BJP Assam Mandate Will Be Short-Lived If It Does Not Deliver On Identity Issues

The BJP alliance’s thumping win in Assam, where it won 86 of the 126 seats at stake, is cause for sobriety, not over-optimism. Chest-thumping for a day may be excusable, but the party needs to quickly put its celebrations behind and think through what it is expected to deliver and how it will go about doing it.

A few realities need to be emphasised.

One, the BJP-AGP-BPF victory was possible due to the split in the 35 percent Muslim between Congress and Badruddin Ajmal’s AIUDF. A simple adding up of popular votes tells us this: the BJP front won 41.5 percent of the votes cast; the Congress and AIUDF got 44 percent between them. If the losers had banded together, the outcome could have been quite different. The next time it clearly won’t be the same.

Two, the BJP has been given a big mandate by those who feel threatened by demographic change – which would include the Assamese in general, and Hindus. While the first group includes both Assamese Hindus and Muslims, the latter group includes local Assamese, pre-partition Bengali Hindus settled in Assam, and illegal Hindu immigrants from Bangladesh. The BJP’s victory has been built by blurring the distinction between Assamese fears over identity, and Hindu fears about Muslim assertiveness, with the demographic tilt being strengthened by high birth rates and illegal Bangladeshi migration.

If the BJP is to hold on to its vote base, it will have to deliver on both development and Assamese/Hindu identity issues. Visibility in the latter is vital for the BJP to survive as the natural party of government in Assam. If it does not, there is no reason why the Assamese should not vote for the Congress.

Put simply, the BJP’s mandate is to do something about illegal migration. What it chooses to do has to be fair to immigrants, legal and yet reassuring to the Assamese. It is a difficult balance to pull off, but re-election in 2021 depends on solving this difficult equation.

The BJP does not have to reinvent the wheel to do this, for some infrastructure already exists for starting the process of detecting illegal migrants. 1971 is the cutoff point for deciding who is or is not a legal resident of Assam. But to do the job properly, another law may be needed.

The centre already has the National Citizen’s Register (NCR) going, and anyone who does not find his way into this register is theoretically not a citizen of India. Any Assam resident born in the state upto 1971, or who can trace an ancestor in electoral rolls between 1952 and 1971, is to be deemed an Indian citizen. The state government has created many NRC centres to help people find their ancestors.

While “secular” parties would like to pretend that illegal immigration is insignificant, the changes in demography between 2001 and 2011 indicate otherwise. During the decade, Assam’s Muslim population rose by 3.3 percent, from 30.9 percent to 34.2 percent, when the national Muslim population grew by 0.8 percent, from 13.6 percent to 14.2 percent.

As The Indian Express noted in a report last year, “since 1985…(foreigner detection) tribunals have declared over 38,000 persons in Assam as illegal migrants. Most of these 38,000 have gone missing, are absconding for fear of being caught, have been detained in camps, or been pushed back across the border. Over one lakh (cases) are pending in the Tribunals, and a sizeable number are likely to be declared foreigners. Nearly 1.5 lakh names in Assam’s electoral rolls carry the prefix “D” — for “Doubtful” citizenship status — which was inserted by the Election Commission of India.”

But even this will clearly be the tip of the iceberg, as the huge demographic change between 2001 and 2011 shows.

So what can the BJP do?

First, it needs to make the NRC process more rigorous and complete it within a time-bound manner.

Second, it needs be fair and compassionate to the illegal migrants too. It needs to abandon all fantasies of deporting too many illegals for the simple reason that the number may run into millions, and many of them have already migrated to states outside Assam. The more sensible thing to do is to legislate a law that will allow the government to strike off the names of illegals from electoral rolls for 10 years, while at the same time protecting their basic rights and allowing them to continue living here and doing the work they already do. This may need supplementary laws allowing for the issuance of work permits, including an agreement with Bangladesh. A treaty like the one we have with Nepal may be doable. The process of making illegals into citizens can start after they are first declared illegals and excluded from voting lists for 10 years. That is the penalty they pay for illegal entry.

Third, a distinction has to be made between pure economic migrants and those who came here seeking asylum from Islamist coercion and jihadi attacks in Bangladesh. The asylum-seekers will largely be non-Muslim (though there could be Muslims too, given the rise in recent attacks on bloggers and secular writers), their right to citizenship will have to be prioritised over migrants merely coming here for a better life. The secular parties failed to make this distinction even though steady ethnic cleansing has happened in Bangladesh all through the post-partition years. From 21 percent, Hindus in Bangladesh are now down to 8 percent or thereabouts. This massive ethnic cleansing has gone unmentioned in the English language media in India and abroad.

Fourth, a border fence would be useful, but this will merely make illegal crossing more difficult. Those who want to come can still do so through any neighbouring state as well. Even in the difficult terrain of the Indo-Pakistan border in Jammu & Kashmir, jihadis manage to infiltrate successfully. Economic refugees won’t court as much risk, but then the India-Bangladesh border is simply too porous. So fences can be built, but the real thing has to be about managing the illegal flows sensibly. Regulation is better than trying to forcibly defy demography.

If illegal immigration is stemmed, and illegal voters are deleted from the electoral list through legal means, the Assamese fears should abate.

The BJP cannot assume that it can win the next time merely by doing nothing.