The citizenship and identity of Assam today are not the same as it was a few years ago, but a tool. The current political dispensation of the BJP led by PM Modi in the Centre and the regime of CM Himanta Biswa Sarma in the Dispur feel that they are strangers in their own land that their own ancestors had long referred to as their own country. It is not politics but identity politics and this is dangerous politics.
Citizenship and Belonging in Assam: A Contrived Crisis
The 2019 completion of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) update in Assam should have been a typical example of bureaucracy with the goal of identifying illegal immigrants. The consequence of it, however, is something much more frightening. Some 19 lakh or almost 1.9 million citizens were excluded in the revised NRC with most of the exclusion including poor, rural and Muslim/Bengali Hindu population who lacked the documentation that was initially unavailable to them due to poverty and migration.
According The Wire reported, The whole procedure is stained with random denial of claims, unequivocally formed verification guidelines and a bureaucratic load that is placed wholly on the citizen many of whom are old, illiterate and unable to negotiate a system that appears to be geared to fail them.
Aminul Islam and the Voice of Minority Identity Crisis
Aminul Islam, the president of the All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF), is among those persons who have played one of the most vocal roles in the expression of the palpable trepidation that is being experienced by the Assam minorities. Islam has been fronting stern warnings on how the NRC, Citizenship Amendment Act and the rhetoric of the current Chief Minister of Assam, Himanta Biswa Sarma have all contributed to the development of second-class citizens in the state of Assam.
The threats of Islam are not empty words because over 10,000 people have been displaced by the present regime of Sarma. The majority of the people being evicted are Muslims. According to the Al Jazeera’s investigation in the Darrang district eviction drive of September 2021, police opened fire on the people protesting the eviction. Two persons were killed in the police firing. Dozens of people were injured. The police firing was photographed by a government .The police officer was photographed kicking a wounded citizen. The police officer was defending his action by the government.
Himanta Biswa Sarma: Division Politics
The man that has come to power in May 2021 and ever since become the Chief Minister of Assam, Himanta Biswa Sarma has developed a brand, which is based almost entirely on his anti-Muslim rhetoric. Sarma has given speeches on the increase of Muslim population in Assam as a menace to the Assamese culture, on the necessity to legislatively control the number of children that Muslim families can have, and has chaired a massive proliferation of Foreigners Tribunals, a body with unlimited powers to declare Indian citizens foreigners, and with no legal assistance available to them and an appellate system tilted against them.
In February 2023, Sarma’s government detained over 2,000 people within a week of each other under the guise of a drive against ‘child marriage,’ a move that civil liberties groups pointed out was highly disproportionate against Muslim men in minority-dominated districts.Experts, as reported by The Hindu documented had raised serious questions about procedural issues, arrests made before dawn without warrants, and the use of such a drive as a political tool ahead of local polls.
CAA and NRC: BJP’s Two-Part Citizenship Conundrum
Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019, passed by Modi’s government with minimal discussion in Parliament, grants minorities in Pakistan,Bangladesh, and Afghanistan a fast track to citizenship in India. Every religion is included except one Islam.The exclusion of Muslims is not an oversight it is a point.
When viewed in conjunction with a nationwide NRC, which the BJP has threatened to impose repeatedly, it becomes clear that NRC denies citizenship to those who cannot prove documentation, while CAA grants it to non-Muslims. This, as Amnesty Internationalw has so clearly put it, is a constitutional framework to make Muslims in India stateless, a charge that the BJP has never been able to convincingly defend against.
Modi’s Silence: Complicity Dressed as Statesmanship
The Prime Minister has never once publicly addressed the fear that gripped the minorities of Assam. He has never once visited a detention centre. India has over 3,000 declared ‘foreigners’ in its six detention camps in Assam. They have been kept here without trial for years. The Prime Minister has never once publicly condemned the Darrang violence. He has never once publicly acknowledged the findings of the Supreme Court-monitored NRC process that his own party has now disowned as “faulty” and demanding a re-verification. In other words, they are threatening to start the trauma all over again.
A report by BBC News, states that several people who had served in the Indian Army had been left out of the NRC. Hindu families with documented histories of being in Assam for more than a century had been deprived of their citizenship on technical grounds. And yet this is the population that has been affected by the NRC. One can only imagine what the NRC must have done to the vulnerable.
Conclusion
The story of citizenship and belonging in Assam under the BJP is the story of a state turning against its own people. Not all its people, mind you. Only those who are inconvenient to the party’s electoral calculus because of their religion, language, or ethnicity. Modi gives the ideology. Himanta Biswa Sarma gives the machinery. And millions of ordinary Assamese Muslims pay the cost in fear, displacement, and dispossesion.
A state that bases its notion of citizenship on religion, uses bureaucracy as a tool to oppress its poorest citizens, and runs its politics through a fabricated demographic crisis is not securing Assam. It is destroying the very notion of a pluralistic India – one eviction notice, one tribunal hearing, and one deleted name at a time.
