GUWAHATI: With an eye on next year’s Assembly elections in the state, Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi has advocated that people of various religions who migrated to Assam from Bangladesh after the partition of India should be given Indian citizenship. “Faced with an adverse situation in the aftermath of the partition of India, a lot of people, including Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists, migrated to Assam. They all should be given Indian citizenship,” Gogoi said recently.
He also wants Indian citizenship to be given to another 1.5 lakh people identified as “doubtful” or “disputed voters” by various tribunals. His assertions came amid demands by groups and organisations to deport illegal migrants.
Gogoi is trying to keep Bengali Hindus and Bengali Muslims in good humour. He is worried about the phenomenal rise of the BJP and the All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF) at the expense of his party, the Congress, and the regional Asom Gana Parishad (AGP). The AGP, which ruled the state twice, is in a shambles now.
The Congress under Gogoi has been in power for the last 15 years in Assam. Since 2001, the party did not taste defeat until last year’s parliamentary elections in which the BJP grabbed seven of the 14 seats by whipping up an anti-Bangladeshi sentiment. The Congress and the AIUDF won three seats apiece. The Congress suffered subsequently in the civic elections and drew a blank in the Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC) elections.
In more than one-third of Assam’s 126 Assembly constituencies, Bengali Hindus and Bengali Muslims are the virtual kingmakers. For long, they have been the vote banks of the Congress until switching loyalties to the BJP and the AIUDF.
There is no ambiguity in the BJP’s stand on illegal migrants. The party views Bengali Hindus with roots in Bangladesh as refugees. The BJP’s logic is that their migration was in the face of religious persecution and torture in the neighbouring country and as such, they should be accorded the status of refugees. This has gone down well for the BJP with a large majority of Hindu Bengalis embracing the saffron party with all earnest in recent years.
“The BJP is committed to give refugee status to Bengali Hindus, Buddhists and Christians who migrated from Bangladesh. As the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi made a commitment ahead of the elections and his government will fulfill it,” Mishan Ranjan Das, a BJP leader in Assam, told The Sunday Standard.
Dubbed as the protector of Bangladeshis, the AIUDF bettered its results in every election in recent years by polarizing the votes of Bengali Muslims. Faced with the threat of citizenship crisis, Bengali Muslims view the AIUDF as their messiah. The party was very vocal during the xenophobic and rebels-orchestrated attacks on the community in the state in 2012 and 2014.
Even now when a process is on to update the National Register of Citizens, AIUDF chief and Lok Sabha member Maulana Badruddin Ajmal threatened to move the Supreme Court, alleging that the state government had hatched a conspiracy to brand 40 lakh Muslims as Bangladeshis. The criticism that followed notwithstanding, the AIUDF surely scored some brownie points by being able to touch the hearts of those who matter the most for the party.
Gogoi knows it well that he cannot win elections without the support of Bengali Hindus and Bengali Muslims and wants to regain their lost confidence in the Congress.
“We wonder if Gogoi is the chief minister of Bangladesh. His statement that Bangladeshis should be given Indian citizenship is irresponsible and uncalled for. This has proven yet again that the Congress doesn’t have any existence in Assam without the support of the Bangladeshis,” says AGP president Atul Bora.
BJP calls Gogoi a traitor. “It is just for the sake of holding on to power that the chief minister has taken sides with illegal migrants. BJP will thwart his attempts,” says a BJP spokesperson.