Assam’s nativist push fraught with grave consequences
ASSAM Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has been relentless in his drive against Muslims. The more he ramps up his rhetoric and his government enacts laws to protect the ‘indigenous population’ from what he calls various jihads, the more he remains in the spotlight.
His latest campaign is to make it mandatory for all adult applicants to provide their NRC (National Register of Citizens) application number while applying for the Aadhaar card from October 1. Sarma has already expressed concern about the number of Aadhaar card holders being more than the recorded population in at least four districts. The CM has mentioned that these districts have a Muslim majority, and he suspects that illegal migrants from Bangladesh may have procured fake Aadhaar cards.
The issue of migration from Bangladesh has always defined Assam’s political landscape, triggering one of the strongest and most successful students-led agitations in the 1970s. Sarma was also part of that agitation before he joined the Congress (he switched over to the BJP in 2015).
It is well documented how the NRC updating exercise in Assam in 2014 led to hundreds of arrests and incarceration in detention camps. More than 19 lakh applicants were left out of the ‘complete draft’ of the NRC, released in 2019. As many as 688 persons were thrown in the detention camps, where 28 have reportedly died. Most of them are Muslims. The whole NRC exercise was ridden with clerical errors that led to years of repression.
However, the idea behind this massive effort was to ‘cleanse’ Assam of illegal Bangladeshis. The purpose was not achieved as only 321 were declared foreigners. Since then, the Chief Minister has taken it upon himself to rid the state of ‘termites’, a slur used by then BJP chief (and now Union Home Minister) Amit Shah in 2018 while referring to Bangladeshi migrants in Assam.
The Sarma-led state government has been changing laws and enacting new ones. He has been saying things which can be reported as hate speech. In March this year, he candidly said, “Islamophobia is real for many Hindus.” In a recent statement, he said he would take sides against the state’s Miya community (including Bengali Muslims), while speaking about the sexual assault on a 14-year-old Assamese girl, allegedly by a Muslim man, Tafazul Islam. He projected the incident as an attack by Muslims on ‘indigenous communities’. The accused later drowned in a pond while reportedly trying to flee when the police were reconstructing the scene of the crime.
Assam has a record of killings in police encounters. Earlier, Sarma had led a similar campaign against criminals and drug peddlers, most of whom he identified as Muslims. Since that time, landlords have been asking Muslim tenants in eastern Assam to immediately vacate their premises. In less than a week, more than a hundred families have fled. Small groups of Assamese youth, reportedly moving across various districts, are issuing ultimatums to Bengali Muslims to leave within a week. Just like lynch mobs in other parts of the country, these groups have been created to intimidate Bengali Muslims, using violence if necessary. In Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, such mobs have been threatening a section of the Muslim community on the suspicion of smuggling/eating beef.
It is not the anti-Bengali rhetoric of the 1970s that has been reawakened in Assam. The communal equation has since been reconfigured into a sharper polarisation between Hindus and Bengali Muslims (Assam’s Muslims are perceived to be members of an affluent community who prefer to assert their Assamese identity). The old feud — the Brahmaputra valley versus the Barak valley (inhabited largely by Bengali Hindus and Muslims) — has also become much more strident.
Sarma plays to the nativist gallery — someone who would have preferred ousting all non-Assamese people from the state but has reconciled with forging alliances to target the common ‘enemy’.
Under Sarma’s regime, the target population remains the same during frequent eviction drives. Sarma seems to be in a hurry to compete with fellow BJP Chief Ministers in other states in his tirade against Muslims. Considering his steadfast support to the Hindus, it was inevitable that he got on the bandwagon of love jihad. In 2023, his government carried out a brutal crackdown on child marriages. Thousands of Muslim men were arrested and madrasas demolished. This ideology aligns with the BJP campaign theme that Muslim men marry Hindu girls to convert them to Islam.
In August, the state passed the Assam Compulsory Registration of Muslim Marriages and Divorces Bill, 2024, to replace the 1935 Act. Sarma has now promised to introduce a legislation to ban polygamy.
In 2021, following some other states’ example, he started a cow protection campaign. In January this year, a man in Karbi Anglong district was lynched on the suspicion of cattle smuggling. For the record, a huge number of Indian head of cattle are smuggled to Bangladesh every day, allegedly in collusion with law-enforcement agencies and local residents.
Like his counterparts in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, Sarma has been allowing the use of bulldozers as a retaliatory measure. He recently restarted the bulldozer exercise.
Sarma is determined to walk the talk on his jihad against Muslims, though he clarifies that his tirade is against the Miyas or Bengali Muslims. His desire to dominate the mainstream narrative is a cause for concern.
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