The ‘foreigner’ issue has arisen once again in Assam, the state of northeast India under BJP rule. In fact, this year three million Bengalis will be officially be given the foreigner ‘seal’. The Assam government will have no alternative but to drive them out of the state. But there is no answer as to where these people will go.
The present chief minister Sarbananda Sonowal’s former student organisation, the All Assam Students Union (AASU) has said that they will not tolerate any delay in driving the foreigners out. Anyone failing to prove their nationality, whether Hindu or Muslim, will be evicted from the state.
In India, only Assam has a National Registrar of Citizenship (NRC). NRC coordinator Prateek Hajela recently submitted a draft list to the Supreme Court, stating that about three million residents in Assam do not have citizenship. However, he didn’t elaborate on what basis he came to this conclusion nor did he define citizenship.
Hajela spoke about original inhabitants (OI) in Supreme Court, but did not explain who there were. Yet according to the Assam agreement, those living in Assam before 15 March 1975 are all permanent residents of the state.
In the meantime, the Supreme Court has ordered that the NRC list has to be published within 31 December. Since the issuance of this order, the hardliner anti-Bengali AASU is once again vocal in its demand to evict foreigners.
Assam’s language and religious minorities feel that BJP is instigating AASU to take such a stand. Congress fears that if this ‘foreigner’ stigma is attached to three million persons, the state will erupt in unrest again.
Former chief minister and veteran Congress leader Tarun Gogoi placed a counter question to the journalists, where will those who fail to prove their citizenship go? No one even has the proof that those who cannot prove their nationality due to their poverty, or other reasons, are actually Bangladeshi as often alleged to be. So Bangladesh in no way will accept them. Gogoi says that many poor people have no shelter. Many of them lose all their belongings in the floods every year. Many can’t afford the legal fees to prove themselves Indian citizens. If initiative is taken to force them out as foreigners, violence will break out in the state. And the BJP government will be responsible is such a situation arises, said the state’s Congress president Ripon Bora.
The state minister for railways, BJP leader Rajen Gohain also said that the situation in extremely bad. He commented in front of the media that the minorities in the state are in a panic over the NRC issue.
Human rights activist Shadhan Purakayastha from Shilchar told Prothom Alo over cell phone, “The condition of Bengalis in Assam is worse than the Rohingyas. The Rohingyas are able to flee and take shelter as refugees. The Bengalis of Assam have nowhere to go. During the BJP rule, sitting in jail they can only hope for the funeral pyre or the grave.” He said, “In Bangladesh or Pakistan, the minority can protest. Here they cannot even cry. BJP’s police have kept Bengali student leader Shubodh Biswas in jail for months on end despite his innocence.
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