Opinion Misframing the issue

The remarks of Himanta Biswa Sarma, a minister in Assam and the BJP’s chief strategist for the Northeast, in the context of the debate around the controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, are disturbing. In Guwahati on Tuesday, Sarma said Assam needs to chose its “enemy”. “Who is our enemy, the 1-1.5 lakh people or the 55 lakh people?” he asked. The “people” Sarma referred to are the illegal migrants in Assam, though there is no official data that supports his figures. He then argued that the “1-1.5 lakh people”, presumably migrants of Hindu faith from Bangladesh, were acceptable in Assam and suggested that the BJP wanted to protect the Bengali-speaking Hindu migrants and to keep them segregated from the Bengali-speaking Muslim migrants.

Sarma clearly frames Assam’s migration issue as a communal problem. This is a terrible simplification of a complex matter that has been traced back to the colonial era when the British actively encouraged migration to the region to build cheap labour banks. The Partition, politics in the region before and after the traumatic division of the Subcontinent, the Bangladesh liberation war, economic disparities and ecological imbalances in what are essentially large transnational river basins have all contributed to mass migrations resulting in the creation of a complicated social matrix comprising numerous ethnicities, tribal loyalties and linguistic and religious identities. Much blood has been shed in the region over claims for land and resources in recent years. Though the religious divide has been an undercurrent of anti-migrant politics in Assam, the leadership of the Assam Movement always stood for a composite Assamese identity, not a communal one. Sarma, who began his political career in the Assam Movement, wants to shift the grounds of the debate now and differentiate and discriminate between migrants along religious lines.

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Migration is a politically sensitive issue in Assam and it needs to be addressed independent of the migrant’s faith. It also has an international dimension and a lasting resolution is possible only if the issue is understood in the context, and as a consequence, of the region’s political, economic and ecological history. Sarma’s attempt to reduce it to a tidy, communal problem, speaks of a deeply troubling world view.