Kaliph Rehman

Abstract

Assamese discourse on Bengali migrants is dominated by reactionary literature. This article seeks to challenge this reactionary narrative and advocate for the Bengali community in Assam. The prevalent allegations of illegal and mass immigration foster an atmosphere of suspicion and anxiety among minorities. This article posits that Assamese chauvinism stems from the British colonial legacy of divide-and-conquer tactics. Additionally, the demonisation of Bengalis has facilitated policies that verge on genocide and resulted in the statelessness of millions. This article argues that much of the existing scholarship is marred by narrow interpretations of identity, hypernationalism, and persistent racism. The aim of this article is to highlight the overlooked experiences of Bengalis in Assam and amplify their voices.

Introduction

Assam has had a troubled history with Bengalis within its own borders for a century now. Ethnic relations inside Assam have had important knock-on effects for the entire South Asia region and beyond. More recently, drawing condemnation from the UN for its human rights abuses, demonisation of Bengalis in the state of Assam has led to consequential legislation and policies that may create rifts with Bangladesh and cause even more concern for the safety of the Muslim minority in India. This article is placed against the majority of the literature written on the subject of Bengali migrants and their “illegality” in Assam. While the security literature appears adamant that many Bengalis are illegal immigrants, representing a threat to the ethnic purity of the state, demographic data from up to the colonial period does not support much of these claims. Appraising the current security-centric and racist scholarship, this article seeks to dispel the standard narrative of Bengalis and their history in Assam. The pro-Assamese literature is the reason why a legally ambiguous situation for Bengalis in Assam persists today. The lack of advocacy for Bengalis in the overall literature has created an environment where Bengalis can only be described in negative terms. Ethnic hatred in the state traces its genesis to colonial divide and conquer rule, political impotence and hyper-ethnonationalism. Advocacy for Bengalis is important because support for Bengalis in security literature is practically non-existent, the appalling literature more often than not spelling grave implications for the Bengali minority in Assam and Northeast who are routinely harassed, discriminated against and killed by the state for merely existing.

British civil servants in the British Raj produced increasingly belligerent reports of Bengali Muslim peasants, initiating a tradition of indigenous scholarship, that remains to this day, anti-Bengali and anti-Muslim. The overwhelming anti-Bengali sentiment is an imperial British invention, it is also misinformed and based upon incorrect readings of demographic data and overly narrow conceptions of identity. However, despite this, the literature has informed policy-makers to legislate ways to exclude the Bengali minority in the state and justify their statelessness, often disproportionately affecting Muslims too. It is not surprising that chauvinistic scholarship has led to a precarious state of affairs given the lack of attention to other facts that may unsettle or challenge the dominant narrative in the Northeast. Consequently, this academic enquiry aims to contribute to an intellectually underexplored area in academic scholarship on Bengali migrants and their legal status in Assam.

Advocating for Bengalis: Argument and Structure

This article argues against the overwhelming literature that posits illegal immigration from Bangladesh as a persistent and manifestly obvious problem, not just in Assam, but across India. This article will attempt to reveal how ethnic conflict in the 21st century in Assam is a result of British colonialism. Firstly, an overview of the literature should demonstrate the state of contemporary literature on Bengalis in Assam, followed by an evaluation of the current status of securitising Bengali migration and its success. Following next is a basic literature overview of scholars from various disciplines who have argued against the long-term trend of Assamese literature.

In the section entitled “Politics of Identity”, this article delves into the colonial period to illuminate the reason why Bengali migrated to Assam. This should uncover how Bengalis unassumingly ventured into Assam’s virgin fields only to find themselves suddenly embroiled in ethnic conflict with the ethnic Assamese and other tribal groups in the region. In this section the narrowing of Assamese is demonstrated to have adversely affected the unity of the state, leading to the break-up of Assam. Despite their involvement in facilitating the movement of Bengali peasants and administrators to Assam, British civil servants would try to foment differences between Bengalis and Assamese people towards the end of the British Raj. The consequences of which would manifest in numerous massacres in the postcolonial Indian state. The second major section of this article deals with the present state of how the electoral, legislative and Islamophobic forces come together to force millions into statelessness. The violence that minorities in the state experience is made possible by the convergence of interests between national and local parties in desiring to “deport Bangladeshis” and an unfair preoccupation with Bengali Muslims, despite the findings of the problematic National Register of Citizens (NRC) exercise.

In order to make the argument, this article firstly presents a historical overview, clearly delineating the forces that marked the initial instances of ethnic hatred. Thereafter, the argument becomes concerned with the present Islamophobia and statelessness that have sharpened the hatred heaped onto Bengali Muslims of the state.

Overview of Literature

Assamese Ethnonationalism

Myron Weiner advanced the thesis that Assam’s lack of homogeneity, due to overwhelming colonial Bengali migration and persistent Bangladeshi illegal migration, was leading to dangerous instability in the state that posed a risk to its fragile and still-nurturing institutions. Weiner’s arguments rely on Assamese intellectuals who resisted Bengali migration from the colonial period and participated in the Bongal Kheda (Bengalis Get Out!) campaign, which sought the expulsion of Bengali Hindus in administrative positions in newly-postcolonial Assam. Thus, Weiner’s contribution is set in a much broader literature which is totally and explicitly discriminatory towards Bengalis.

In addition to South Asia experts, like Weiner, pro-Assamese interpretations of the “migrant crisis” have currency among Assamese liberals and Marxists. Hiren Gohain represents the latter view and argues that the legislation that is used to harass Bengalis, like the National Register of Citizens (NRC), which is a product of the Bongal Kheda campaign and has currently left 1.9 million people stateless, is necessary to maintain peace and order. His denunciation of “regional chauvinism” and violence ignores the root cause of the violence, which is not only the inflammatory press coverage of Bengali migrants but includes intolerance of the very presence of Bengali-origin and Bengali-speaking people in the state, despite how well they do to assimilate into Assamese culture and society. Criticising Gohain is Sanjib Baruah Kumar, who claims that Marxists like Gohain don’t take Assamese demographic insecurities seriously enough. Kumar argues that unchecked Bengali immigration, legal or illegal, will only exacerbate current ethnic conflict and tension in the region. His rather nationalist solution is to yield control of Assam’s border from the Indian central government over to the government of Assam. However, again, this does little to engage with the intolerance existing and documented Bengalis experience and the subsequent neurotic environment of suspecting anyone poor, Bengali and/or Muslim to be Bangladeshi, which is what principally animates this issue.

Security Literature

Political events in the 1980s brought the scholars of Assam to the national forefront, the issue of Bangladeshi illegal immigration hereon became quickly securitised and constructed as an existential security threat of national importance. As a result, there is no dearth of scholarship coming out of India calling for increased securitisation of the migration of Bengalis into Assam. Scholars from Assam join a chorus of politically charged voices from West Bengal, Meghalaya, Tripura, Manipur and Nagaland (and, more recently, Mumbai, Maharashtra and Delhi) in seeking government intervention to deal with Bangladeshi illegal immigrants, whom they regard to be a serious and existential security threat.

Monika Verma’s paper investigating the securitisation of “Bangladeshis” identifies that two referent objects can be determined. One, referenced by the Assamese ethnonationalists themselves, is ensuring the majority position of the Assamese people, a concern that finds expression in Clause 6 of the Assam Accord. The second potential referent object, best represented as the core concern of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, is the integrity of India’s borders from untrustworthy Muslim neighbours (and allies), Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. A discord between these two objects of reference can be grasped with the recent fallout between Assamese nationalist organisations and the BJP-led government in Assam over the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 (CAA). 

Josy Joseph seeks to understand whether securitisation improved the ability of the Indian government to identify and deport Bangladeshi illegal immigrants in Assam. Joseph discovers that the “violent anti-migration movements and massacres, the rhetoric and urgent measures by securitizing actors have achieved very little”, and recommends that India desecuritise and become more accommodative to Bangladesh’s “needs and aspirations”. However, Ksenia Glebova’s study into English-language press coverage of Bengalis in Assam concludes that desecuritisation is impossible under the current security framework (in, then, 2008). Securitisation has shifted Assam’s politics away from “normal” and thereby legitimised legal acts of discrimination and exclusion, which, lately, have manifested as state-enabled statelessness. Evidence of this is the forceful “pushing” and even killing of people suspected of being Bangladeshi in recent anti-encroachment drives.

Non-Issue

Scholars who share the pro-Assamese perspective have admitted that sometimes genuine Indian citizens have been evicted from their homes in Assam. The othering of Bengalis in the state has led to a culture of doubting the citizenship of poor Bengalis, particularly Muslims. Critical scholarship is emerging that challenges prevailing assumptions about the citizenship and history of Bengali Muslims in India. One example is Amalendu Guha who understood Assamese chauvinism to be “proto-fascist” and violently anti-minority. Guha also did not believe in the “migrant crisis” or illegal-infiltrator narrative, criticising it for misconstruing demographic data. Against the Assamese chauvinist’s claim, Guha argues that the growth of Bengali speakers in the state is modest compared to the larger increase in the growth of Assamese speakers. Another critic of the illegal-infiltrator argument is Navine Murshid, who argues that Assam possessing a large Muslim population explains why the growth of Bengalis seems abnormal. Murshid also interrogates the popular and academic parlance in Bengali migrant discourse and uncovers Bengali Muslims “have become the de facto “illegal Bangladeshis’’” as a result of xenophobically charged media reporting and culture. Malini Sur furthers this line of argument to describe how mere accusations of illegality can have significant consequences for one’s citizenship. Sur writes that “[b]y leaving unclarified the contentious issues of land loss and identities in Assam, judicial processes make suspicion, rather than legal and procedural certainty, fundamental to the manufacturing of Indian citizenship in Assam”. In effect, what began as frenzied media speculation doubting the citizenship of Bengali (Muslims) has become concrete as minorities are forced into a condition of statelessness via unfair bureaucratic means produced by communalised politics. 

Conclusion

The literature is overwhelmed by pro-Assamese prejudices reproduced by security analysts and South Asia studies scholars. Playing on religious and linguistic lines, the literature displays a significant gap of advocacy for Bengalis. Therefore, this article is one attempt in bridging this gap, which is something that will require vastly more literature in the future. Much of the Pro-Assamese literature reviewed suffer from five things: (1) conflating Bangladeshi with Bengali Muslims where such a conflation is baseless, unwarranted and contextually improbable; (2) failing to understand that apprehensions at the border oftentime represent unauthorised crossings as a result of poorly marked borders, further obscured by economic activity at the border, as opposed to immigration; (3); exaggerating the threat of Islamism; (4) xenophobically suspecting every Bengali residing in a chor or border town to be an illegal immigrant; and finally, (5) many of the more academically unrefined articles sometimes do not hide their prejudice and represent little more than expressions of racism against people of Bengali heritage. At best, literature opposing the standard Assamese (and composite Northeastern) ethnonationalist narrative(s) will occasionally feature a denunciation of the violence against Bengalis but conclude that legislation disenfranchising Bengali migrants and limiting immigration are necessary for demographic reasons. Or, more infrequently, elaborate xenophobic and Islamophobic concerns in technical academic vocabulary.

Consequently, the literature has given demographic anxiety a privileged role in determining India’s national security issues, making Assamese demographic anxieties a valid and established fact among Indian and South Asian experts outside of security. However there exists a minority of literature, which will be returned to later, that clarifies the overabundance of attention given to “Bangladeshi infiltration” reflects domestic Indian antagonism towards poor Bengali Muslims, who, due to increasing urbanisation, are becoming more noticeable in urban centres beyond their immediate ghettoised slums and chors.

Politics of Identity

Bengal in Assam

The modern history of Bengalis in Assam begins with British dominion over Assam in the 1830s when the East India Company transferred Bengali amlahs (officials of the court) over to newly annexed Upper Assam. The language of administration and instruction was in Bengali which alienated the indigenous Assamese but further precipitated a flow of Bengalis into the area. The migration included Bengali elites involved in administration followed by a significant influx of peasants who intended to cultivate Assam’s fertile and underutilised fields. Both social classes were actively encouraged to migrate by the British and received institutional backing. In the backdrop of this British-led demographic change in the 19th century, Assam’s demography had transformed by the turn of the 20th century.

Colonial schemes, with the purpose of making the state financially viable, encouraged Bengali migration to form settled communities on the floodplains across Lower Assam well into the 1930s. It was under this pretext that Sylhet transferred hands from the Bengal Presidency to the newly created Assam Province. It is also for this reason that Bengalis would go on to overwhelmingly dominate jobs in colonial bureaucracy and became essential cogs in Britain’s imperialist machinations in the so-called “North East Frontier”.

Assamese Cultural-Nationalism

In returning fire to the unfair privileging of Bengalis, the Assamese elite began to advocate for their unique language and identity, which had until then existed in a harmonious relationship with Bengali. Assamese intellectuals soon enough began producing important cultural works asserting a new Assamese cultural nationalism distinct from and opposed to Bengali people and culture.

The victims of this Assamese cultural resurgence were people whose identities existed in the peripheries of Assam, like Goalpara; particularly, outside the bubbles of the Assamese elite, who were disproportionately from Upper Assam. As Bengal too underwent a cultural nationalist surge, Muslims and those contesting the emergent identity found themselves precluded from nationalist imaginations. The seemingly small details of British imperial policy would have lasting consequences that have defined relations between Assamese and Bengali (and between Muslim and Hindu) people into the modern-day. 

Origins of Assamese Chauvinism

Amalendu Guha described in relatively positive terms the migration of Bengalis and the point at which they encountered the Assamese, that was the source of future tension:

Immigration was a welcome phenomenon for labour-short, land abundant Assam from the economic point of view. Landless immigrants from over-populated East Bengal during 1901-51 – of them some 85 per cent were Muslims – found an el dorado in the jungle-infested riverine belt of government wastelands, remaining water-logged for many years. Used to an amphibious mode of living, they were industrious and hardy enough to come up the Brahmaputra on steamers and boats and reclaim these malarial areas. All that they wanted was land. When they pressed forward in search of new land to areas held by the sons of the soil, conflicts with the latter began to take place.

The vast bulk of the migration of Bengali Muslims consisted of peasants handpicked by colonial authorities for their superior cultivational skills and experience with newly introduced crops. Over-intensive agricultural production over shrinking arable land left many Assamese and Bengali cultivators struggling to pay rent and overburdened with debt amid ever-increasing competition. The competition was so intense that after the earthquake of 1897, which exacerbated the loss of agricultural land to river erosion, conflict broke out between the ethnically heterogeneous peasantry. 

The real conflict between Bengalis and Assamese people began with the promulgation of the Line System in 1920. The Line System was thus introduced to control violent clashes over land. However, instead contributed to concretising the differences between the Bengalis and Assamese in arbitrary ways and, as is still the case today, legitimised violent interventions in purging Bengalis from the area. Violations of the Line System were raised by the Assamese politicians in the Legislative Council and subsequently, a moral panic ensued. M. Waheeduzzaman Manik reveals that this was due to the “selling of land by the Assamese to the immigrants [which] was widespread, and such land deals were openly and enthusiastically sponsored and financed by the Marwari and Assamese money lenders, and indigenous co-operative banks”. But because of this, popular sentiments against Bengalis ran high and justified hysterical rhetoric concerning ethnocide allegedly represented by the Bengali peasants. 

Despite the seemingly exclusive concern over Bengalis, some Bengali Hindu legislators also advocated against the largely-Muslim Bengali migrants. It was this period in the 1920s where, Manik believes, the agitation against migrants developed an element of communalism. 

British civil servants, in following a form of divide and conquer rule, engaged in increasing contempt for Bengalis and bolstered Assamese claims of demographic threat by producing false and hyperbolic information. C. S. Mullan has several very popular accounts of the supposed threat posed by Bengali migrants which are frequently cited in contemporary security papers. One of the most common quoted pieces of his writing comes from the Census Report of 1931:

Probably the most important event in the province during the last 25 years – an event, moreover, which seems likely to alter permanently the whole feature of Assam and to destroy the whole structure of Assamese culture and civilisation has been the invasion of a vast horde of land-hungry immigrants mostly Muslims, from the districts of East Bengal.

One of the more colourful descriptions (and one of the most fantastical distortions of this period), also by Mullan, is where he said: 

[The Bengali] immigrant army has almost completed the conquest of Nowgong. The Barpeta subdivision of Kamrup has fallen to their attack and Darrang is being invaded. Sibsagar has so far escaped completely, but the few thousand Mymensinghias in North Lakhipur are an outpost which may, during the next decade, prove to be a valuable basis of major operations. Wheresoever the carcass, there the vultures be gathered together. Where there is wasteland thither flock the Mymensinghias.

In spite of these dramatic assertions, in what even then was a very sensitive issue, the Governor addressing the Council in 1933, while citing Mullan’s Census report, reduced the significance of Mullan’s analysis: 

[I]nspite of the [Bengali] language increase in the population of Assam at every census since 1901, the percentage of speakers of Assamese to the total population has remained very steady. It is clear from the figures of increase in the speakers of Assamese at the Census that the language is at present in no danger of supersession.

With time, the words of the Governor have proved true; Assamese is under no more threat today from Bengali as it was in 1930 and the gap between Assamese and Bengali speakers has only widened since then. But it is Mullen’s words that continue to have reverberations in academia and inform Indian policies at the state and central government levels. Fiery words by civil servants, like Mullen, followed increasingly belligerent legislation. The Line System organised Bengalis and the Assamese into segregated areas within a given district, disallowing Bengali or Assamese people to mix except in designated areas. It follows the model of British imperial racial segregation, as part of its divide and conquer rule, which was used and led to similar bouts of intensive and enduring ethnic conflicts elsewhere in India, Malaysia and Nigeria. Soon, the Line System itself became intensified by the state to segregate, oppress and discriminate against the Bengali minority. Its use ruthlessly split families and communities and contributed to creating a culture of fear, disunity and suspicion among the Bengalis and Assamese.

It should become clear, therefore, that contemporary Assamese chauvinism and the perceived threat of Bengalis in the state are British inventions. British missionaries studied the rough, Assamese vernacular and introduced the first works of literature, printing and grammar in the language. Armed with a distinct culture, art and history, Assamese identity was thus formed in opposition to the Bengalis who ruled over them. The important takeaway is that Assam is one such region where British imperial agents, in the form of missionaries and civil servants, engaged in colonial demographic engineering and the subsequent xenophobic backlash were direct consequences of this divide and conquer strategy.

Assam Agitation and Nellie

Demographic anxiety would receive nationwide attention during the Assam Movement from 1979 to 1985, led by the All Assam Student Union (AASU) and All Assam Gana Sangam Parishad (AAGSP). Also known as the Anti-Foreigner Agitation or just Assam Agitation, the six-year period featured widespread ethnic violence and significant political unrest. A flashpoint of the Agitation was the massacre at Nellie in 1983, claiming more than 2,000 lives over six hours with unofficial figures five times higher. Considered one of the worst pogroms in post-independence India, the Nellie massacre exposed unnoticed faultlines quickly developing in Assamese society. The perpetrators of the massacre of the Bengali Muslim village were not ethnic Assamese but Tiwa tribal people who had recently lost their land to the inhabitants of Nellie. Growing landlessness led to growing resentment and persuaded a number of tribal communities to turn to extreme violence and militant ethnonationalism. Of the several massacres that took place in the wake of the state elections of 1983, there was no one community that was singled out for violence. If any pattern could be discerned, it would be that the violence seemed to be between tribal and non-tribal people. Many Assamese nationalists became disenchanted at this unanticipated change in events, particularly Assamese Muslims who took the massacre at Nellie and targeting of Muslims to mean the Assam Movement had been hijacked by the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). They also took this to mean that the Movement was ending and the signing of the Assam Accord followed swiftly, in 1985, between the Indian Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi and leaders of AASU and AAGSP.

The Assam Agitation was successful in reorienting Indian politics and made “Bangladeshi infiltration” a national security issue. In doing so, the issue developed a communal character and some Indian mainlanders were even more enthusiastic than the Assamese ethnonationalists themselves to get rid of the “Bangladeshis”. The securitisation of Bangladeshi illegal immigration, therefore, is intimately tied to the Hindu nationalist and Islamophobic politics of the BJP as well as the Assamese. In contrast to the mainland reaction, the ULFA, which grew out of the Assam Movement and was the principal organisation fighting for an Assamese nation-state, was not religiously fundamentalist and attributed Assam’s woes to economic exploitation from the Indian Centre. As the BJP found common ground with the upper-caste Assamese Hindus, they entered into alliances with the leaders of the Assam Movement and their parties, causing a shift in Assamese ethonationalist politics from the violent secessionism represented by the ULFA to electoralism and Hindu nationalism.

Islamophobia and Statelessness

Electoral Background

“Ultranationalist” scholars and those more sympathetic to Bengali migrants both agree that illegal immigration was never taken seriously by the Indian central government and national parties in Assam. The Modi administration has attempted to rectify this image problem of mainland policymakers and, since 2014, campaigned extensively on the migrant crisis, exposing the Congress Party as exploiting and benefitting from it. Corruption in the state was a great source of momentum for the BJP; the Assam Congress chapter had exploited Bangladeshis deprived of land due to the chaotic riverine geography by exchanging ID cards in return for votes, all the while doing nothing to improve the precarious legal situation surrounding migrants already settled there for generations. It was for this reason that Congress had tried avoiding taking a public stance on the migrant crisis, even as and after it began creating significant instability in Assam. BJP infiltration of Assam state politics comes after the decline of a powerful local Congress led by Tarun Gogoi, who helped Congress manage to obtain the widespread support of the ethnic Assamese and rule without a coalition for the first time since the Assam Accord. It was under Gogoi’s leadership that then-future Chief Minister, Sarbananda Sonowal, fought in the court to overturn weak legislative powers of the police to deport suspected illegal immigrants. Convergence of ethnonationalist interests and the BJP was the result of Assamese Hindu nationalist’s, emboldened after the Assam Accord, scheming attempts to exert influence on national politics in order to obtain their ideological goals, with varying degrees of success. Congress’ own doing incidentally served as an impetus for ethnonationalism to be co-opted and diffused into the politics of the BJP. For example, the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP), formed in the aftermath of the Assam Accord, is currently a junior coalition partner with the BJP in the Assam Legislative Assembly. Additionally, the BJP has collected the non-Congress parties from the region under its North-East Democratic Alliance (NEDA), which has so far dominated Northeast electoral representation in the upper and lower houses of Indian parliament and its respective Northeast state legislatures. 

The marrying of Hindu nationalism with linguistic xenophobia has not always been a successful one. Because of the way Assamese nationalism was so narrowly defined, contemporary Assamese racism has left many of the Bengalis feeling unwanted. Previously, this pushed Bengali Muslims to identify as Assamese (or, Na-Asamiya, meaning Neo-Assamese) in the census and adopt Assamese as their native tongue, foregoing Bengali. But continued hatred against Bengalis and Muslims has contributed to fragmenting already disparate identities even further – the latest evolution of Na-Asamiya as Miya people, or Miya Musulman (Miah Muslim), is an embracement of the fact that Bengal-origin Muslims will never be accepted into Assamese society. But the Muslim component of Miya Musulman also underscores the lack of unity among Bengalis across religious lines. Well before the BJP’s taking of the state in 2016, Bengali Muslims and Bengali Hindus multiple attempts to electorally unite have consistently resulted in clear failure, the last time being the short-lived United Minorities Front, Assam (UMFA), which emerged immediately and disappeared not long after the signing of the Assam Accord. The fourth-largest party in the state is the All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF), which draws significant support from Bengali Muslims, but it is notable that there is no Bengali Hindu equivalent. Seemingly, Bengali Hindu dominant areas generally elect BJP MPs and MLAs (state representative), in line with national and state trends, which demonstrates how the BJP has successfully assured Bengali Hindus of representing their interests while simultaneously sharpening anti-Bangladeshi rhetoric to capture cross-ethnic appeal to Assamese Hindus. As stated before, the Hindu nationalist coalition is crumbling and Assam state politics is reorienting itself in response to the BJPs failures on this front. The consequences of further aggravation and radicalisation may lead to a return to militancy that affected the state considerably in the 80s and 90s. Indeed, with the anti-encroachment drives as an example, the policies of the state are already becoming much more violent, causing great concern for the Muslim minority.

Muslim Insecurity: Systemic Discrimination and Harassment

Anti-Bengali sentiment is so high that Bengali communities regularly face attacks from the wider Assamese society, including aggressive expulsion campaigns led by non-Assamese tribal people. The Assam 2012 violence between Bodos and Bengali Muslims was some of the most violent in the region’s history, resulting in nearly 100 dead and up to 400,000 people displaced. The media response at the time was rife with the far-right “Greater Bangladesh” conspiracy theory, alleging that Bangladesh aims to annex Assam using lebensraum-like tactics. Barun Gupta reveals how the media and spokespersons for the Bodos freely spread disinformation:

“The spectre of a conspiracy to create a ‘Greater Bangladesh’ is being raised. People are being warned that Assam is soon going to be devoured by Bangladesh. Wild statistics are being concocted and bandied about on the incredible rise of the Bengali Muslim population in Assam without citing their sources. Sensational stories of a United Muslim National Army, formed in June, being behind the July riots are circulating freely”.

The frenzied rioting and frenzied reporting were combined in a positive feedback loop, one feeding and intensifying the other. The violence was heavily one-sided against the Bengali Muslims, but news reports continued outpouring sympathy for the Bodos, citing the danger illegal Bangladeshis posed to the other communities in Assam.

The violence in 2012 followed major massacres against Bengali Muslims, like the one in Nellie, 1983 and the 2014 Assam violence. Many other attacks, like the Khoirabari massacre also in 1983, were committed against the Bengali Hindu community. But where Bengali Hindus are concerned, they are not targeted for their religion. The fact that anti-encroachment drives take place in areas mostly occupied by Bengali Muslims illustrates how Bengali Muslims experience a form of “double oppression”. The stereotypical illegal immigrant is perceived to be a lungi-wearing Bengali Muslim, who also comes from Bangladesh, a mostly-Muslim and mostly-Bengali nation. Dismissing the religious component of how Bengali Muslims are being pushed into statelessness ignores how being Bengali and Muslim automatically raises suspicion and, therefore, discrimination and harassment. 

Bengali Muslims are targeted for being Muslim as much as they are for being Bengali; the potent mix of Islamophobia and anti-Bengali racism forms the basis for aggressive and terrorising policies of the state seeking to uproot communities that have lived there for generations.

Feelings of insecurity are compounded by police harassment of Bengali Muslims. Spontaneous pogroms against minorities are arguably enabled due to negligence by law enforcement authorities throughout the state. An issue particularly acute during the Agitation period of 1979-1985 was the boycotting of state elections, which typically preceded episodes of ethnic cleansing. But these boycotts often had the support of electoral authorities themselves and cases of polling agents refusing to perform their duties and even clashing with minorities wanting to vote are well documented. 

The violence that Bengali Muslims are so familiar with is exacerbated by wilful neglect but also the active participation of the law in criminalising their identity. Most clearly demonstrated by extra-legal mechanisms used by the state to punish and reclaim land from alleged illegal settlers, Muslims are disproportionately affected. There exists overwhelming evidence that proves that the people being targeted are not illegal immigrants – vindicating an argument made in this paper that the current security literature has enabled ethnic hatred to deprive millions of Bengalis of Indian citizenship. Without any clear recourse to appeal in legal institutions or repatriation agreements with Bangladesh, the legal situation for millions of Bengalis is extremely fragile. Those people who are “pushed back” into Bangladesh linger in no man’s land in-between Bangladesh and India. They are refused entry into either country and usually “disappear” after a few days. 

Malini Sur reports on a number of families and individuals forced out of Assam in the 1960s and who continue to live in Bangladesh. Many were unable to be rehoused and absorbed into Bangladeshi society, with those who were born in Assam and whose ancestors had lived in Assam for generations experiencing trauma from when they were forced out. The subjects in Sur’s fieldwork have not been able to assimilate into contemporary Bangladeshi society, insisting that they are Assamese, the land they used to own usually visible from the border. Instances like this, where Bengali-origin Muslim peasants have totally assimilated into Assamese society and identity underscore the level of intolerance, racism and hysteria contained within Assamese ethnonationalism. An attitude that caused Amalendu Guha to describe as “genocidal” and “fascist”. However, the NRC has exposed that most of the illegal immigrants are not Muslim peasants but Hindus fleeing persecution and harassment in Bangladesh while also numbering well below sensationalist media numbers. This has caused the “political narrative in the state” to change to a “great extent”, demonstrating a greater focus on religious relations in Bangladesh.

NRC, CAA and Statelessness

The power and institutions of the state are frequently used to harass, discriminate, antagonise, disenfranchise, segregate and deport the Bengali minority. The presence of Bengalis in chors and border towns especially arouses the suspicion of the state and they are treated, in society and academia, as though they’re “Bangladeshi citizens”. As stated earlier in the literature review, scholars justify this racist vocabulary based on a misreading of demographic data. Assamese ethnonationalists tend to prioritise data on population growth to assert that illegal immigration is in the millions. However, perceived unusual population growth is due to Assam possessing the third-largest Muslim population of any state in India. Otherwise, Muslim growth in Assam, which is higher than the national Hindu population growth, is in line with national trends among Muslim populations across India. The misreading of the demographic data is extremely commonplace and is used to justify state violence against Bengalis.

The latest BJP government, receptive to the Assamese demands for stricter migration controls, passed a substantial citizenship reform bill that severely disenfranchises Muslims from acquiring Indian citizenship. The reform bill, called Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 (hereon CAA), endeavoured to satisfy a shared political goal of the BJP (since the Assam Accord) and the Assamese ethnonationalists: identification and deportation of “Bangladeshi infiltrators”, which, to the BJP, meant Muslims.

However, there were large-scale protests against the CAA and accompanying the National Register of Citizens (hereon NRC) by the main opposition to the BJP, like Congress and the Bengali Muslim-led All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF), and Assamese nationalist groups, including the BJP’s coalition ally, AGP; and AASU and AAGSP, both organisations which spearheaded the Assam Agitation only five decades prior.

Preoccupied with the religious difference between Bangladeshi and Assamese people, the BJP failed to acknowledge the linguistic difference, inducing the president of the AASU to declare that the bill continues to maintain Assam as “a dumping ground for immigrants”. The outcome was that the CAA turned out to be insufficiently radical for most of Assamese society. But it also indicates a continuous pattern of undermining political will and institutions in the Northeast, whether for good or bad, which is formenting instability and, as in the past, militancy. A potential factor behind the persistence of the belief in a “migrant crisis” can be attributed to the neocolonial relationship between the Indian centre and the peripheral Assam. The Assamese public does not feel in control of their borders and believes that national parties come into the state to legislate ways to authorise citizenship for their illegal immigrant vote bank, which is popularly imagined to be Bengali Muslim and Bengali Hindu for Congress and BJP respectively.

With the given reaction by mass Assamese society, uniquely crossing political lines, it can be said that the BJP’s rollout of the NRC and CAA was a failure. However, it enabled even more radical policies, namely the proliferation of detention centres to detain the 1.9 million stateless people (also in the anticipation of furthermore illegal immigrants as NRC is expanded to all of India) and extrajudicial anti-encroachment drives, not too dissimilar to the Minuteman Project in the US-Mexico border. These drives are driven by suspicion and antagonism towards poor Bengalis by the police and wider society, as such, the people they target are often mistakenly labelled illegal immigrants. The violent nature of the extrajudicial anti-encroachment drives gives no room for justice or possible course of action to its victims.

With the looming fear of statelessness of potentially tens of millions of people, not including the millions already made stateless, international organisations and foreign countries have aired their dissatisfaction. Since the mass protests, the UN has upgraded India, and Assam in particular, into its Genocide Watchlist. The biggest causes for concern are the anti-Muslim legislation supported by the Hindu nationalist BJP and the anti-Bengali violence and legislation inducing statelessness in the state of Assam. Bangladesh seems to have weighed in on the issue as well, in the past have kept quiet or, at most, non-confrontational. Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, voiced confusion but neglected from condemning the NRC and CAA legislations.

Non-Issue

The consequences of securitising Bengali migrants, or “outsiders”, have led to little nuance in public debates and public knowledge of the issue. Local prejudices become objects of fact used to mislead successive Indian national governments. Or, as in the current case with the BJP, is used to justify bigoted common interests with national governments. The politicisation of the Bengali migrants has had consequences elsewhere in India where Bengali Muslims are seen as Bangladeshi illegal immigrants in states as far as Maharashtra. But emergent literature, like Murshid’s, reveals that politicisation and securitisation have obscured the fact that Bangladeshi illegal immigration is likely significantly lower than media estimates, which can number in the tens of millions. Sur’s fieldwork concludes that movement and apprehensions at the border to states like Meghalaya is likely dominated by non-Bengali Garo and Khasi people inhabiting northern Bangladesh.

A number of reasons can be given for the over-politicisation of the issue. Feelings of impotence due to lack of direct control over borders is one argument. Another argument is neocolonial economic relations is pushing Assam towards ethnic rivalry for economic dominance. In his analysis of the Assam Agitation, Amalendu Guha found that the rioting and violence of the Agitation can be attributed to the Assamese ruling class who owned the news presses. Their interest was simply that they participated in the Agitation in order to assume monopoly in industries where Bengalis and other non-Assamese people were dominant. The issue was less to do with Bangladesh and illegal immigration and simply the deportation of dissident minorities who stood in the way of total monopoly for the Assamese upper classes, who were embarrassed by their relatively impoverished condition compared to other elites in India.

The border between Bangladesh and Assam also represents a wealth border. On the one side, there is the informal economy of Assam, run by Bengali Muslims and some Bengali Hindus mostly illegally trading cattle to be consumed in Bangladesh. On the other side is a markedly more formalised economy where trade is subject to certification and licensing for specific subspecies of cows coming into Bangladesh. Cattle trading is not a respected profession in Assam, usually requiring bribing border officials and travelling under the cover of night. Workers involved in the practice lead precarious livelihoods sustained by seasonal demands for large cows in time for Eid-ul-Adha celebrations. But in Bangladesh, businesses selling cattle make over six times what their suppliers in Assam make for the same cow or bull. Incidentally, this wealth disparity defies the economic incentive argument for Bangladeshi immigration. It doesn’t make sense for Bengali Muslims to remain in Assam, where they’re discriminated against, to enter Bangladesh, a country where they enjoy significantly more privileges, that is, if they did not have kin and feel belonging to the land in Assam.

Possibilities and Recommendations

Bangladesh cannot change policies in the Indian state of Assam, but it can pressure India to produce mutually beneficial outcomes for both nations and communities. Protecting the interests of minorities and those who have lived where they have for generations is paramount. This article suggests the following policy proposals:

1. Officially complain and condemn the use of “Bangladeshi” as a derogatory term in India.
2. Bangladesh must practice a delicate balancing act in maintaining dialogue with the Indian centre with persistent issues in the Indian Northeast. This means keeping diplomatic channels open and establishing rapport with state Chief Ministers and their opposition. Bangladesh already does this to a certain extent and informal relations between parties, organisations and individuals do exist.
3. Advocate for the rights of Bengalis and the danger posed by statelessness and genocide in Assam and elsewhere in the Northeast. Given the magnitude of the problem, Bangladesh, recognising that it is a nation of Bengalis, ought to shift its institutional weight towards recognising the issue of Bengali discrimination and encouraging security scholars and academics to take note of what is happening to people in the vicinity of Bangladesh’s borders. This concerns not only India but also Nepal, Myanmar and incidentally Pakistan, given the large population of Bengalis in the slums of Karachi. However, it is doubly important to promote advocacy for the Bengali minority considering the reactionary state of the current literature.
4. Bangladesh must lobby India to provide clarity over citizenship to Bengalis living in the chars and border towns. Moreover, Bangladesh must lobby India to sort out the irregularities involved in the NRC and quickly rectify legal statuses for those hastily made stateless. 
5. Policies regarding ethnic relations have implications for domestic Bangladeshi policies too, chiefly with regards to adiboshis and the CHT region.

Conclusion

Assam is often said to be India in miniature, because of the vast ethnic and tribal diversity in the state due to the mixing of cultures and peoples from faraway regions in its rich history. In the past, this history has led to occurrences of atrocities between competing ethnicities in a Hobbesian war of all against all. A repeat of tribal and ethnic differences can be demonstrated since the post-colonial period against populations brought over by the British. The atrocities that were committed and continue to be committed under the guise of legality and encroaching genocide foreground the urgency of my argument in this paper – want for ethnic purity and dominance, things that should widely be seen as fascist beliefs, have forced Bengalis into statelessness. Rather than opposing this fascistic predisposition in Assam, academics and policy-makers have privileged demographic anxiety in law and policy, leaving minorities vulnerable to the genocidal tendencies of inhabitants of the state of Assam. This has resulted in the NRC exercise leaving 1.9 million people stateless in Assam, the forceful pushing into Bangladesh of nearly millions of people since 1947 and the murderous anti-encroachment drives. In order to hope for a reversal of this sad state of affairs, the existing xenophobic and genocide-enabling literature must be challenged.