As stateless people are in a limbo, the party should look at stopping future border influx than fixing the past
If the fiasco over the National Register for Citizens (NRC) has proved anything, it is that the “one agenda” umbrella simply doesn’t work in a country as vast and diverse as India. Clearly, the BJP, which has premised its alternative credo on purification of Indic people and revision of history, has found that while it may toy around with quick fixes in the economy, it is difficult to pull out threads from a tightly woven matrix of social plurality. As it has turned out, the final NRC list for Assam, which was meant to segregate those born of the soil from settlers who came into the State after 1971, has found 19 lakh citizenship claims illegal compared to the 40 lakh-odd initially projected. And while the party thought most would be of Muslim migrants from Bangladesh, turns out a huge number of those left out are Bengali-speaking Hindus, a core constituency that is powering the BJP’s campaign in eastern India and is helping it grow roots in Assam, Tripura and now Bengal. The less said about members of the same family being delegitimised overnight beside the abandonment of bonafide citizens — some of whom are national awardees, legacy makers, soldiers — the better. This has forced the BJP into an extremely uncomfortable situation in the State, where its legislators have drawn votes not just on religious consolidation but on multi-polarity as well. So when the BJP’s chief executor in the Northeast, Himanta Biswa Sarma, claims that the NRC software was bugged and that forgery cartels have “helped” Muslims, he forgets that the entire exercise was conducted under the supervision of the BJP governments in Assam and in New Delhi and that unfavourable numbers make him look like crying over spilt milk. Even he has admitted that after appeals and inquiries, the total number of illegal migrants could whittle down to just four or six lakh, something that rights activists have been claiming for a long time, arguing that most Muslim intruders were beaten back anyway before 1971. Considering the lack of political dividend, the cost of this huge churning of people’s lives will have implications in the State’s politics. Besides, with the government not declaring those unlisted as “stateless”, allowing them rights and entitlements in the interim and assuring its strategic partner Bangladesh that it would not allow a reverse flow, one wonders what was the need of unsettling and uprooting people’s lives, making them look like enemies of the State through no fault of theirs. The extended timeline for review by the foreigners’ tribunal and courts means NRC-rejects have to have unlimited resources for legal fees and patience to re-verify their papers. If existing anxieties aren’t enough, this humanitarian crisis could trigger a full-fledged hatred on an issue that everybody could have done without.
What the BJP badly miscalculated was that the Assamese demand for restoring the State’s demographic pattern is more sub-cultural than religious, one which has linked the supremacy of Ahom identity to the exclusion of others. Historically, Bengalis have suffered from this identity politics, simply because they controlled the economic resources of the region by virtue of the colonial legacy of the British raj. So while the party is planning to amend the citizenship law to coopt Hindus returning from foreign countries, Assam will not welcome that influx either. The BJP has clearly failed to weaponise local pride as national pride and identity. Besides, it must realise that migration has changed geopolitics everywhere and here we are talking of 50 years of settler families, who, for whatever wrong reason of votebank politics by various parties, have not only been naturalised but have established valid credentials and permeated the system. Even if one were to go by its MP Manoj Tiwari’s suggestion that an NRC should be done in Delhi, can one imagine the consequences in a city whose DNA lies in all kinds of migrants? What the BJP should have done is concentrate on stopping illegal immigration here on and codify new border protocols on this. Besides, it should focus on what sold in 2014, its idea of development. Economic indices in the State are still sputtering and the intensity of floods in times of climate change has meant that agriculture has become a shifting profession, what with fertile tracts becoming unusable, forcing farmers to migrate or seek alternative income sources and turn river refugees. Now if we only remembered Albert Einstein’s words, “We can’t solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
