved away from that position in a globalised world, where economic migration has become a necessity and need for an ethnic identity has lost its significance.. He said he understood that Assamese people were victimised and agitated for a separate cultural identity. He said the movement never took a separatist turn. He also spoke about the confusions around the NRC debate. “Is it ethnic or communal,” he asked.
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Gupta said that although the movement is primarily ethnic in nature, the RSS, even in the 1980s, was “making a very determined effort to make it communal, to turn it against Muslims” despite the fact that even the ethnic Assamese Muslims supported the AASU agitation.
“Top leaders like Sudarshan visited the state back then many times. He told me that this movement has to be given a shape whereby the opposition builds for Muslims,” he said.
However, he added that the “idealism” which was seen among AASU members during the agitation days completely “disappeared” and “they became the most corrupt leaders later.”
Roy contemplated on the idea of citizenship within a legal and administrative landscape and how it is so closely linked to the idea of NRC. She said that Pisharoty’s book brilliantly documents how citizenship is “written” through different periods of history, and how through the NRC, Assam has found ways to be documented in national history.
Hazarika, who is advocating constitutional protection for Assamese indigenous people, came out in strong support of the NRC. He said the primary reason the Assamese people felt left out was because of the sustained way their right to possess land in the state kept diminishing. He added that the neighbouring states of Assam like Meghalaya, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh could preserve their right because of special powers.
He also distinguished between “internal” and “external” migration. He felt that Assam has been quite open to Indian immigrants and that the insecurity in Assam was for immigration from Bangladesh.
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“We have a very serious issue. Out of 535 ethnic communities in India, 247 are in the north-east; 115 in Assam alone,” he said, adding that all the 247 are fighting to secure their small space, necessitating the need for constitutional protection and special rights. He quoted studies which speculated that ethnic Assamese may become a minority in subsequent years.
Pillai seemed to hint at the fact that the insensitive attitude that successive governments showed for the issue aggravated the problem. He said that as the joint secretary in-charge of the north-east region during the NDA-I government, the then home minister L.K.Advani was strongly opposed to start the process of NRC updation. He said as the Union home secretary during the UPA government, P. Chidambaram, the home minister then, kept deflecting the issue.
However, he said that economic migration has become a reality. And while trying to stop illegal immigration from Bangladesh, Assam should also “welcome” the migrants from other states of India.