By Sanjana Pegu & Sabina Yasmin Rahman for TwoCircles.net
On July 30, 2018, people of Assam woke up to find themselves at the centre of a category 1 storm. The draft NRC was released, 40 lakh people were left out of it, and mainland India (and international media) were promptly outraged. A casual glance at the news reports streaming in implied that all 40 lakh people were on the brink of being deported at any moment.
In keeping with longstanding tradition, when it comes to the North-Eastern states, lack of basic fact-check and unfamiliarity with background and contexts of issues form an integral part of the modus operandi of mainland Indians. For instance, the citizenship cut-off date for India is July 19, 1948, while for Assam it is March 24, 1971. This difference of almost 23 years, however, hardly merits consideration in mainstream media, let alone a thorough analysis of its potential impact for a state that is deemed ‘backward.’ In the wake of fervent discussions around NRC, journalists scrambled to remote locations of Assam to cherry-pick anecdotes of paranoia and agony. Soon enough, everyone had also discovered Assam Accord and Nellie massacre, and those unfortunate enough to have their names on the NRC draft were slapped with choicest epithets they saw fit for murderous sub-nationalists.
Most Assamese people found themselves at the receiving end of a vicious name-calling, insults, harassment, and concern-trolling – an entire state’s citizens were collectively tarred as xenophobes, racists, nationalists, Nazis, genocidal, terrorists even while the NRC process itself was declared akin to the Rohingya genocide, despite no evidence of even minor NRC-induced kerfuffles. International media such as the BBC produced videos with clickbaity headlines such as “4 million rendered stateless.” When asked why such misinformation was being spread when the Supreme Court had itself stated that no such step could be taken on the basis of the NRC, BBC referred to a CNN report as its source.
There is enough reason to believe that this narrative was decided even before the draft NRC was published. For instance, a letter by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) to the Ministry of External Affairs mentioned June 30th as the date for publishing the “complete draft.” Fallacious data has been a key weapon in the arsenal of this demonisation exercise but finds nary a word in reportage by bleeding-heart liberals. A petition circulated (with misleading data) by Avaaz, a New York-based NGO with dubious linkages and history, doesn’t raise red flags but the counter-petition by NRC is heavily derided. Interestingly, the part draft NRC released on December 31, 2017, hardly met with a whimper from concerned mainlanders. However, this time they created straw men for their screechy, tiresome reportage.
First strawman: 4 million Bengali Muslims declared stateless and await deportation
Several fact-finding missions have been parachuted down to Assam from the mainland. Curiously, they have landed only on areas seemingly dominated by Bengali Muslims because those are the only people we get to read about. While in itself this isn’t a problem, when the bulk of such fearless journalism is focused on a specific segment of the population whilst blithely ignoring others, legitimate questions arise as to whether the ‘facts’ select themselves to suit pre-defined agendas. The voices of the indigenous tribal population who have legitimate concerns about losing their land, culture, language and the way of life find no space in this narrative.
Even though NRC coordinator Prateek Hajela made it clear that details of the 40 lakh people left out of the NRC cannot be made public for reasons of confidentiality, this hasn’t stopped famed journalists from touting that most of them are Bengali Muslims, conveniently eliding the fact that many Assamese and Bengali-speaking Muslims view the NRC as a possible solution against the ‘Bangladeshi immigrant’ taint.
Soon enough, reports started to emerge that should have put to rest baseless rumours, including one from Nellie itself, which documented Bengali-speaking Muslims and Nellie survivors speaking in support of NRC. Another report indicated that Muslims from the chars were able to finally wipe away the stigma of being perceived as illegals. Many indigenous Assamese and Bengali Hindu families too have not found their names in the draft. Yet mainland liberals continued to use Nellie as an excuse to dismiss the voices of the actual stakeholders of the process.
On the question of deportation, Bangladesh Information Minister Hasanul-Haque Inu went on record saying that it is an internal matter of Assam, and India has made no official mention to Bangladesh on this issue. Others from Assam have posited workable options to resolve the issue once the NRC updation is complete and the extent of undocumented migration credibly detected.
Second strawman: NRC is part of BJP-led Hindutva politics
In their crusade against the current BJP government, mainlanders have presented NRC as a Hindutva conspiracy, casually brushing aside the fact that the roots of this exercise go back to the Partition, and made highly imaginative statements such as, “(NRC) removed a huge number of voters who were likely to vote against the BJP” without providing a shred of evidence. Teetering on the precipice of their own limited worldview and cluelessness about the North-East, such is their desire for their assumptions to be true that it takes only a gentle nudge to fall into the trap of fake data.
Aspersions have also been cast at the SC bench monitoring the NRC process because one member happens to be Assamese despite the SC repeatedly stating that NRC cannot be the basis to throw someone out of the country. But then hyperbole sells, especially when the buyer is national and international media.
The continuous protests by major students’ groups and civil society organisations of Assam against the BJP-sponsored Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016 have been conspicuous by their absence in anti-NRC discourse, including the fact that BJP ally AGP’s Prafulla Mahanta and BJP leaders are opposed to the Bill. This opposition can only be explained by the fact that Assamese society abhors forced demographic change based on religion. In fact, the whole North-East region supports the protection of rights of indigenous people through the timely implementation of NRC and ILP against unchecked state-backed immigration based on religion. It should be mentioned that the BJP government was reprimanded by the SC for dragging its feet on NRC. This makes sense because once the exercise is completed, it can no longer use the bogeyman of the illegal ‘Bangladeshi Muslim’ immigrant to perpetuate its politics of hate.
Myths versus facts: Competing internal narratives
The Assam Agitation that began in 1979 claimed 855 lives and triggered a bloody insurgency leading to more lives being lost. Now, on the occasion of the NRC, there is a tendency in mainland media to portray Nellie massacre as yet another instance of a typical Hindu-Muslim communal violence. But such a view of the incident can only be termed ahistorical and dangerously out of line with ground realities due to its lack of nuance in the representation of how the groups involved identified themselves.
Nellie has widely been understood within its specific regional and sociopolitical context as one of the worst instances of reactionary inter-ethnic violence – an expected, but not entirely unavoidable, outcome of the unbridled exploitation of Assam’s natural resources by the colonial Indian state’s economic policies resulting in land alienation, and complete indifference to the aspirations of local people. This led to their wrath of being directed at a construed “foreign” (“bidesi”) enemy, who also happened to be Muslim. Scholars like Yasmin Saikia and Makiko Kimura have documented these stages of construction of the “other” in the context of Assam, and how the policy-induced migration of Bengali-speaking Muslim of a certain period in history was transformed into a credible threat in the form of “Bangladeshi Muslims” in another.
Post Nellie, Muslims in Assam and ULFA in upper Assam maintained that Indian state was our real enemy. AASU leaders, on the other hand, were against the settlement of “Bangladeshis” and demanded deportation – an already repugnant scheme made worse due to its timely hijacking by Hindu right-wing forces of India for electoral gains. Indeed, according to the interviews in Kimura’s study, the Tiwas who are perceived as the “attackers” in the Nellie massacre felt cheated by the AASU and AAGSP leadership to whose anti-foreigner drive they had extended support as an indigenous community of Assam. Further, people on both side submit to the fact that there was no real conflict between the Tiwas and the Muslims of immigrant origin before the movement. In fact, the latter rightly felt that even if the cause and stated goal of the movement itself was legitimate, its scope of targetting immigrants who came before the partition and independence of India and leaving them in perpetual precarity was offensive.
The 1971 cut-off date was a compromise and accepted by all communities including the Muslims. While the first NRC was conducted in 1951, this recent exercise has been borne out of the Assam Accord of 1981 and an updated NRC was to be conducted then with the Indian government required to detect and expel foreigners. It finally took a 2014 SC directive for it to be implemented. This chequered history is merely representative of the complexities and complications inevitable in a region that has seen continuous migrations for multiple decades.
Despite repeated assurances by NRC officials that no one can be tagged a ‘foreigner’ or ‘infiltrator’ on the basis of the NRC, that this was indeed a draft version, that only the Foreigners Tribunal can pronounce someone an ‘illegal immigrant’, that everyone will get a chance to reapply, and that the final list will not be out till the end of the year, fear-mongering in mainstream media and social media reached such a fever pitch, some Assamese people felt a little bemused at this relentless attention accorded to a state, which hitherto was seen as little more than a green patch of land known for tea, floods, and illegal Bangladeshi immigration through porous borders. Knee-jerk reactions were the order of the day, especially from politicians who, before this, were not known to be champions of Bangladeshi immigrants, and Assamese people, en masse, were declared xenophobic.
Since the demographic break-up of NRC data will remain confidential, one can only cautiously glean certain trends from rough surveys and anecdotal evidence. Prima facie, there is no indication that any particular group has been systematically targeted. There are no reports that districts with large Muslim populations such as Dhubri or those with a Bengali-speaking majority like Hailakandi and Karimganj have a higher rate of exclusion. This is indirectly validated by the absence of violence – otherwise fairly common in the state – even in the face of relentless provocation in the mainstream press. Now that prognostications of ‘ethnic cleansing’ have failed to come about, will there be a mea culpa from mainland know-it-alls and their fervid allies in Assam?
Perpetuating unconscious bias through aggressive denial
What mainland liberals have done through their wild speculations and human rights posturing for Bengali Muslims is an act out of Arnab Goswami’s play: construct a dubious narrative and then substantiate it with selective samples peppered with outright lies and misconstrued facts, resulting in a dangerously caricatured view of reality. In their zeal to appear progressive, they have only been patronising to the Muslims of Assam, exposing in the process, their unconscious bias that renders “Bengali-speaking Muslims” synonymous to “illegal Bangladeshis” in their statist mainland mental map. Even in their vehement denial to the many tribal and ethnic minority communities of Assam, the right to assert their indigeneity, mainland liberals only reinforced their deep-seated prejudices about Muslims in Assam, which is the exact opposite of what NRC is trying to achieve.
While a good number of these voices pointing fingers and condemning Assam for deportations – that haven’t taken place and perhaps, will not either – belong to those of upper-caste mainland intellectuals, similar concern and consistency of politics over the large-scale deportation of “illegal” immigrants that has indeed taken place in the state of West Bengal between 1983-1998 under the Foreigners Act curiously finds no place in their self-righteous rage.
These mainland narratives are, therefore, a stark reminder of the historical oppression and negligence of the AFSPA-imposing Indian state that persistently undermined the aspirations of the indigenous populations of the region, which ultimately culminated in Nellie, the ugliest blot in Assam history. If history has taught us anything, it is that when things go south, neither the State nor mainlanders will come to our rescue.
Sanjana Pegu is a writer with CauseBecause.com