Dr. Prasenjit Biswas
When the politics of turning a minority into a lesser identity and another into a greater identity gets covert support in a variety of ways, it becomes the longest night for the victims. Just as 1983 Nellie massacre passed as a tragedy of being presumably ‘illegal immigrant’, the name tag returns on some again, the peasantry and the labouring class of the erstwhile East Bengal origin. They are named as illegal immigrants even if they are assimilated into larger society of Assam. The implication is that the Constitutional State will now have to act upon at the behest of legitimate citizens that include the sons of the soil and the authentic ones.
The line is drawn thick in the apprehension of loss of land and a number of casualties. The victims could now be perpetually held responsible for alienating the indigenous people. With the tag of being illegal immigrant, they could be thrown outside the purview of constitutional recognition of their basic human rights such as Right to Life. None of them can seek any redressal in case they are assaulted and their rights are violated. Their feeling of being subjected to multiple injustices can now be ignored till they prove their credentials. Although the last shred of papers in their possession might be destroyed, yet they have to produce their land document and the record of theirs being voters. A Kafakaesque life awaits these sheltered and indescribably dehumanized souls of the lakhs of displaced in various camps of Bodoland Autonomous districts and its adjoining areas.
Burden of proof is on refugees who have lost all.
Reportedly the Assam government has arrived at a consensus with Bodoland Territorial Council administration that only those displaced will be allowed to return to their homes who have records of land patta and also names in electoral rolls. If Assam government is serious, the same should apply on every other displaced community and not just on any one of the victimized populace.
In this ordeal by fire, the presumed suspicion that some of the riot victims are Bangladeshis and hence does not require any legal and moral veracity. It presumably suspends the primary task of constitutional protection to the displaced victims. The suspicion occupies priority over constitutional and legal mechanism by placing determination of ‘citizenship’ outside the purview of the very law and constitution that are supposed to adjudicate it. The unstated and presumed notion of citizenship in this context is based on a yet-to-be granted ethnically exclusive land rights that refuses to accept the status quo of settlement of the currently displaced people. Indeed an environment of enforced statelessness prevails to reduce the collective identity of the riot victims into disqualified citizens, where the State also has been reduced to a mere arbiter of lesser and greater identity.
The argument about exclusive homeland of Bodos is now couched in terms of only six communities that enjoy constitutional protection in tribal belts under Assam Revenue and Land Regulation Act, 1986. These six communities are plain tribes, hill tribes, scheduled castes, tea tribes, Santhal and Nepali, who, according to this regulation can enjoy land rights and can be settled in tribal belts. Invocation of such a law at this point of time is to exclude the possibility of the return of victims other than these communities to their own villages. This is a grave denial of their previous existence and habitation in many of the villages of the four Bodoland Territorial Autonomus Districts. In a scenario where the Bodos and other tribes constitute only one-third of the total population of some 30 lakhs in these four districts of Chirang, Bagsa, Kokrajhar and Udalguri of Territorial Council, such a denial to return to their respective homes would be a grave violation of human rights. This would violate even the ‘principle of non-refoulment’ that applies to the already identified illegal immigrants. Far from being determined as illegal immigrants, these victims are now subjected to a procedure that puts the onus of proving them to be legitimate Indians before they are rehabilitated. This is twice victimization that goes any minimum sensibility towards the human rights of victims. Victims are victims first and the question of their origin and identity comes only when their human rights are ensured.
More importantly, why does a constitutional state panders to the fear of illegal immigrants as mooted by some ethnically dominant communities? Why a liberal democratic state doesn’t remain firm in its constitutional and moral duty of rehabilitating the displaced? Instead, what is getting some amount of limelight in the Northeast is the knee-jerk reaction of the State in identifying illegal immigrants by the police. In case of wronging someone as illegal immigrant, the policing procedure wouldn’t have to be accountable; unless the whole procedure is open to judicial review from the side of the victim. It becomes a travesty of justice when the so called illegal immigrant has to carry the burden of proof that he or she is not an illegal immigrant. This immense fluidity and viciousness of legal procedures based on mere suspicion results in a situation of identifying any culturally and linguistically different person as a suspect. In case, he or she happens to be a migrant Bengali Muslim or a Chin, the suspicion often turns into a confirmation. The needle of suspicion does not leave any right to defence to an accused person. Such a one-sided prosecution clearly shows the agenda of an ethnic and racial profiling of the suspected immigrants who have gone to work in any of the Northeastern states.
Compare the situation with Raj Thackeray’s jibe against Bihari migrants in the city of Mumbai. He called Bihari migrants as ‘infiltrators’ in an Indian state. The constitutional right of free movement and settlement of peoples across the states of the Union barring the right to own land in fifth and sixth schedule areas of Kashmir, Nagaland and some other Northeastern states comes under threat from a kind of nativism that is antithetical to migration and settlement of others. In the case of detection and deportation of illegal immigrants, the name tag ‘illegal immigrants’ gets conflated with legal migrants and citizens of different cultural, linguistic and religious origin throwing up a deep seated bias against people from East Bengal origin. Such a conflation brings out the impropriety of ascription of the category ‘illegal immigrant’ on certain section of people. There is no legal mechanism to commonly apply to peoples of all the community identity with the exception that a certain suspected community is subjected to proving the validity of their right to citizenship. In the absence of any such common mechanism, it’s a clear division of identity in terms of who is a native and who is a settler, as if the notion of citizenship arises from such contestable notion of identity and belonging.
Within this whole conundrum of determining who is a Bangladeshi and who is a native, what is lost is the basic constitutional purpose of protection of indigenous tribal identity of Bodos. As Bodoland territorial Council is created by an accord by Government of India, it has to be seen that the letter and the spirit of the accord be upheld. My contention here pertains to clause 4.3 of BTC accord, which safeguards the rights of non-tribals in the proposed territorial council, who are settled therein before 2003 and as part of this constitutional safeguard to minorities, the accord prohibits any change of law that could adversely affect the non-tribals in exercising their bonafide right over land in terms of acquisition, sale or possession. An accord made in accordance with democratic principles of justice and equality that empowered the Bodo people to enjoy autonomy without curbing rights of others, needless to say not only recognizes the ‘first nation’ like status of Bodos but it also retains the delicate status quo between Bodos and non-Bodos within the autonomous council area. In resettling the non-tribal victims who are now dwelling in camps, it is the constitutional duty of the government at the Centre, Sate and also at the autonomous council to follow a principle of non-refoulment and resettle people back to their homes without allowing any unnecessary dispute about their status.
Indeed the work of various peace committees comprising of Bodo leaders and other important social and political leaders in last two weeks brought some good news of peace and reconciliation among Bodos and other Indian citizens. The governments at all levels played a positive role in initiating reconciliation among the communities in Bodoland areas. At this delicate juncture, desperate at making political dividends, certain groups are generalizing the fight against an imaginary Bangladeshi immigrant at the backdrop of Bodoland clashes. If all the provocations in social media and other ways that had already created tremours at the national level, why there is still repetition of the same gambit by raising the ‘Bangladeshi’ bogey? One needs to realize that any provocation to create an ethnic and communal division would further jeopardize the peace process in trouble torn areas. It would not even serve the cause of ethnic homeland as competitive fight over Bangladeshi bogey only will fracture unity between indigenous peoples themselves.
What this entire controversy is attempting to blur is the foundational significance of citizenship right by restricting it to people who have land pattas and names in voters list. Indeed citizenship rights, considered as basic to any other right cannot be given a secondary and derived status. In the case of victims who hail from a certain minority, the State has a greater responsibility to ensure that their legal and constitutional rights are not jeopardized under any pretext of authenticity. The hue and cry over illegal immigration should not be taken at its face value to deprive the citizenship rights of select migrant communities of different religious and linguistic origin. It would simply encourage increase in vulnerability of all segments of minorities in a poly-ethnic Assam. Pitting one minority against the other is a suicidal strategy of bargain for windfall political and economic gains, but it certainly is a recipe for greater disharmony.
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Author is the Director (Research) of Barak Human Rights Protection Committee, Silchar.