The wage war

ON April 24, 2005, members of a small club in Dibrugarh called Chiring-chapori Yuva Mancha Chiring-chapori is an area in the Upper Assam to...

ON April 24, 2005, members of a small club in Dibrugarh called Chiring-chapori Yuva Mancha Chiring-chapori is an area in the Upper Assam town distributed pamphlets to residents, urging them not to employ Bangladeshi migrants. But no one imagined it would take on a larger dimension. Bangladeshi migrants usually work at much lower wages than other workers.

But soon the BJP, RSS and even the district units of the All Assam Students Union AASU picked up the news and turned it into a campaign.

8216;8216;It is a good move. We have been saying this since 1979 when a democratic movement was first launched to focus on the dangers of infiltration. You can8217;t stop people from refusing employment to any particular labourer or domestic hand,8217;8217; says AASU advisor Samujjal Bhattacharyya.

In fact, picking up from where the Dibrugarh club left, district units of the AASU in Tinsukia, Sivasagar, Golaghat and Jorhat even issued statements asking Bangladeshis who came after 1971 to leave India voluntarily. The result: over 5,000 people who did not belong to these districts have moved out.

For chief minister Tarun Gogoi this exodus from the Upper Assam districts comes at a time when his government has just completed four years in office. 8216;8216;People who have fled from the Upper Assam region are not Bangladeshis. They are all Indian citizens,8217;8217; Gogoi said. But AASU, Asom Gana Parishad AGP and BJP said they were not so sure.

Bangladeshi migrants have always been the Congress vote bank. Meanwhile, the BJP is busy sending out SMSs, asking people to follow the Dibrugarh way of pushing out migrants.
The AGP is silent

The Upper Assam districts incidentally have fewer Bangladeshi migrants than other districts. There are several reasons behind this. First, these districts are not contiguous to Bangladesh. Second, there are very few pre-Independence East Bengali or pre-Bangladesh East Pakistani migrants in these districts. Third, there are less fallow land because of the presence of tea plantations.

THE issue of migrants has always been coloured by politics. Traditionally, migrants from Bangladesh have been the Congress vote bank. Then there is the BJP which is at present busy sending out SMSs to people, asking them to follow the Dibrugarh way of pushing out migrants.

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Meanwhile, with assembly elections just a year away, the AGP has realised that silence is the best policy.

8216;8216;Whether it8217;s the Congress, BJP or AGP, every party wants to keep the issue alive for petty electoral gains. No party is concerned about India8217;s security concerns in the Northeast and the silent demographic invasion,8217;8217; says Sankar Prasad Roy, president of AASU.

Assam8217;s migrant population issue is different from other parts of the country. The Illegal Migrants Determination by Tribunals Act of 1983 allows all those who came to Assam upto March 25, 1971, to remain and acquire Indian citizenship. The Assam Accord of 1985 too endorses the same. The AASU, AGP and BJP have been demanding a repeal of the IMDT Act.

Meanwhile, the migrants who fled from Upper Assam have all gathered in the Lower Assam districts including Guwahati. 8216;8216;These are flood-affected poor people from Goalpara and Dhubri who had gone to Upper Assam looking for work,8217;8217; says United Minorities Front UMF president Hafiz Rashid Ahmed Choudhury.

The debate over identities in Assam has become shriller than ever before.