Political reshuffle

Wracked with internal turmoil following disastrous NRC rollout, Assam’s regional parties are shifting their rhetoric away from ‘Bangladeshi aliens’ to preservation of Assamiya culture

- ASHIS BISWAS

Has regionalism reached its limit in Assam? Four explosions on Republic day 2020 after a prolonged spell of relative peace and stability certainly breathed new life into the question in Assam’s context. The secessionist wing of the ULFA, which operates from abroad, has claimed responsibility. But even without the ULFA’s explosive intervention, fresh questions had arisen about the relevance of regional parties like the AGP after the recent NRC updating exercise.

The NRC’s objective was to ascertain accurately the number of illegal Bangladeshis staying in Assam, generally estimated at around 5 million out of a 3.2 crore state population. Post-NRC, the final figure of the ‘undesirables’ according to unconfirmed reports, may not exceed over 200,000 or so, once the appeals are disposed of. This end result is much too anti-climactic to be accepted by Assam-based political parties, fed liberally on visions of “lakhs of termites (read Bangladeshi aliens) to be herded in 16 special high-security detention centres” as the much-hyped NRC exercise got underway.

Worse, the ill-conducted NRC initiative, while not settling the critically important question about Assam’s future, also turned out to be extremely negative for India’s image abroad. India’s proud projection of itself as the biggest secular democratic country in South Asia and the world’s largest functioning democracy, took a severe mauling that will take much time to heal. Influential institutions in the EU and the US severely reprimanded the methods of NRC officials in dealing with the poorest of non-Assamiya Hindu and Muslim citizens. Clearly, such people could never have been expected to provide the sort of documentation of their citizenship the NRC had asked from them.