The Influx Issue in Assam

“AASU badly wants a fence”, said my friend. This about summed it up for me. For a while!

The ‘fence’ that people in Assam want is one on the Indo-Bangladesh border. It seems that over the last 60 years about 4.9 to 5.2 million Bangladeshi refugees (called influx, migrants or Banglas here) have crossed over into India. Samujjal Bhattacharya, the leader/chief advisor of the All Assam Students Union, said to me that Assam had taken the burden of the refugee problem on itself for the rest of India.

In some ways the influence of Bangladeshi migrants is felt very clearly. They are the ones that run the mandi at Beltola Bazaar. They are the rickshaw pullers. They are the masons, labor, construction workers, maids, drivers, agriculturalists, sweepers, road workers, fish sellers, etc. What has begun worrying a lot of people these days is also the fact that most Bangladeshi refugees are also Muslim.

Mostly everyone you speak to in Guwahati agrees that the influx issue is a huge problem. N- the biodiversity expert I spoke to, stated that in Manas and Kaziranga national parks encroaching on forest land had increased due to many Bangla migrants making their way to the ample forests and resources therein for survival. In fact, Assamese national parks are still populated with humans. Adivasi groups that have lived there for millennia are now entitled to stay there under the Forest Rights Act 2002. There is raging controversy about this – should animals be kept outside of human contact or can communities which have coexisted with nature and wildlife for centuries be allowed to stay as caretakers of the ecosystem. While this remains unresolved in the Indian context, human rights groups have stated that forcing tribal people out of their ancestral land to protect animals makes little sense.

Anyhow it seems that migrants have been able to make their way to the national parks and a clash of resources seems to have broken out between migrants and the adivasis or indigenous people settled there. Recently, there was an incident where adivasis burnt about 12 migrant settlements. Adivasis have not been reported taking up arms in this region. Quite obviously, discontent and rage at being deprived of resources or having to compete for them has set in motion the wheels of conflict.

Historically Assamese have never been divided on the grounds of religion. Many Assamese did take up Islam when the Mughals ruled here. But language seemed to unify them. It mattered less if you were Hindu or Muslim. What mattered was language. And language has been a very important marker of identity for historical reasons. It seems that when the British took over most of Assam after the Treaty of Yandaboo was signed in 1826, they began introducing Bengalis to perform the clerical and book-keeping functions. Bengalis had an advantage; they spoke English and were good at administration.

By the early 1900’s the Bengalis had begun replacing the old Ahom feudal elite as the new elite and middle class. After independence there was a move to introduce Bengali as the language of the state. But concerted opposition from Assamese people led to the shelving of the project. Strangely, the script for Assamese and Bengali is the same. The languages have much in common. Since I can understand Bengali a little bit thanks to my Bengali friends and being mired in left politics at JNU, following Assamese has not been that challenging.

During the years preceding Independence when the Partition debate was at its peak, it seemed that the Congress was quite comfortable handing Assam over to East Pakistan. This has been the regions greatest travesty – it has never fully entered the imagination of the mainstream Indian or the central government. When the Assamese plus Bengali (now already Assamised) elite realized that a Partition was in the offing they moved to oppose it. They succeeded, and only Bengal was partitioned into East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and West Bengal. It was at about this time that the influx began.

Tangentially, I just noted how when we speak of the Partition of India, we only restrict ourselves to the Partition of Punjab and the events in north India. There was similar unpleasantness and violence experienced by the people of Assam and Bengal, but we scarcely hear it mentioned. As was pointed out to be by a few people the Indian national anthem says “Punjab, Sind, Gujarat, Maratha, Dravida, Utkal, Banga”. It ends with Bengal to the east and has a fictitious province called Sind, which actually belongs to Pakistan now.

When borders don’t exist people move freely from one region to another. Even indigenous Assamese (adivasis etc) have practiced shifting agriculture called jhumming for eons. While this changed rapidly thanks to the British starting tea plantations and imposing modern Lockean property rights over the land. Once the Indo-Bangla border was decided, anyone crossing over became a refugee, a migrant. In all honesty, from a human rights perspective, one cannot blame Banglas from crossing over to India. The Brahmaputra wreaks havoc in the delta region annually. Farmland is limited and coastal Bangladesh is submerged and apparently more and more land is coming under water. The military junta and democratic governments of Bangladesh have both been unable to solve problems of inequity and development. Annual cyclones destroy many coastal and inland villages. On the other side of the border there are plentiful forests, land on which anything will grow with little effort and a democratic government that seems unable to deal with the problem of influx.

So why not cross over along the miles of porous borders? I certainly would!

The Assamese do not like this one bit. AASU’s entire spiel today centers around the problem of influx. This is the one issue that keeps the movement alive. There are AASU sympathizers from all sections of society from IAS officers, to former commissioners, politicians, students, local people, etc. They all agree that AASU is the only body/organization which takes this issue up seriously.

So yes, AASU indeed badly wants a fence.

The political parties have been accused of going soft on the migrants. This is because migrants are a bloc which can help parties win elections. The INC that has controlled the state for most of Assam’s post-1947 history has never begun an initiative to seal the borders. The migrants are able to get false papers, ration cards and voter id’s. They go back en masse to vote. As one security advisor states, a day before elections the entire bazaar is empty because everyone has gone back to their constituencies to vote.

Even the Asom Gana Parishad, the regional party which was an outcome of the AASU has gone soft on this issue. It seems playing the electoral game is a tad more important to everyone than actually addressing issues.

Samujjal, Chief Advisor of AASU, told me how for the rest of India 1948 was the cut-off point for refugees. Anyone who entered after 15 August 1948 was deported. During the Assam Accord it was decided that the cut-off point for entry would be 1973. Anyone coming in after 1973 from Bangladesh had to leave. AASU agreed to this concession. The GOI put in place an act called the IMDT Act, where anyone suspected of being a Bangladeshi could be deported. This was a draconian legislation, which allowed the police to decide who was an illegal immigrant and who wasn’t. Often people were hauled in off the streets on suspicion and arrested and tortured. There were great big loopholes in the Act (which I need to research right now). Recently, it came to notice that a migrant had actually been able to contest elections and had WON. He was since deported. But not before the system realized it needed to ACT (pun intended.. :D).

I asked one security advisor how I could identify a Bangla by just looking at him or her. To me everyone here looks the same. You can make out Assamese people quite clearly, they have slightly mongoloid features – a holdover from Ahom kings who came in from Mongolia. But as it goes in South Asia – it is very hard to determine ethnicity from looking at someone. I was told Banglas wear loongis, skull caps (because they are Islamic), their Bengali is very different and recently they have started growing Islamic beards (whatever that means). So an ASSAMESE can actually tell who a Bangla is and who isn’t.

I must admit, I am thoroughly confused. Determination of ethnicity was never my strong point.

The outcome of the influx issue has been the polarization of society to some extent, between those who are the actual influx people and others threatened by insecurity and contestation over jobs.

Thankfully, this has not become a Hindu verus Muslim issue yet. AASU has been very categorically stating that they don’t care if the migrants are Hindu or Muslim they should all just go back. The introduction of the right-wing BJP has complicated matters. The BJP seems more inclined to deport the Muslim migrants and keep the Hindu ones. This makes it almost impossible for an alliance to occur between AASU and the BJP. However, there is a shaky tie-up between the regional AGP and the BJP. The plan is to unite all non-Congress parties. The arrival of the BJP does worry me because it does think in terms of majoritarian democracy. It is easier to parcel society as Hindu and Muslim and then ask for votes, since interests are broadly aggregated this way. Who wants to deal with troublesome tribes, adivasis and tea-estate tribes? Too much trouble running to them for votes. They are neither Hindu nor Muslim. So much better for the parties if they were. But this is not the case.

The tribes have a mind of their own. So far I have been in contact with Bodo students, Koch Rajbhanshi student sympathizers. But apparently there are Tai Ahoms, Dimasas, Motoks, Karbi, Rabha, Tewa, Tea Tribes, etc. Pretty complicated. Not all tribes are Scheduled Tribes. Some are just adivasis and are vying for ST status. Other tribes want to be included as OBC’s. Some others like the Bodo Liberation Tigers wanted an autonomous district council now called Bodoland Territorial Council. But within the Bodo itself a new group called the NDFB (National Democratic Front of Bodoland) wants a separate Bodoland country.

I can’t imagine why no one has ever done concerted work on this region. It is definitely the most splintered place on the face of the earth. Several hundred Ph.D type questions can be found here. Also once you come here, you realize just how remote this place is. I will speak about the telecom rules and services here in another post.