The brouhaha created by opposition parties over the release of the second draft of the National Register of Citizens for Assam, is manufactured. It is manufactured for the following reasons. One, the list is not a final document; that is still some months away. Two, those who do not find their names in the list can approach the authorities with the their claims and objections by citing evidence in favour of their inclusion. Three, the massive exercise to distinguish genuine citizens from illegal migrants from neighbouring Bangladesh has been conducted under the supervision of the Supreme Court. Four, the process is religion-neutral. And five, it is in keeping with long-standing demands made by the people of Assam to weed out infiltrators who have not just changed the demography of large parts of the State but also sought to appropriate resources of the State at their cost.
The Opposition, especially the Congress, the Left and the Trinamool Congress, have put forth the ‘humanitarian’ angle to justify their criticism. The Congress has claimed that the process conducted by the BJP-led regime at the Centre and in Assam, has been “tardy”. Trinamool Congress chief and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee alleged that people with Bengali names were deliberately excluded from the list. Even
Amnesty International has jumped into the fray. In the first place, those who ultimately fail to prove their credentials and find themselves out of the final NRC list, are not going to be instantly deported to wherever they came from, or cast into the sea. It is possible that, to begin with, they will have some of the privileges Indian citizens enjoy, curtailed. But eventually they need to be sent back. India cannot become a dumping ground for illegal migrants. A similar outrage had been witnessed in the case of nearly one million Rohingya Muslims who entered India illegally and continued to live illegally.
As of now, nearly 40 lakh persons have not made it to the NRC, and this includes almost 2.5 lakh “doubtful” voters and those whose cases had been referred to foreigners’ tribunals. As things stand, the Election of Commission will take a final call on the voting rights of these people; for the present, they will not have those rights, while other privileges, including Government subsidies etc, will be continue to be available to them. So, humanitarianism has not been thrown to the winds.
It is funny for the Congress to say that Indians are being made refugees in their own country. How does the party call people in Assam, who cannot substantiate their claim to be Indians, citizens of this country? The real Indian refugees are the Kashmiri Pandits, and various Congress regimes at the Centre and in Jammu & Kashmir have over the years failed to address their grievances. The reason why the Congress and the others are shedding tears for illegal migrants in Assam and elsewhere is that the latter have over the years been cultivated as vote-banks. They were given ration cards, voter identification cards, and even Aadhar cards. Indebted for these favours, they naturally voted for those who continued to legitimise their illegal stay.
The opposition has also added a communal twist to the exercise. It says that the BJP regime has been targeting people from a certain community (Muslims) in the preparation of the NRC. The fact is that a large number of the infiltrators who have crossed over from Bangladesh belong to the minority community, and so it is obvious that the vast majority of those who will be eventually left out will be those from this community. At the same time, there are also Hindus among the illegal migrants and they too will face the same standards in establishing their Indian identity. While the Congress is eager to reclaim its support among the Muslims of Assam, which it has substantially lost to some regional outfits there, the Trinamool Congress is determined to send a communal message to constituents in West Bengal. Indeed, that State too needs to be cleansed of illegal migrants — and they support the Trinamool Congress now, as they did the Left in the past years.
Those who argue that the issue of illegal migration in Assam has been blown out of proportion, should take a look at figures. At least nine districts of the State now have a Muslim presence that is over 50 per cent of the total population of those districts. In some districts, the figure is as high as 80 per cent. These are skyrocketed numbers when compared to the figures of the previous two Census reports. Only large-scale migration from neighbouring regions can explain the phenomenon. A similar situation is waiting to explode in West Bengal, where already a clutch of districts has seen dramatic shifts in demography.
Assam is now peaceful, but it was not always so since independence. It has seen various movements — which often turned violent — in favour of ethnic Assamese and against infiltration. Those in the forefront where organisations such as the Asom Gana Parishad and the All Assam Students Union. The 1985 Assam Accord signed between the Rajiv Gandhi Government and these outfits was mandated to settle the issue once and for all. But both in letter and in spirit, successive regimes at the Centre and in the State, primarily Congress-led ones, destroyed the accord. The net result was that illegal immigration continued unabated, resentment among legitimate citizens of Assam (and this includes Muslims) continued to grow, and the new BJP regime led by Sarbanand Sonowal in the State was faced with the onerous task of resolving the matter.
Now that the bull has been taken by the horns, neither the Centre nor the State should back down. It’s time to clean up. Let opposition parties cry foul, let so-called human rights activists shout from the rooftops, let politicians extract petty mileage. National interest is supreme.
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