Sonowal, from ‘Jatiya Nayak’ to ....

The decision of the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Monday to table the controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Bill in Parliament on January 7 after rejecting all objections raised by the Opposition members and the determination of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its government to pass the said Amendment only indicates that Assam is heading for difficult times. While the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, once passed in Parliament will make all illegal migrants from certain minority communities coming from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan eligible for Indian citizenship, the direct fall-out will be in Assam. Apart from facilitating all illegal Hindu Bangladeshi migrants already staying in Assam getting Indian citizenship, it will also open flood-gates form millions of Bangladeshis to rush to Assam.

The outcome will be that Assam will be flooded with Hindu Bangladeshis, which in turn will reduce the Assamese and other indigenous communities of the state into a minority – or, in simpler terms, refugees – in their own land. By doing so, the BJP is only emerging as several times more dangerous than the Congress party which had all along encouraged illegal migration from erstwhile East Pakistan and present-day Bangladesh. By doing so, the BJP is going to prove that it is least bothered about the future of the Assamese and other indigenous communities of Assam who had made the highest sacrifice among all communities of the country in a series of movements to protect the territorial integrity and sovereignty of India. The Muslim League – the founders of Pakistan – had always had Assam in their mind. They had almost included Assam in East Pakistan during the Grouping Plan leading to partition of the country in 1947.

Pandit Jawharlal Nehru to had practically agreed to Assam being clubbed with East Pakistan, and had it not been for Lokapriya Gopinath Bardoloi – who rushed to Mahatma Gandhi and Sardar Patel – this land would have been Pakistan on the midnight of August 14-15, 1947 itself. Post Md Ali Jinnah, other Pakistani leaders including Yahya Khan, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and Mujibur Rahman (when he was leader of the Awami League in undivided Pakistan prior to 1971) – all had their eyes on Assam and the Northeast. While Bhutto had clearly mentioned that Assam was the second most important issue of dispute between Pakistan and India after Kashmir, Mujibur Rahman, as leader of the Awami League in undivided Pakistan, had put it on record that East Pakistan would prosper only when Assam and the North-eastern region of India was made part of it.

While Jinnah, Bhutto, Mujibur Rahman and others had dreamt of creating a larger Islamic state comprising East Pakistan/Bangladesh, there is also another conspiracy at work to convert Assam into a Muslim-majority state. Assam, which has the glorious record of inflicting the most crushing defeat on the mighty Moghuls in the Battle of Saraighat in 1671 – said to be the world’s greatest naval battle fought on a river – has been facing a continuous influx of Muslims from the time of the British, particularly during the time of Lord Curzon. There was the notorious ‘Grow more food’ programme of the Muslim League government of Sir Saadullah in Assam in the 1930s – which Lord Wavell had described as ‘nothing but Grow more Muslims’ – through which a systematic inflow of Muslims from erstwhile East Bengal (then of course part of undivided India) was encouraged and patronised. Later, when large number of people flocked from East Pakistan immediately after Independence, Lokapriya Gopinath Bardoloi had a huge clash with Prime Minister Nehru, because the latter had threatened to reduce central funds to Assam if the state refused to accept the Bengali migrants from East Pakistan – be they Muslims or Hindus.

Despite stiff opposition from Nehru, both Gopinath Bardoloi and his most able successor Bimala Prasad Chaliha did pursue a policy of detecting and deporting the illegal migrants. In fact, Chaliha alone had thrown out about 2.28 lakh illegal migrants from Assam during his tenure, an act that had seriously antagonised Nehru. But then, while senior Congress leader from Assam Dev Kanta Barooah had himself coined the term ‘Ali-Kuli-Bangali’ and said no power on earth can unseat the Congress till the ‘Ali’ (migrant Muslims), ‘Kuli’ (tea labourers) and ‘Bangali’ (Hindu Bengalis) were with it, another chief minister Sarat Chandra Sinha must be held fully responsible for not ensuring that the East Pakistani/Bangladeshi refugees of the Bangladesh civil war era who had entered Assam between 1969 and 1972 returned to their homes.

In the post-Bangladesh era, then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and then Assam chief minister Hiteswar Saikia got the notorious Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act passed in 1983, one which only protected the Bangladeshi migrants instead of actually detecting them. The outcome of the misdeeds of the Congress in the past is that the Muslim as well as Bengali-speaking populations in Assam are rapidly increasing. While the Muslim population in Assam has increased from 15.3 per cent in 1901 to 34.22 per cent in 2011, the Bengali-speaking population has risen to 28.92 per cent in 2011, the basic reason being the presence of illegal migrants – both Hindus and Muslims – from East Pakistan/Bangladesh.

What is most interesting that while Sarbananda Sonowal had, as an MP of the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP), got the notorious IMDT Act scrapped by the Supreme Court of India in 2006, the same Sarbananda Sonowal has now maintaining a stoic silence when his present party BJP is out to take a historic step of wiping out for ever the Assamese and other indigenous communities of Assam by passing the yet another notorious piece of legislation – the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill 2016. The same Sarbananda Sonowal who had ensured the victory of the BJP-led alliance in the Assam assembly elections in 2016 by promising to protect ‘jaati-maati-bheti’ (identity, land and homesteads) of the indigenous people of Assam. The same Sonowal who was hailed as a ‘jatiya nayak’ – national hero of the Assamese – for having got the IMDT Act scrapped, is today heading towards being described as something else. What shall he be called now?