Assam, the impossible state, and NRC

A recent tweet from Taslima Nasreen, an exiled Bangladeshi writer now living in India, took one by surprise. She writes that India has enough Muslims of its own. Its people do not need more from Bangladesh, only the politicians do. One feels tempted to ask her, “Dear lady, what pray gives you the right to speak on behalf of all Indians?” And have you totally forgotten the days when threatened and chased by the fundamentalists, you had requested for support from world writers’ fora and political asylum?

Both were granted. You have lived for long years in the West thereafter and are now in India, so there is no reason to believe that you don’t know the trauma of being a refugee well. But, what do you know about the complex and long history of ethnic conflicts and various migrant groups and their gradual integration in Assam, that the great Moghuls had also labelled as Ghair Mumkin (impossible to rule)?

What is your understanding of the original Assam Accord of 1985? Why did all subsequent governments (including more than one in which the BJP too was a major force) skirt it, adroitly aware of the explosive repurcussions of looking into ethnicity issues in the state? For this is where, way back in Dwapar Yuga, the Shaivite ruler Banasur’s daughter, eloping with the Vaishnavas’ Lord Krishna’s grandson, had triggered off a major war between the gods!

Do you understand the proposed amendments to the 1985 Accord that suddenly surfaced in 2016 and that several states protested against them, vehemently saying they defy the spirit of our Constitution? Do you know seven decades ago, one of India’s most prescient leaders and among the framers of our Constitution, Baba Saheb Ambedkar had said that the Indian Constitution shall remain a dual polity with a single citizenship category for the whole of India: Indian citizenship.

It is the sad fate of this nation that in July 2016, our politicians set a new stage, proposed amendments that redefined the earlier sane criteria for acquiring citizenship, basing it anew on birth, descent, registration and naturalisation. Thus, they created a divisive principle of asymmetrical evaluation of citizens’ status that rules that India’s communities are unequal and some shall be deemed more unequal than others.

And a speedy national consensus to this nonsensical idea is being sought on grounds of increasing threats to our national security and to the livelihoods of the local population from people of Bangladeshi origin. The Supreme Court has clearly stated that the Draft NRC can not and shall not be the basis for action by any authority. However 40.07 lakh applications received under the NRC update process, have either been rejected or put on hold.

Large sums of money have been spent over five years in the verification process, and several state level meetings between Bangladesh and India have taken place but this issue was not raised formally. So it is clear that an accurate NRC is yet to be produced and will take time.

When is a crisis reached? When questions arise that cannot be answered. When the citizens are expected to commit themselves to a questionable and far from legally validated list. But many of the ruling party members continue to spread fear and suspicion through fake news and give encouragement to lynch mobs while those at the top look away.

Terror is barren. It creates nothing except ‘yes’ men and women everywhere - from the bureaucracy to board rooms, from the market to the media. When a population is weakened and exhausted by battling uncertainty and bewilderment all the time, words are deprived of their native meanings and propaganda replaces debate. Watching party spokespersons screaming at each other on a by-now-totally-defanged TV debate on Assam, one was reminded of a joke in which the great media manipulator Franjo Tudjman says to Hitler, “I wish I had your army, I would have defeated the Serbs long ago,” and Hitler says “If only I had your media, the Germans still would not know they have lost the war.”