Last Wednesday in connection with the simmering communal tension in the BTAD area that has rendered about 1, 79,000 people homeless with the death toll rising to about 40 and with fingers being pointed by several sections of the populace including  Congress-coalition partner and BTC Chief Hagrama Mohilary on the involvement of the illegal immigrants(read Bangladeshis), the statement made by Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi, as we reported on Thursday, that there is “no Bangladeshi hand in BTAD violence” despite being most unfortunate comes to us as no surprise.

Interacting with editors of the electronic media in Guwahati, Gogoi said that the State Government had no information about the hands of Bangladeshi nationals behind the ethnic violence in the BTAD. “The violence was orchestrated by our own people and not by the Bangladeshi nationals,” said Gogoi (emphasis added).

We have long held that for the Congress party—notorious for enacting the now-scrapped IM(DT) Act, responsible for changing the demographic profile of the state and making the minorities a majority community(This swelling we wish to reiterate is not caused by the enlightened Assamese Muslims who have associated themselves and have become an integral part of the greater Assamese society but because of unabated influx of Bangladeshis with geometric population growth)  in several districts of Assam—there are no illegal immigrants in Assam. In the Congress scheme of things all that exists is the ‘minorities’ who are all welcomed to their living space and who must be protected and cherished at any cost.

It is not only that the Congress dispensation has shown disinterest in solving this issue, other political parties including the AGP which came rising high on the agenda of regionalism and promising to solve the problems of illegal influx too failed to deliver finding in them a precious vote-bank— something the Congress party had realized long ago and leveraged upon.

This newspaper has for the past two decades hammered tenaciously on the grave dangers posed by such unabated influx of illegal immigrants. This column has on several occasions expressed serious apprehension arising from such illegal immigration who would one day try to outdo the indigenous communities leaving them bereft of land and other belongings. This violent confrontation, regardless of all denials and political allegations, is just a revelation of the threat offing on the very existence of the indigenous communities- something certainly very dangerous and having serious implications unless checked. Such incidents, as the one in question, reveal two basic facts before us. First the scant regard that political parties have for indigenous communities whom they (almost all the political parties) can afford to send to hell because they must cherish their illegal immigrants something so precious for maintaining their electoral equations. Secondly   the loss of land by indigenous people owing to the demographic changes being effected by the unabated influx from Bangladesh.

The bottom line therefore, as this column harped on (without even remotely trying to suggest that all illegal immigrants must be given Indian citizenship) last Wednesday for the common man is to accept the reality that he does not have the liberty to relocate himself in case of such danger when one fine day he finds himself homeless. The first and foremost need, as we said the other day, is to achieve a certain level of harmony and a will to coexist. There should also be a self-assumed sense of responsibility by the civic society and various socio-cultural organizations so that every tribe or community living in an area, irrespective of its population percentage, gets its due concern and attention so that the problem of identity crisis does not arise.