People no country wants

Assam is sitting on a volcano of suffering and conflict. On test is the mettle of India’s democracy.

Govt must order suo motu verification of ‘illegal migrants’: Assam students body on NRC — It is not often remembered that not just Punjab and Bengal, but also Assam, was partitioned in 1947, when after a referendum, Sylhet district was transferred from Assam to Pakistan.

When the sun went down on 2018, the doors closed for one million residents of Assam who were unable to file their claims to prove that they are Indian citizens. The claims of the three million who were left out of the National Register of Citizens(NRC) will now be examined by the Foreigners’ Tribunals.

Assam, meanwhile, continues to battle the throes of a uncertain tumult. Through a complex and tortuous process with no parallels in any other part of the country — and few if any in the world — millions of Assamese residents were called upon to produce documents that prove that they are Indian citizens.

It is not often remembered that not just Punjab and Bengal, but also Assam, was partitioned in 1947, when after a referendum, Sylhet district was transferred from Assam to Pakistan. Migration from Sylhet and other parts of Bengal to Assam had continued until then for two centuries, fuelled by land-hunger and the attraction of creating farm-lands in the vast virgin forest tracts and river islands, and encouraged by the state. The cataclysms of Partition and the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971 spurred fresh migrations into Assam.

From the late 1970s, a sporadically violent movement against “foreigners”, by people who saw themselves as “original inhabitants”, rocked the state. The current updating of the NRC is in fulfilment of the agreement reached by the agitators with the Union government, that persons who migrated after 1971 would be identified and deported.