The BJP’s alliance with the AGP makes little sense but might be their key to winning the state
On 7 September 2015, the union home ministry issued two orders that made changes to provisions in the Foreigners Order 1948 and the Passport (Entry into India) Rules 1950. These changes allowed non-Muslim migrants from Bangladesh and from Pakistan who had entered India before 31 December 2014 to stay back in the country. While this was being officially carried out, in the political domain, the ruling party gave the assurance that Hindu Bengali settlers would eventually be eligible for citizenship, and that a bill to the effect would soon be brought before the parliament. Until the emergence of the BJP in the state’s politics, the question about what constitutes a foreigner in Assam had only a linguistic distinction. Assamese nationalism had always rallied around linguistic identity with no room for religion to sneak in. But the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance government introduced a religious angle to the issue.
Today, Western Assam, where a sizeable Bengali-speaking population of the state lives, will vote in the second and final phase to elect Assam’s sixteenth assembly. Even as the Congress party refused any pre-election alliance, the BJP successfully tied up with the local Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) and others in its first serious bid to win the state. But this electoral alliance between an optimistic BJP and an off-colour AGP has raised many eyebrows in the political sphere in Assam. At the grass roots level, there is simmering dissention in both the parties against the collusion arrived at by the top leadership of each. The reason given centres on the question of citizenship status for the Bengali Hindu migrants from Bangladesh after the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. By shifting the focus from the Assamese middle class and onto the that of national identity, the parties hope to change the debate that has gripped the state for years.
On 15 August 1985, the six-year-long violent Assam Agitation, or anti-foreigners movement, spearheaded by the All Assam Students’ Union calling for the government to identify and expel illegal immigrants ended in the inking of the Assam Accord. According to the accord any immigrant who had come to Assam after 25 March 1971 would be considered a foreigner, and would be deported. Born out of the AASU and the Gana Sangram Parishad, who had led the agitation as an assertion of the “Assamese little nationalism” (a term first coined by the scholar Amalendu Guha in a debate on the nationality question in Assam in the pages of EPW in 1980), the AGP was in power for two terms during 1986-1991 and 1996-2001. But much to the chagrin of the Assamese chauvinists, it “failed to expel the Bengali foreigners” to a satisfactory extent.
The real rancour lies in the actual number of such “foreigners.” Neither the state nor the central government has any credible data for how many “infiltrators” from Bangladesh live in Assam. The easiest way of detection was language. As a result, all Bengali settlers in Assam—Hindu and Muslim—have become “suspected Bangladeshi” even in the eyes of law, not to speak of popular perception.
The induction of religion into the already volatile topic of illegal immigrants by the BJP was vehemently opposed by the Assamese nationalistic formations. To nationalistic Assamese, all Bengali migrants in the post-1971 stream, regardless of religious affiliation, are foreigners. But the BJP, backed by the RSS tactical line that India is the natural refuge for the persecuted Hindus from all over the world, had to toe the communal binary even if inconsistent with the secular constitution and citizenship provisions. With the process of preparation of the National Register of Citizens under the direct supervision of the Supreme Court still a long way from completion, the home ministry has no way of determining just how many Bengali Hindu migrants would be covered under the proposed communal citizenship award. But, interestingly enough, the 7 September notifications have significantly lessened the dimension of statelessness as only the Muslim immigrants in the post-1971 phase would now be required to be deported.
The incompatibility of the AGP-BJP alliance, therefore, lies in the dilution of the Assam Accord. While BJP has brought in a new date, 31 December 2014, by which the Hindu Bengali would find safe passage, the AGP still sticks to 25 March 1971 as the cutoff date and considers the Assam Accord as sacrosanct.
With such a fundamental difference remaining unresolved, how can the BJP and AGP form an alliance? Poll pundits would surely find this alliance questionable given the extreme existential crisis the AGP is facing today. Since 1996, the last time this regional party came to power in Janata Bhavan, the electoral prospect of the AGP has been steadily on the slide in the subsequent elections in terms of both the number of seats won and vote share.
In the 2011 Assembly elections, the AGP could manage only 10 seats with a vote share of 16.29 percent. The Party’s worst ever performance was recorded in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, in which it drew a blank with a paltry vote share of 3.8 percent. Even as the AGP celebrated thirty years of its formation last year, nothing has happened on the ground since then to suggest that this “party of the Assamese” in whom the nationalists once saw the ultimate emancipation, is no longer a force to be reckoned.
The obvious question is, then, why the BJP, fresh from its brilliant performance in the 2014 general elections followed by another splendid display of electoral success in 2015 civic polls, needs a morbid AGP to play second fiddle in the Assembly hustings? Why can’t the BJP go alone to take on the one-and-a-half-decade of anti-incumbency of Congress and Tarun Gogoi?
The answer lies not in electoral, but ideological support. A robust BJP does not perhaps require the seats of the AGP to add to its kitty in the sixteenth Assembly that much. But what it urgently needs at the moment is a loud and clear message to the Assamese middle class that BJP is very much with the chauvinistic core of Assam. The AGP, its gloomy electoral prospect notwithstanding, is still the vanguard of Assamese sentiment and aspiration. The BJP surely cannot undermine this critical electoral factor, hence the BJP-AGP tie-up.
Given the win-loss set up in the complex demography of Assam, a political party has to take a clear call on all controversial issues. In the instant case of uncertain fate of the Bengali settlers in Assam, the BJP had two mutually exclusive options.
One was to carry forward the twin notifications of 7 September from the union home ministry, allowing the stay of the Hindu Bengali migrants in India to its legislative conclusion. In this case, the party had to incur the wrath of the Assamese middle class in upper Assam, traditionally a Congress bastion, where the BJP had done exceedingly well in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls on its way to bag seven seats in the Brahmaputra Valley. The second was to forget the Bengali citizenship issue and get along with Assamese nationalism, which has traditionally charted the political course in Assam.
With the clinching of the electoral alliance with the AGP, Amit Shah and the BJP chief ministerial candidate, Sarbananda Sanowal, have obviously opted for the second alternative. As the Nobel laureate in Economics, Paul A Samuelson, once said “choice reveals preference,” the BJP has without any dithering preferred the Assamese middle class over the Hindu Bengali vote bank.
The BJP official statement immediately after the formal announcement of the alliance that the assembly election in Assam would be a contest between ‘all indigenous people’ led by it on one side and the Congress and the AIUDF on the other decisively draws the battle line. It’s the “us” versus the “other,” and the Bengali issue cannot just be accommodated in the conundrum. The reaction from the union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad at a press conference on 3 March in New Delhi that the proposed citizenship status to the Bengali settlers “is not an issue now” thereby springs no big surprise.
Most importantly, this emerging scenario is readily acceptable to the Congress as well. When the BJP brought in a religious angle to the citizenship issue, the Congress was already in a fix. It was becoming increasingly difficult a proposition for them to take a stand on the home ministry notifications. While for the BJP it’s very easy to take the Hindu side, the Congress, badly seeking the support of both Hindu and Muslim settlers, just cannot take a clear call either way without risking half of its support base.
With both Congress and BJP happily poised during this Assembly election, the citizenship question clearly is on nobody’s agenda.