Assam’s indigenous ethnic groups and communities have been facing a severe crisis threat. The threat is from immigrants from erstwhile East Bengal/East Pakistan and present-day Bangladesh, with hordes of people coming from there in large numbers in a systematic manner in the past twelve decades. Large-scale immigration had started in 1905 after the British government partitioned Bengal, created a Muslim-majority Eastern Bengal, and clubbed Assam with it. Though Assam was separated from Eastern Bengal in 1911, the inflow continued in a massive manner. CS Mullan, the then Census Superintendent, in the 1931 Census Report for Assam, while highlighting the demographic changes caused by the migration from East Bengal into the Brahmaputra Valley, referred to the immigrants as “vast hordes of land-hungry Bengali immigrants, mostly Muslim”. He had also warned that if the immigration continued, a day would come when the Assamese would be left with only the Sivasagar district in their control. Again, Lord Wavell, the British Viceroy of India, after visiting Assam in 1943, wrote in his journal that though the Muslim League ministry of Assam headed by Syed Muhammad Saadullah had adopted a policy of encouraging Muslim migration under a “Grow More Food” campaign, the real objective was to “Grow More Muslims”. The conspiracy to flood Assam with Muslim immigrants was a prime policy of the Muslim League, which was founded in Dhaka in 1906, and this policy has been carried forward by Jinnah, Bhutto and Mujibur Rahman and all others who have been leading Pakistan as well as Bangladesh. Former Indian Army Vice-Chief Gen S K Sinha, as Governor of Assam, had in his report to the President of India in 1998 clearly mentioned that Bhutto, in his autobiography, had mentioned Assam as an “unfulfilled agenda” of the founders of Pakistan. When the British government, on the eve of leaving India, went ahead to create Pakistan, it also added fuel to the Muslim League conspiracy by clubbing Assam in Group C, which would eventually constitute East Pakistan. The present generation of Assamese, and for that matter of indigenous communities as well as the members of all other communities which have come from different parts of India to make Assam their home, must always remember one thing: that Nehru had almost gifted Assam to Jinnah, turning down Gopinath Bardoloi’s request to save Assam from getting included in Pakistan. It was at the instance of Mahatma Gandhi, Syama Prasad Mukherjee and Sardar Patel that Assam was saved from going to Pakistan. Even after independence, when Bardoloi demanded expulsion of immigrants from East Pakistan, Nehru threatened him with cutting down financial support to Assam. When Assam’s third Chief Minister Bimala Prasad Chaliha threw out about 1.78 lakh Muslim infiltrators in a span of six or seven months, Nehru issued a similar threat. When the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU) launched an agitation in 1979 demanding detection and deportation of the infiltrators, the Congress government of Indira Gandhi not only opposed the demand but even enacted the notorious IM(DT) Act in 1983 to facilitate protection of the infiltrators. The Rajiv Gandhi government hoodwinked the AASU in the name of solving the issue by making its leaders sign the Assam Accord, which did not have proper provisions to detect and deport the illegal migrants. Any common person can understand why successive Congress regimes had opposed detection and deportation of the illegal migrants; they constituted vote banks for the party. One senior Congress leader in the 1960s had even said that the party was not bothered about votes of the Assamese (read indigenous communities) as long as the ‘Ali’ – immigrant Muslims – was with the party. In 2005, the Supreme Court, while striking down the notorious IM(DT) Act, had clearly stated that Assam was facing a silent demographic invasion and that it was a threat to the integrity and sovereignty of India in the northeastern sector. One must also always keep in mind that the illegal migrants and their fast-multiplying progeny do not only constitute a threat to just the Assamese-speaking people. Rather, they have already caused serious insecurity to the Bodo, Rabha, Tiwa, and other tribes in their respective areas. The Tiwary Commission report very clearly shows with facts and figures how the tribal communities of Assam have been pushed to the wall by the infiltrators. That could be one reason why the Congress and the leftists had opposed the release of the Tiwary Commission report. Natural resources of Assam have also attracted people from other parts of India. There is no constitutional bar for Indian people settling in any part of India, but the same constitution also provides protection to the tribal communities living in the Sixth Schedule areas. It is for the government to ensure that provisions of the Sixth Schedule are duly honoured.