Making Sense of the NRC Citizenship Bill and Assam’s Reaction

As reported in The Assam Tribune on December 19, the President of All Assam Students Union (AASU) attended a day-long workshop organized by Sadou Asom Goriya Moriya Deshi Jatiya Parishad. Dipankar Kumar Nath the president of AASU allayed fear among the Assamese Muslim community about the process of updating the National Register of Citizens (NRC). He further stated that AASU would not allow the history of Assamese Muslims to be challenged by including the names of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. References to the ‘Silapathar incident’ were also made where Subodh Biswas, the president of the Nikhil Bharat Bangali Udbastu Samanvay Samiti (NIBBUSS) gave a speech in which he incited a mob to attack and vandalise the AASU office at Silapathar in Assam. Nurul Haque the working president of the Sadou Asom Goriya Moriya Deshi Jatiya Parishad mentioned the Goriya Moriya community’s contribution to the Language Movement and Assam Movement, with members of the community even joining the United Liberation Front for Asom (ULFA). Haque alleged that the All Assam Minority Students Union (AAMSU) was working for the benefit of the Bangladeshi Muslims and not the ‘indigenous’ Muslims. He also extended full support and cooperation with the NRC process. The workshop also saw the attendance of Pramod Boro the president of All Bodo Students Union (ABSU).

The NRC process has been a contentious issue in Assam, until after a Supreme Court Order, it became more contentious among certain sections in India than in Assam. The concern for many in India is that a number of people may be deprived of citizenship through this process. The people who are most likely to be affected are Bengali speaking Muslims. The community has come out strongly in opposition to the process seeking Supreme Court Orders as well as by demonstrating against it. The concerns of the Bengali speaking Muslims have peaked due to the proposed amendment to the Citizenship Act, 1955. The amendment would allow illegal migrants who are Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan, eligible for citizenship. This has created a rift between the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and their coalition partner, the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP). The AGP has shown its opposition to the amendment stating that the clauses of the Assam Accord must be adhered to strictly. In Nagaon, following the Assam floods, former members of ULFA were attacked by a group of Bengalis in a farm implements shop. The former militants had gone there to collect funds for flood relief which was corroborated by the CCTV footage. This led to widespread condemnation of the unprovoked attack by various nationalist groups in Assam. That one of the men arrested in connection with the assault was a member of the BJP, was a wakeup call to Assamese nationalists who are opposed to dividing the Assamese society on religious lines.

In the rest of India, the Bill is seen in violation of Article 14 of the Constitution of India which embodies the ‘Right to Equality’. In Assam, the perception is that the Bill is a step towards the erosion of ‘Assamese culture’. An Op-Ed in The Assam Tribune on December 16 embodied these sentiments wherein references were made to Assam’s composite culture and history with figures like Azan Fakir who brought Islam to Assam, later followed by Sankardeva who had brought Vaishnavism. The issues of Assam regarding the NRC and Citizenship Bill cannot be understood in the framework of ‘Hindutva’ alone. With a BJP government in power in the state, the Assamese are now showing resistance to this ‘Hinduism from outside’. The opposition has come even from Kamakhya particularly regarding the ‘Namami Brahmaputra’ event, which saw priests brought in from outside the state to perform rituals that were unknown to Assam.