A state on edge

On a hot and humid August morning, Abedur Rahman gathers his worldly possessions-one tin sheet, four bamboo mats, a mattress, a couple of utensils, a plastic chair and some clothes-and packs them onto a small boat tethered on the shore of the vast expanse of the Brahmaputra. Clad in the ubiquitous blue checkered lungi, his bare torso bathed in sweat, he proffers a voter ID card that says he's 53 though he looks more like a septuagenarian. The card also says he's originally from Boko in Assam's Kamrup district but other voices in the crowd witnessing the scene rumble threateningly.

"Thanks to corrupt officials, these migrants can easily forge documents. Don't trust him, his identity is fake," says Jyoti Hazarika, a local member of the Prabajan Virodhi Manch (PVM). As it happens, Rahman can speak fluent Assamese but another companion of his, in his 30s, gestures to him to keep silent. Soon Rahman is on the small boat with his wife and two daughters, making his way to another bank of the river where the authorities have determined he can rebuild his life. For the moment.

This small human drama, enacted on the shores of Assam's iconic river, was a set piece that is likely to play out repeatedly across the state in coming months.

Here, near the village of Hatimuria in Mayong, otherwise known for black magic, it has already transpired, after a short cycle of violence between the now-evicted settlers and the villagers on August 13.

In state capital Guwahati, a related drama was being enacted simultaneously in the state assembly as BJP MLA Ramakanta Deuri called his Congress colleague Sherman Ali 'Bangladeshi'. Ali was arguing that the alleged encroachers of government land might not always be illegal migrants from the neighbouring country. They should be properly rehabilitated, he suggested, instead of being indiscriminately evicted. It's worth mentioning that Ali, now accused by Deuri of being a foreigner, famously scored top marks in Assamese in his 10th board exam. But such nuances were lost in the heat of the unparliamentary clamour that consumed the assembly for the rest of the day.

A month later, on September 19, the district administration, backed by state finance minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, evicted 331 families, mostly Bengali-speaking Muslims, and cleared over 2,400 bighas of land in three villages-Banderdubi, Deuchurchang and Palkhowa-located on the fringes of the Kaziranga National Park. Though these villages housed several Assamese families too, including the ancestral home of a renowned editor in Assam, the move was seen as a drive against illegal Bangladeshi Muslims, and the BJP government was happy to play to the public perception. It's a different matter that the eviction was necessitated by a Gauhati High Court order in October 9, 2015, following a PIL admitted in 2012. The court order states that Deuchurchang was notified as a reserved forest in 1916, Banderdubi is not only social forestry land but also within a tiger reserve and animal corridor, and Palkhowa too is forest land. The same week, encroachers were driven out from the adjoining areas of Batadrava Than in Bordowa, the birthplace of Srimanta Shankardev, the 16th century ascetic who shaped the religious, cultural and social identities of the Assamese. "We have started police surveillance in 2,300 riverine areas spread over 800 km in the state," says Assam chief minister Sarbananda Sonowal. "Because there was no police presence in these areas, they had become a hub of anti-social activities." A majority in Assam have welcomed this move, as settlers in these areas are perceived to be illegal migrants.

While opposition parties, including the Congress, the All-India United Democratic Front and the Left accuse the government of targeting religious minorities, the BJP is projecting the evictions as the fulfilment of its election promise to free Assam of 'illegal immigrants'. "It's not a coincidence that most encroachers are Bengali-speaking Muslims," a senior BJP leader says in Assam. "We know that sending them back to Bangladesh will be difficult now, so we are trying to push them back to limited pockets. Their design is to spread across Assam and influence electoral results in every constituency. That is why they encroach land. We're putting an end to that."

In May 2016, the BJP came to power in Assam after an election campaign promising to protect the state's mati, bheti and jaati (land, home and community) from illegal settlers from Bangladesh. It was a canny platform, because for several decades now the perceived threat of a demographic deluge from Bangladesh-and implicitly, of Bengali Muslims-has been tom-tommed as an existential threat to the indigenous people of Assam.

The coming together of the BJP, Asom Gana Parishad and Bodo People's Front who have all waged their own very distinct campaigns against the 'Bangladeshi threat' has rekindled a new enthusiasm among a broad section of Assamese voters for a permanent solution to the issue.

Thirty years ago now, the six-year-long Assam agitation, demanding detection and deportation of illegal immigrants, culminated in the Assam Accord, signed in 1985 by then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, the All Assam Students' Union and the All-Assam Gana Sangram Parishad. It even laid down a formula for detection of illegal immigrants.

According to that accord, all Assam residents who had entered the state until January 1, 1966, would be deemed citizens. Those who came between 1966 and March 25, 1971, would be disenfranchised for 10 years. But foreigners who came to Assam on or after March 25, 1971, would be detected and deported, their names deleted from the voters' list. This special exception-granting citizenship to those who entered Assam between 1947 and 1971-was made only for Assam as Article 6 of the Constitution states that anybody from East or West Pakistan who enters India after July 19, 1948, must apply for citizenship. The Assam Accord also says that people whose names have appeared in the electoral lists from 1952 to 1971 are Indian citizens.

The second exception was made in the process of detection. In other Indian states, it is governed by the Foreigners' Act, 1946, the Passport Act, 1952 and the Citizenship Act, 1956. For Assam, however, the Indira Gandhi government enacted the Illegal Migrants' (Determination by Tribunal) (IMDT) Act, 1983, which provided special protections against undue harassment to 'minorities' in Assam. IMDT put the onus of proving the illegality of a migrant on the complainant, while the Foreigners' Act requires the accused to prove their right to Indian citizenship.

Following a challenge by Sonowal, then the leader of AASU, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court struck down the IMDT Act in 2005, saying it "has created the biggest hurdle and is the main impediment...in the identification and deportation of illegal migrants".

One of the first official estimates of the scale of the illegal migrant problem came from Indrajit Gupta (then the Unio minister for home) on May 6, 1997, when he told Parliament there were 10 million foreigners in India. On July 17 the same year, the Election Commission of India issued a circular directing the Assam government to remove those who did not have citizenship credentials from the electoral list. Known as Doubtful Voter (D voters), they were put on trial before the foreigners' tribunals set up under the Foreigner (Tribunal) Order, 1964. As on March 30, 2016, the tribunals have found 11,064 D voters to be illegal immigrants; 136,448 cases of D voters are still pending. There are hundreds of foreigners' tribunals in the state currently to settle D voter cases.

The Gauhati High Court on April 4, 2004, ordered D voters to be sent to detention camps till their cases were disposed of. Some 489 people-including 19 children-are now lodged in six detention centres in Goalpara, Kokrajhar, Silchar, Dibrugarh, Jorhat and Tezpur.

Women detainees at the Kokrajhar detention camp

A visit to the Kokrajhar detention centre, inside the premises of a district jail, the inadequacies of the state's response to illegal migration and some of its absurd and tragic consequences. Ramani Biswas, a 32-year-old woman from Mayong, has been languishing here since 2009 when she along with her husband Dilip Biswas, 40, and daughters Kalpana, 15, and Archana, 9, were picked up by the authorities. Her court records show the family ignored notices sent by the foreigners' tribunal, based on complaints about their citizenship. According to the court verdict, they will have to be deported out of India, but till the government can execute the order, they will stay in the detention centre. As the male and female detainees are kept apart, Dilip is in the Tezpur detention centre. What makes the case curious is that both Ramani and Dilip's parents are Indian citizens, as are their siblings. "What is my fault?" asks a distraught Kalpana. "Why have I been denied the right to education?" Her younger sister, along with five other children, is taken to a local primary school, escorted by two policemen. But as jailor P.K. Bharali explains, they take children to school only till they reach 10. "There is a risk of them fleeing when they grow up," he says. "We don't have enough manpower. Even to provide clothes and food for the detainees, we have to depend on public donations."

Giving Ramani company in the detention centre are Minara Begum, 32, from Udarband in Silchar; Momirunessa, 45, from Baghbar in Barpeta; Halima Khatun, 40, from Dhing in Nagaon; Gita Biswas, 50, from Shantipur in Baksa and Basanti Mahanta, 40, from Bongaigaon. These women are the only ones in their family who have been charged as or declared as illegal migrants. Their husbands, parents and siblings remain Indian citizens. Many of these poor, semi-educated or illiterate women seem to be paying the price for having failed to understand and respond to notices sent by the foreigners' tribunal. Two recent cases in the last two months have highlighted the legal loopholes in the process of detecting D voters. The high court has declared Moinal Mollah and Mihir Biswas, who had been put in detention centres as D voters, to be bona fide Indian citizens. They were fortunate because the NGO, Muslim Youth Forum Against Communalism, Terrorism and Sedition (MY-FACTS) took up their cases. A report by the National Minorities Commission in the first week of September has even questioned the parameters of detecting illegal citizens in the state.

Sonowal now pins his hopes on the completion of the National Register of Citizens (NRC). This is only the second time in the past 65 years that the citizens' register is being updated anywhere in the country. The 1951 NRC just replicated independent India's first census. Following a 2009 PIL by public organisation Assam Public Works (APW) demanding a clean-up of voters' lists in Assam, the Supreme Court is supervising the entire Central government-funded NRC update process. The importance of this process can be gauged from the fact that Sonowal drove straight to the NRC office after taking oath, even before going to his chief ministerial office.

While the existing rules, applicable across the country, provide for the preparation of the NRC strictly through house-to-house enumeration, the Citizenship Act rules have been amended for Assam. This is to enable the updating of the NRC by inviting claims from the direct descendants of those figuring in the 1951 NRC or the 1971 Assam electoral roll.

Of the 33 million people who have registered for NRC, a large number have fake or forged documents. In some cases, over 50 persons have applied as children of the same individual. Many women are found to have 'given birth' to multiple children within a few months. Most of these fake documents were found in the lower Assam districts. A large number of people in Barpeta district submitted birth certificates of Nagaland while many produced forged documents of the Board of Secondary Education, Assam. Interestingly, Barpeta has the highest number of D voters.

"To detect such forgery, we are creating a family tree, asking applicants to provide details of their siblings. This prevents unscrupulous elements from claiming ancestry based on forged documents," says IAS officer Prateek Hajela, NRC Assam's coordinator and the primary force behind formulating its entire mechanism. While Hajela is confident of preparing a transparent and flawless NRC, doubts have been raised about the final number of illegal immigrants it'll be able to detect. "In the end, not even 2 lakh illegal migrants may be detected. Did the people of Assam struggle for decades to be told there are only 2 lakh Bangladeshis in the state?" asks Abhijit Sarma, head of APW.

According to Supreme Court advocate and PVM convenor Upamanyu Hazarika, the changes made in the process of granting citizenship by birth in Assam have rendered the entire NRC update exercise futile. Citizenship by birth in the state factors in three time-frames. Anyone born between January 26, 1950, and July 1, 1987, will be an Indian citizen regardless of whether their parents are citizens or foreigners. Anyone born between July 1, 1987, and December 3, 2004, will be an Indian citizen if either parent is an Indian citizen. Anyone born after December 3, 2004, will not be an Indian citizen if either parent is an illegal immigrant. "It implies that while illegal immigrants who settled in Assam after March 25, 1971, will be considered foreigners, children born to them before 2004 could be declared Indian, resulting in lakhs of immigrants getting citizenship," says Hazarika, who was appointed by the Supreme Court in May 2015 as a one-man commission to prepare a report on the various issues related to illegal immigrants in Assam. Following the 53-page report he submitted on October 5, 2015, the apex court directed both the Central and Assam governments to respond on November 5, 2015. "Till date no action has been taken," he says.

Even as the process to update the NRC, taking March 25, 1971 as the cut-off date, continues, there has been a growing demand to expand the category of foreigners by using only the 1951 NRC and the 1952 voters' list. In 2012, Motiur Rahman, working president of the Asom Sanmilita Mahasangha (ASM), an umbrella body of different ethnic and indigenous organisations, filed a petition in the Supreme Court against making 1971 the cut-off year. ASM claims that using March 25, 1971, as the cut-off date would ensure that millions of foreigners, who entered Assam between 1951 and March 1971, will get citizenship, threatening the existence of indigenous people. This demand received fresh impetus just before the assembly elections, when Sarma endorsed the appeal to make 1951 the cut-off year. "I personally believe the cut-off year should be 1951 and I will raise my concern at the appropriate forums. But at the moment, I will go by what my party says and what the government has to do following rules and court orders," he says.

Though Hajela has already missed the initial January 31, 2016, Supreme Court deadline, he expects NRC's 'update process' to be completed by December this year. Not only does this sound ambitious, for Sonowal it could also prove to be a double-edged sword. If the number of foreigners turns out to be as 'disappointing' as suspected by APW's Sarma, he'll have to fight a huge perception battle, fuelled by Assamese sentiment against foreigners, often stoked by official statistics and census data. Between 1951 and 1961, the state's population leapt by 36 per cent, and by 35 per cent in the next decade. Between 2001 and 2011, India's Muslims grew from 13.4 per cent to 14.2 per cent while in Assam they grew from 30.9 per cent to 34.2 per cent. Fourteen of Assam's 27 districts have shown higher population growth than the state's average of 17 per cent; Muslims are a majority in nine of them (see graphic: Fear by Numbers).

On the other hand, if the numbers turn out to be close to the 4 million figure indigenous activists and organisations often tout, Sonowal's government will face an unprecedented humanitarian crisis with no clear roadmap on how to deal with such an enormous population of 'illegal migrants'. If detection of these foreigners has been a long, cumbersome process, deportation will be an unmanageably impossible task. Of the total 7,622 illegal migrants detected in the state from 2001 to October 2008 under the provisions of the Foreigners' Act, only 61 were deported. Similarly, of the total 2,643 illegal migrants detected from 2001 to July 19, 2005, under the provisions of the IMDT Act, only 54 were deported. "We should not bother about deportation. These illegal migrants must be deprived of all political rights so that indigenous people don't feel threatened. They should be given work permits," says finance minister Sarma. Hazarika, on his part, believes in addressing the root cause of the influx-land and resources. He finds support in Bishnoi who explains that most of the clashes in Assam, ethnic or communal, have been a consequence of encroachment of forest land. Over 3.3 lakh hectares forest land in Assam is currently in the hands of encroachers. "Illegal migration is driven by the need for land and work. So the only way to tackle this issue is by depriving the Bangladeshis of any stake in resources and by going back to 1951 records. Land and government jobs must be reserved for those listed in the 1951 NRC and their descendants," he says.

Others question the practicality of this approach. "I don't think it's a feasible idea. There would be ways and means to dodge such legislations as we can see even now," says Subimal Bhattacharya, a Hindu Bengali native of Assam and a former country head of defence firm General Dynamics. In fact, the reverse-land allocation to immigrants-seems to be happening in Assam, as an RTI query recently revealed: Illegal migrants occupied 77,420 bighas of state land in the Sipajhar area in Darrang district. Of this, 3,000 bighas was professional grazing reserves (PGR) where human habitation is disallowed. In 1994, the court ordered 199 families occupying grazing land to move out. Not only did they stay put, the government went on to build 12 schools on the land; it built two primary schools near Hatimuria village for settlers who came here in 1988.

Several BJP members even see a larger conspiracy in the All-India United Democratic Front (AIUDF) - which came into being to protect the minorities against legal harassment following the repeal of the IMDT Act in 2005 - targeting PGRs and village grazing reserves (VGR). "If you observe carefully, in the last five years, their MLAs have always asked questions about PGRs and VGRs in the assembly. They get the data and settle immigrants on these lands overnight. Later, such settlements get regularised," says a BJP MLA. AIUDF chief Badruddin Ajmal dismisses such allegations and claims his party has neither supported illegal infiltrators nor land encroachers. "The moment you detect an illegal immigrant, just shoot him. We have no sympathy for them. But the BJP is playing communal politics. They are targeting Muslims instead of Bangladeshis," he says.

There are many in Assam who advocate a socio-cultural solution to the issue rather than allowing politicians to use it as an election plank. In several riverine regions in lower Assam, often perceived as hubs of Bengali-speaking Muslim migrants, children go to Assamese-medium schools, even if only because government-run schools are all they can afford. "Ironically, they're the ones perhaps who're keeping the language alive, as well-off Assamese families send their children to English-medium schools," says political commentator Dileep Chandan.

When during the 2016 assembly election campaigns, India Today travelled to certain locations in Nagaon and Dhuburi districts, dominated by alleged immigrants, a telling cultural paradox was immediately apparent: The leaders were felicitated with Assamese gamochas, speeches were delivered in chaste Assamese, and posters were in Assamese, yet the locals spoke in a Mymensingh dialect of Bengali among themselves.

"There is no doubt that illegal migrants must be detected and stripped of political rights," says Assam's musical icon Zubeen Garg, "but we must also take a humanitarian approach. Constant cultural engagements will certainly build a greater Assamese society where our language and tradition will thrive like never before."

But naysayers point towards the glaring divide between the ethnic Assamese-dominated Brahmaputra valley and the Barak valley, inhabited largely by Bengali-speaking Hindus. "After seven decades of Independence, the assimilation of Bengali-speaking Hindus of Barak valley, who are bona fide citizens of Assam, into the socio-cultural process of Brahmaputra valley has not been possible. To think that the illegal migrants will accept Assamese culture is just naive. Once they reach significant numbers, they'll dump the Assamese language as the Bengalis in Barak valley have done," says Hazarika.

Given this inherent and enduring tension between Assamese and even Hindu Bengali identities, Sonowal faces another tough challenge: the Modi government introduced a bill on July 16 to amend the Citizenship Act, 1955 to provide citizenship to Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan. Though the Bill covers refugees from three nations, it is primarily aimed at Bengali Hindu migrants from Bangladesh. The Bill has now been sent to a joint committee of Parliament, which includes 20 members from the Lok Sabha and 10 from the Rajya Sabha. The BJP's gameplan is simple-protecting the Hindu identity of Assam against the influx of Muslims from Bangladesh is more important than addressing the fear among the Assamese of the cultural hegemony of Hindu Bengalis. "Have you ever heard of Hindu Bengalis encroaching a Vaishnavite monastery of Assamese people, unleashing violent attacks on indigenous villagers,"counters finance minister Sarma. "It's in the interest of all indigenous groups in Assam to stand united against religious aggression by illegal immigrants."

The CM knows he doesn't have the support of even his best friend and AASU chief patron Samujjal Bhattacharya, or of coalition partner AGP on this issue. AASU has already staged protests across Assam against the Centre's bid to grant citizenship to Hindu Bangladeshi refugees. "We will start a full-fledged agitation against this move," says Samujjal.

The Congress too has opposed the move, though Tarun Gogoi had advocated granting refugee status to Hindu immigrants in 2011. Now, the former chief minister has threatened a legal battle to stall this constitutional amendment. Several intellectuals in the state have already warned of 'civil war' if Hindu Bangladeshis are given citizenship. What has made matters worse is that the joint parliamentary committee has held consultations with several Assam-based Bengali groups but ignored influential groups such as AASU and the Asom Sahitya Sabha. While the former claim that the inclusion of five lakh Hindu Bengalis will have little impact on the demography of the state, Assamese organisations refuse to buy the argument. "How do they know the exact number of illegal Hindu Bangladeshis in the state?" asks Samujjal. "The actual number could be much higher and has the potential to turn indigenous groups into minorities in the state."

At dusk, as the Brahmaputra begins to devour the evening sun, 28-year-old shopkeeper Bimal Saha (name changed), a Bengali Hindu and third-generation Assam resident, stares blankly at the horizon. Sitting atop a hillock on the outskirts of Hatimuria, he says he feels insecure about his identity for the first time in his life. He senses a new note of animosity in his Assamese friends.