The demographic threat

Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Friday reiterated that Assam was indeed facing a serious threat to its demography from infiltrators, one which also poses a threat to the country’s security. Shah has also said that Assam may face difficulties in the coming days if the demographic change is not stopped immediately. Though there is a tendency among the so-called secularists and leftists to think that Shah is talking politics with the forthcoming Assam Assembly election in mind, the fact remains that the implications of the demographic threat to Assam – and for that matter to the whole of the Northeastern region – are real and much bigger than one can imagine. This newspaper has time and again mentioned that this demographic invasion had begun way back in 1905 when the British clubbed Assam with Eastern Bengal. In 1906 the Muslim League was founded in Dhaka, and its agenda included the ‘capture’ of Assam. There are historical reasons behind this conspiracy, which is now more than 120 years old. While the Mughals and their other Muslim predecessors, after invading India, had tried their best to capture Assam, the Assamese repeatedly frustrated all such attempts. The Battle of Saraighat (1671) was not only the biggest victory of the Assamese against the invaders but also one which permanently sealed the Mughal design to extend its tentacles beyond Assam and the Northeast to Southeast Asia. This they have not been able to forget, and thus the continuous effort to capture Assam since 1905. In this they have chosen the population bomb as their weapon. Systematically pushing in thousands of poverty-stricken Muslims from East Bengal, East Pakistan and Bangladesh, the conspirators want to reduce the region’s indigenous population into a minority. Once they can achieve that, the next step could be like what had happened in Kashmir in the past three or four decades. Unfortunately, while successive Congress regimes at the Centre let Kashmir slip into the hands of fundamentalist and radical forces, they had done the same to Assam by patronising the infiltrators for the sake of votes. The Congress government in 1983 enacted the notorious IM(DT) Act to facilitate legal protection for the illegal migrants instead of actually identifying and expelling them. This fact has been best articulated in the historic judgement of the Supreme Court of India while disposing of the “Sarbananda Sonowal vs Union of India and others” case on July 12, 2005. Assam’s BJP-led government must be appreciated for taking effective steps to barricade the demographic invasion. While the process of freeing government land from infiltrators began during Sarbananda Sonowal’s time with the first eviction drive conducted in Kaziranga National Park, the present regime headed by Dr Himanta Biswa Sarma has gone all out to clear every piece of government land of infiltrators. Simultaneously, the government has also invoked provisions of the Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act, 1950, and deported 467 persons declared as illegal foreigners by the Foreigners Tribunals. The people, too, have an important role to play by refraining from patronising the illegal migrants.