Tale of the demographic invasion of Assam by land-hungry immigrants

A deliberate and well-drawn campaign has been going on for several decades now to make people believe that the influx of Muslims to Assam is nothing new and that Muslims have been here for centuries. It is true that Muslims have been living in Assam for nearly eight centuries now, since the first Muslim invasion led by Bakhtyar Khalji in 1206. It is a fact that hundreds of war prisoners had stayed back in Assam till, say, the Battle of Saraighat and had become part and parcel of the Assamese society, as have those who had accompanied the Sufi saint Azan Peer. There have been a number of conversions too, starting with Ali Mech, a Mech tribal chief of Goalpara who is said to be the first Assamese convert to Islam. But the influx of lakhs of Muslim peasants from erstwhile East Bengal, erstwhile East Pakistan and present-day Bangladesh is a very recent phenomenon, which is exactly 120 years old now.

It was the Partition of Bengal, done by Lord Curzon in 1905 with the initial objective of weakening Bengal and thus the growing national movement, which is the original culprit. While Curzon, by splitting Bengal, also clubbed Assam to form a new province called ‘Eastern Bengal & Assam’, it opened floodgates for Muslims from overpopulated Eastern Bengal to enter Assam. While the British, least bothered about Assam’s ecology, considered all wetlands and low-lying areas as ‘wasteland’ and patronised migration to grow more food to feed a starving Bengal, for the Muslim League, born in Dhaka in 1906, it was a god-sent opportunity to fulfil one of its major objectives of creating conditions for a Muslim state in eastern India. Prior to that, as Barpujari pointed out, only a few migrants from the neighbouring districts of East Bengal had settled in riverine lands of the Goalpara district. Though the ‘East Bengal & Assam’ province was abolished and the latter was made a Commissioner’s province in 1911, a massive wave of migration, particularly from Mymensing, in the next decade itself changed the demography of several Brahmaputra Valley districts. In the 1921 Census, Muslim migrants formed 20 per cent of Goalpara’s population (then covering six present-day districts of Goalpara, South Salmara, Dhubri, Kokrajhar, Chirang and Bongaigaon) and 14 per cent of the then Nagaon (today’s Nagaon, Morigaon and Hojai). CS Mullan, the Census Superintendent of 1931, wrote, “Where there was wasteland, thither flock Mymensingias… a population which must amount to over half a million has transplanted itself from Bengal to Assam Valley during the last twenty years.”

While Barpujari wrote that “the immigrants occupied in an organized way wastelands, grazings and forest reserves,” 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.” With the indigenous people feeling insecure, the government introduced a ‘line system’ in 1920 in Barpeta and Nagaon to put the immigrants in “segregated localities”, a system which could hardly stop them. Bardoloi’s Congress-led coalition government, formed in 1937, while fearing that unrestricted occupation of land by the Muslim immigrants might “drive away the indigenous inhabitants”, prohibited settlement of those who came after January 1, 1938. That was the first “cut-off date” fixed in Assam.

When the Bardoloi government resigned and Saadullah came to power with blessings of the Muslim League in November 1939, one of the first things he wanted to do was to abolish the Line System in order “to encourage settlement of Muslim immigrants to make Assam a permanent base of the Muslim League.” Again, when the Assamese and other indigenous communities expressed fear that Assam would be converted into a province of Muslim immigrants, Saadullah ensured that tribals were not enlisted as Hindus but separately, resulting in a reduction of the Hindu population in the 1941 Census. And, as Saadullah tried to bring in more Muslims in the name of a “Grow More Food” scheme, Viceroy Lord Wavell turned down the scheme, calling it a ploy “to grow more Muslims”.

Census figures of 1951 show how rapidly the Muslim population had increased in Assam after 1941 too. The 1940s was a decade when the Muslim League worked overtime to get Assam included in its proposed East Pakistan by pushing in more Muslims from East Bengal. In the Lahore session of 1940, the League passed a resolution openly demanding inclusion of Assam in Pakistan.

Mention must be made that when Bardoloi approached the Congress leadership to save Assam, top leaders like Nehru and Azad described his demand as a hurdle in the way of India attaining independence. Had it not been for Gandhiji and Syama Prasad Mookerjee, Assam would have become part of Pakistan in 1947 itself. What is interesting is that though a separate Pakistan was created, the Muslim League remained dissatisfied and continued to work towards converting Assam into a Muslim-majority state. That is evident from the fact that an exodus of Muslims continued to Assam even when their separate country was born. A reply by the Union Home Minister in Rajya Sabha on March 11, 1970, had put the number of such infiltrators to Assam during 1951-61 at an estimated 221,000. It was to check this influx that the Assam Police had in 1962 launched the Prevention of Infiltration of Pakistanis (PIP) scheme, under which the Chaliha government had thrown out about 1.78 lakh Muslim infiltrators. But, as the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Hind and his own cabinet ministers Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed and Moinul Haque Choudhury (the latter was once Jinnah’s private secretary!) protested, Nehru asked Chaliha to stop the operation.

Again, when a civil war broke out in East Pakistan in 1969, over ten million refugees from that country arrived in India, the majority of whom were Muslims. One-third of them entered Assam. And when Bangladesh was created, most of them stayed back, as the Congress government headed by Sarat Chandra Sinha did not take any step to send them back. The reason: they strengthened the party’s vote bank. Soon thereafter a large chunk of these people were enrolled as voters. This is evident from then Chief Election Commissioner SL Shakdher’s statement saying Assam’s population in 1971 registered a 34.98 per cent increase over the 1961 figure.

 That infiltration has continued unabated has been further ascertained by several other reports and documents of the subsequent period. The ‘White Paper on Foreigners Issue’ published by the Congress government in 2012 had put the number of persons confirmed by various tribunals as foreigners, infiltrators or illegal migrants till July that year at 61,774. The never-published Tiwari Commission Report on the 1983 Assam Election violence, the Supreme Court’s famous verdict of July 12, 2005, striking down the notorious IM(DT) Act, and the 2017 report of the Committee for Protection of Land Rights of Indigenous People of Assam – all provide a lot of details about this influx, which the Supreme Court had described as a “demographic invasion”.

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