Movement To Continue: North East Students’ Organization (NESO)

GUWAHATI: A day after the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2019 failed to get passed in the Rajya Sabha, the North East Students’ Organization (NESO), All Assam Students’ Union and 30 other indigenous organizations on Thursday resolved to continue their movement as the ruling BJP was hell-bent in granting citizenship to Hindu Bangladeshis.

The students’ organizations will keep putting pressure on the Centre to scrap the Foreigners’ (Amendment) Order, 2015, the Passport (Entry into India) Notification, 2015 and long-term visa to people from Bangladesh visiting India, by resorting to various forms of agitation.

Addressing a press conference here on Thursday afternoon, the NESO advisor Dr Samujjal Bhattacharjya said even though the Centre’s failure to pass the CAB in the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday was the outcome of sustained democratic and secular movement of the indigenous people of the Northeast, the people must not rejoice too much at this juncture and rather remain alert as the ruling BJP has already expressed its “arrogance” to go ahead with its plan to grant citizenship to Hindu Bangladeshis by violating the Assam Accord.

Bhattacharjya said that the problem is far from being over as the Centre has not yet scrapped the Foreigners’ (Amendment) Order, 2015, the Passport (Entry into India) Notification, 2015 and the long-term visa order. He said these executive orders of the Centre could also facilitate citizenship to Bangladeshis who entered India after 1971.

“The present regime at the Centre has perpetrated mental torture on the indigenous people of Assam and the rest of the Northeast by bringing the CAB in the Parliament. Such a development has resulted in mental alienation of the people of the Northeast from mainland India. So it is high time the indigenous people mentally prepared to give an appropriate answer to those bent on granting citizenship to Hindu Bangladeshis,” Bhattacharjya, who is also the advisor-in-chief of the AASU, said.

NESO secretary general Sinam Prakash Singh told reporters that the CAB’s failure to get its passage in the Rajya Sabha is a moral victory for the indigenous people of the Northeast for their collective fight against the Bill. “The Centre has realized the strength of the region in the collective fight against the CAB. We must give similar fight in all other burning issues,” he said.

Expressing gratitude to all those who extended support to NESO’s fight against the CAB, Singh demanded the Centre to immediately introduce inner line permits and update NRC in all NE States to permanently thwart the threat of illegal Bangladeshis to the identity of the indigenous people.

AASU president Dipanko Kumar Nath said a section of vested interest leaders and individuals are all out to spread communalism in the State on the pretext of the CAB.

AASU general secretary Lurinjyoti Gogoi said barring Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal and Tripura CM Biplab Kumar Deb, chief ministers of most of the NE States have extended support to the movement against the CAB.

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