Assam Chief Minister Dr Himanta Biswa Sarma has said that immigrant Muslims were all set to emerge as the single largest group or community in the next census report. According to him – and he has claimed that it was a certainty – the population of this category of Muslims would go up to 38 per cent in the next population count. It may be recalled that the Muslim population in Assam, as reflected in the 2011 Census report, stood at 34.22 per cent of the total population in the state. Muslims had also emerged as the majority community in nine districts in the 2011 Census report. Though no census operation was conducted in 2021, estimates based on projections showed that eleven districts in Assam had become Muslim-majority. The Chief Minister on Friday said that conservative statistics indicated that the Muslims were now the majority in 14 of the 35 districts. In this context, what every individual belonging to the indigenous communities of the state should always keep in mind is that Assam would not have seen such an increase in the number of Muslims in the normal course of things. Looking back, one will find that in 1901, the Muslim population in Assam was about three lakhs only, which was about 9.22 per cent of Assam’s then population. Most of those Muslims were indigenous Assamese-speaking people. Things, however, changed suddenly in 1905 when Lord Curzon partitioned Bengal and clubbed Assam with the newly created Eastern Bengal to constitute a province called ‘Eastern Bengal & Assam’. Coinciding with this, in Dhaka,in 1906, was born an organisation called the Muslim League. Its agenda, among other things, was to flood Assam with Muslims. Prior to that, only a few migrants from East Bengal had settled in some sar lands of the Goalpara district. While the very ground for forming the Muslim League was to split India and constitute a separate Muslim nation after the departure of the British, the leaders also drew up a plan to push Muslim peasants from East Bengal in large numbers into the Brahmaputra and Barak Valleys in order to make it a Muslim-majority province. The immigrant Muslims systematically occupied in an organized way the wastelands, grazings and forest reserves in the Brahmaputra Valley. RB Vaghaiwalla, the Census Superintendent of 1951, not only called them “land-hungry Muslims” but also stated that “their hunger for land was so great that in their eagerness to grasp as much land as they could cultivate, they not infrequently encroached on government reserves and on land belonging to local people.” Their number increased manifold when lakhs of refugees who had entered Assam in the wake of the Bangladesh liberation movement did not return. The Congress government headed by Sarat Chandra Sinha was solely responsible for not ensuring the return of those refugees. Had the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU) not taken up the issue of illegal migrants in 1979, the world would not have known how a conspiracy was being implemented to turn a strategic region of India into another Kashmir. While Indira Gandhi’s Congress regime enacted the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act in 1983, this Act, instead of helping detect the infiltrators, only helped protect them. Political parties like the Congress and the Communists, and a section of self-styled left-leaning intellectuals of the state, however, continue to claim that neither has there been a conspiracy to convert Assam into a Muslim-majority state, nor has there been an abnormal increase in Muslim population. But, as the Supreme Court of India struck down the IM(DT) Act as a piece of legislation ultra vires to the Constitution of India, it also referred to the large-scale illegal immigration from Bangladesh into Assam as “external aggression” on India’s territory.