When the final draft of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) was released, a situation of gloom and despair overshadowed the lives of four million people in Assam who didn’t make to the list and are now vulnerable to become stateless and homeless. These four million people are overnight turned into “no-one” or “aliens” and despite the assurance by Home Minister Rajnath Singh that no one, who didn’t make to the list, will be treated inhumanely or detained, there are very good chances, especially as hinted by Amit Shah’s speech on the problem of “Bangladeshi infiltrators” and the West Bengal BJP’s rhetoric on “kicking out Bangladeshis” from West Bengal once voted to power, that violence against the vulnerable people is inevitable and so is their persecution.
Four million people, most of them are Bengalis, Hindus and Muslims alike, along with Biharis, Nepalis and other “outsiders”, according to the common Axomiya parlance, have no idea what the future holds for them. This is one of the most egregious situations in which a large number of non-Axomiya people of Assam are going to face systematic extinction from the state so that the ruling classes and their lapdogs, the Hindutva fascist RSS and BJP, can sweep the 2019 Lok Sabha election riding on jingoism and xenophobia, not only in Assam but throughout the country.
Since a long time, many common Axomiya people, including the waning left-wing forces in the state, recognised the utmost inhuman and absolutely anti-people NRC list and the Foreigner Tribunals, the dreaded courts that could strike off anyone's name from the citizen’s list, as Constitutional bodies; however, in reality, all of these bodies have their roots in the infamous Assam Accord, 1985, signed between the Rajiv Gandhi-led Congress Government at the centre and the militant Axomiya chauvinists, who have waged a bloody campaign against poor and hapless people of Bengali origin living in different parts of Assam as part of the ruling class’ conspiracy to keep the exploited people of Assam divided in narrow fragmentations.
A gory genocide like Nellie massacre of 18 February 1983, committed jointly by the RSS and the Congress goons, with the help of Axomiya and tribal lumpens on their payroll, happens to be the foundation of the Assam Accord. The militant chauvinist AASU, the terrorist ULFA and the parliamentary AGP, which is now a stooge of the BJP in the very state where Prafulla Mahanta once helped the saffron outfit entrench deep inside, all these organisations have played a crucial role in the Nellie massacre, the largest in India since 1947, in which 3,000 Bengali Muslims, men, women and children were murdered by a Hindutva-incensed and xenophobic mob. When such a genocide happens to be the foundation of an accord and both parties have the blood of the innocents on their sleeves, then such accords can’t have any legitimacy and no one sensible can advocate on behalf of those who committed such a heinous crime against humanity.
When the narrative of ousting “foreigners” from Assam is raised then the question rises that who gave the AASU or the other outfits, including the RSS and the Congress, to determine that 24 March 1971 should be the cut-off date for determining the origin of a person and their citizenship? Who gave the militant Axomiya chauvinist organisations, including the ULFA, an exclusive right to attack the minority Bengalis in Assam for just living in the state? Why did the subsequent governments at the centre and the state not do anything substantial to protect the rights of the vulnerable minorities, the Biharis, the Nepalis, the Bengali Hindus and Muslims? Why apart from vote bank politics no party have ever done anything from which all communities and people living in Assam could economically benefit? Why all governments and all political parties kept using the NRC as a wildcard to win elections? Why no governments or parties fought to stop Indian colonisation of Assam and plunder of Axomiya resources by the Indian ruling classes?
The reason that the NRC and the Assam Accord of 1985, a reactionary treaty itself, were given so much importance by the Indian Government is that Axomiya chauvinism and xenophobia over a purported Bengali aggression on Assam are its tools to keep the Axomiya people and different aboriginal tribes away from the Bengali people to ensure that at the grassroots, these communities do not intermingle, mix and unite against their common enemies, the Hindi-speaking, upper--caste vegetarian Hindu comprador capitalists from North and West India who have monopolised their absolute control over the resources and labour of Assam through millions of threads using which they manage the colonisation of Assam.
Ever since the British colonial rulers left Assam and the Indian ruling classes colonised Assam, all top administrative posts and all major businesses of the state were usurped by the Hindi, Gujarati and Marwari-speaking upper-caste elites. They replaced the white-skinned sahib or his former lieutenant, the Bengali Bhadralok (upper-caste, suave, British puppet elites and upper-middle class Hindus from Bengal) who ruled Assam with an iron fist during the colonial period and kept exploiting the labour and resources. For the new rulers, who indeed had their own Bengali and Axomiya collaborators, it was imperative to distract the Axomiya people from the exploitation of the majority of workers, peasants and toiled people of Assam by the new rulers. Also, during the late 1940s, there was also a compulsion to stop the communists from penetrating deeper inside Assam to carry out agitprop. This dual reasons drove the new rulers to endorse a policy of jingoism and communal hatred to spread in Assam targeting the Bengali people, especially the refugees from then East Pakistan who came to live in Lower Assam.
Throughout the history of the post-colonial India, Assam experienced the goriest atrocities against the Bengali community, which were executed by a section of the xenophobic and jingoistic Axomiya extremists, whom both the Congress and its opponents like the Sangh Parivar used as puppets to achieve their own political goals. Violence-ridden Assam helped to spread the anti-Bengali sentiments to neighbouring Tripura and Meghalaya, where the Bengalis were also targeted by chauvinist locals. Though there is no real data on the migration of so-called Bangladeshi infiltrators into Assam, however, there are records of more than 50,000 Bengalis fleeing to West Bengal during the infamous “Bongal Kheda” campaign against the community in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. All Bengalis are treated as foreigners and even before the NRC list appeared, the Bengali refugees, especially the Bengali Muslims, faced continuous discrimination for their identity in Assam and in human development index, these people fared worse than that of people of neighbouring Bangladesh.
Today, all political camps are celebrating the exclusion of four million people from the NRC. Though the NRC was between the militant Axomiya chauvinists and the Congress-led government at the centre, political parties of all spectrums and hues, including most of the parliamentary “left” forces have been supporting it, citing a “popular demand” for NRC in Assam, which was fanned by an incessant wave of xenophobic propaganda and the efforts of the ruling classes to establish the hegemony of Hindi language, North Indian vegetarian Hindu culture and Hindutva ideology of bigotry in Assam. This xenophobia has actually driven the politically unconscious people, affected by jingoism, to believe that the socio-economic problems of Assam, their own poverty and deprivation from the ownership of economic resources are caused by “infiltration” of “foreigners” into their land, especially the Bengali “intruders”, whom the vulnerable and politically backward Axomiyas are taught to hate.
Socio-economically Assam lags behind many states in India. According to the Socio-Economic Caste Survey, only 7.59 per cent of the population have government jobs and 0.88 per cent in the public sector, while only 3.80 per cent have private jobs in the state. Why subsequent governments failed to create employment opportunities for even the Axomiya people, forget the aboriginal people, the Bodos, the tribals of tea gardens and the Bengali community? It was found 76.89 per cent have an income below Rs 5,000 and by 2021 even if this amount reaches Rs 9,000, then too, it will be too low for families, even with three members, to survive with this paltry amount amidst skyrocketing inflation and save some for rainy days. With 31.64 per cent of landless peasants, Assam is, of course, a state where the government could throw the popular demand for land reform to the back burner and instead have the “outsider vs insider” narrative as the focal theme of governance.
An Axomiya militant chauvinist celebrates the exclusion of four million people from the NRC final draft as it means ouster of the “foreigner” from the state, the Hindutva fascist celebrates because for him the persecution and humiliation of a Muslim is more orgasmic than anything else, nothing feeds his bigotry better than the wailing of Muslims oppressed by an overtly saffronised state machine; the Bengali Hindu of West Bengal is happy because more than Bengali, he’s taught to be Indian, he’s taught to swear allegiance to the Hindi-speaking, vegetarian and Hindutva bigotry mongering ruling classes of North and West India with whom he has no socio-cultural ties and hate fellow Bengalis of another religion because they are taught to be his enemies. There’s happiness among many political forces that are keen to cash-on the agony of these four million people and increase their political weight in the state. So, basically, the NRC is feeding everyone’s political aspiration except those who are poor.
While one may belong to any of the above-described categories, celebrating the plight of the hapless four million people, they may not be aware of the arithmetics behind this NRC drama in Assam and this sudden attack against four million people. NRC has given a time frame to the four million, whose names didn’t feature in the final draft list, to reappear before its local offices and resubmit their citizenship and ancestral records to prove that they or their ancestors came to Assam before midnight of 24 March 1971. Due to this process, it’s possible that nearly 2.5 million people, mostly the Hindu Bengalis, Nepalis and Biharis make their way to the final list, while 1.5 million people, mostly Muslims and mostly poor, may not make it to the list.
So what’s going to happen to these 1.5 million people? Will they be detained forever for being “illegal” and living in India? Can people whose parents or grandparents migrated after 24 March 1971 and were born in India be counted as guilty of a crime that they didn’t have any idea about? When the BJP and its hardcore Hindutva fanatic supporters are calling for ending their citizenship and either throw them out of India or imprison them, when the Axomiya militant chauvinist organisations are keen to carry out massacres, then what steps would the governments at state and union level take regarding the scaled down number of “illegal” residents? Will they become stateless people with a permanent tag around their neck making them susceptible to attacks by jingoistic mobs? Will these people be locked up for the rest of their lives in the detention centres built with public money? Or, whether these people will be deported to Bangladesh?
There is no treaty between Bangladesh and India over the deportation of illegal immigrants and India has recently assured Bangladesh that it will not try to push the so-called “illegal immigrants” into the latter’s territory. After this assurance, there’s absolutely no chance that the majority of these people who have been living in Assam for decades can be deported back and thus there remain two possibilities open for the governments at the centre and at the state.
Firstly, some of these 1.5 million people will be sent to the detention centres, which are nothing but mini concentration camps carved out in the present day overpopulated prisons. The Indian state is not generous to feed a large number of detained people, who will be separated from their families and won’t have citizenship rights unlike those who are imprisoned in the prisons, hence, there is a good chance that their labour will be exploited and usurped by the state. Secondly, a majority of these disenfranchised people, who will be actually stateless and rightless, will be left to bear the brunt of the anger of Axomiya militant chauvinism and the Hindutva fascists, who would take on turns to attack and force them into an exodus to other parts of the country. As stateless and rightless people, their labour will be available for sale at a lower or rather, a throw-away price, which will immensely benefit the Ambanis, Adanis and big corporations, who will be able to exploit their labour and fill their coffer with more blood money.
Many people, including the West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, are predicting a large-scale civil war in Assam and West Bengal, however, as such catastrophes will be non-profitable for the big corporations, foreign and domestic, hence, the RSS or its affiliates will refrain from sparking flames of large-scale genocides, rather, they will try to create a lot of small and medium-scale riots throughout West Bengal and Assam, where few hundred Muslims will be butchered by them, along with some Hindus, so that the pre-poll society can be polarised by 2021.
There will be low-intensity communal attacks and violence all over India later on, which would be fuelled by a xenophobia against “Bangladeshi infiltrators”. This electoral pitch on “Bangladeshi infiltrators” in other states will target only the Bengali-speaking Muslims, who will be seriously affected socio-economically as a large number of these people travel to states like Kerala, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Punjab, Delhi, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan for work. The BJP’s constant propaganda and the RSS’ provocation will instigate the local Hindus to attack them out of xenophobia. Many of them may lose their jobs and can be hounded by the state to appease the Hindutva fascist thugs.
Subjugated and cornered, the Bengali Muslims, including the educated middle-class, will be forced to sell their labour for cheap or move to their home states where they may be again facing NRC-type draconian practice and with the clout that the BJP has on the administration, a lot of Muslims will face difficulty even living in their own home state, West Bengal.
When the BJP is organising rallies against the Bengalis in the heart of Kolkata by flouting the photos of their non-Bengali leaders and their non-Bengali leaders, armed with the support of a large section of politically backward Bengali Hindus who are clinging to the BJP hoping that it will rescue them from Mamata Banerjee’s tyrannical rule, are audaciously threatening Bengali Muslims with dire consequences in their own state, then the space for Bengali Muslims is already shrinking. In Assam, they have started their exercise 35 years ago with Nellie massacre and from there the campaign to create a huge reserve army of stateless labour open to extreme exploitation started and now the ruling classes are visibly happy to ultimately locate the source of cheap labour in the country, who wouldn’t even have basic citizenship rights and thus can’t even ask for anything that those with citizenship rights can at least demand.
To save these vulnerable poor people from facing violence and exploitation it’s important that the base of the problem, i.e. the inhuman and anti-people NRC listing and its foundation, the Assam Accord, are discarded by the majority of the people, i.e. the poor people of Assam. This can only happen when these poor people can be politically weaned away from the Axomiya militant chauvinists who work as the bootlickers of the Indian ruling classes and their Hindutva empire. To defeat these lackeys of New Delhi who are actually pitting one section of the population against another to gain political scores, it’s necessary to expose their deep economic and political ties with the Indian colonisers, whom these forces are not calling foreigners unlike the poor Bengali Muslims, who will bear the brunt of the forthcoming xenophobic attacks. Thus, only the revolutionary communists, who understand the intricacies of the Assam and its politics, can take up the arduous task of uniting the majority of the people against a common enemy.
It’s imperative for those in the revolutionary communist ranks to understand that the principal contradiction in Assam is not between indigenous people and foreigners, as it’s portrayed. This contradiction is actually an artificial one that the Hindi-speaking, upper-caste, vegetarian, North and West Indian comprador capitalists, bureaucrats and their lackeys have erected in Assam by vilifying the vulnerable Bengali community as the enemy of the indigenous people. It will be politically wrong to side with the exploiters or to justify the NRC because they are tools of the ruling class to drive a wedge between the people by fanning chauvinism. The communists must oppose the NRC and the Assam Accord by stating clearly that the poor Axomiya and the poor Bengali people share common enemies, who are also enemies of other aboriginal people. The enemies are the comprador capitalists, the feudal landlords, the rural usurers, the foreign corporations and their lackey bureaucracy manned by those who have no connection with Assam or its people but are working towards consolidating Indian colonisation of Assam.
The communists must not hesitate to clearly declare that the Assam Accord was a treaty between two criminal gangs, who shared an interest in plundering the resources and human labour of Assam. If there was an iota of sincerity among any of these two parties over the fate of the people of Assam, then they would not have allowed the incessant plundering of the state’s mineral resources, oil reserve, tea plantation, etc. by the foreign and domestic corporations; they would not have allowed unemployment to persist in the state and would have at least provided employment opportunity to all Axomiya and aboriginal people. Rather the same government and the same politicians of the chauvinist camp are now busy brokering power-sharing deals, bargaining ministerial berths and amending Indian Constitution to allow citizenship on the basis of religion to selected groups.
No communist can be a supporter of NRC just because the people have spontaneously supported it. Tailing spontaneous movements and popular demands without analysing the fact that which class is benefitting from them is negating the basic tenets of Marxism-Leninism. It’s very crucial for communists to judge that whether their words and actions are in tandem with the interests of the working class, whether their deeds will help the peasantry and whether their standpoint will be beneficial in forging the unity of the working people from all religions, regions, nations, creed and races. If not, even by an iota, then they should immediately do retrospection and course correction. The parliamentary left and their intellectual lobby have always supported the standpoint of the ruling classes and the Axomiya chauvinism and hence it’s important for the revolutionary communists to expose them and their ties with the rulers to ensure that the people can recognise their treachery and condemn them.
In the coming days, Assam and West Bengal will experience intense communal polarisation campaigns by the RSS and the BJP, with the support of the Axomiya and Bengali chauvinists, which would add to their project of creating a barrier to keep the working class and the poor divided. The common people of Germany were not aware of Hitler’s crimes against humanity or the concentration camps, however, in India, by instigating the decision-maker upper-caste elite and urban middle-class Hindus through xenophobia over a purported threat posed by millions of “illegal Bangladeshi infiltrators” the Hindutva fascist RSS and the Modi regime are trying to legitimise their future pogroms against the Bengali Muslims. The Modi regime and its corporate masters are building support throughout India so that they can officially oppress and exploit the Bengali Muslims and the people don’t oppose that inhuman act.
It’s only the revolutionary communists who can prevent such a dangerous situation by building class unity among the poor, especially the working class and the poor-landless peasantry. If a strong class unity can be built by clearly exposing the conspiracies of the Indian ruling classes, then the people’s struggle will identify its true enemy and target it with the goal of establishing a free, democratic, secular and socialist society that the Indian ruling classes never wanted. The working class’ struggle is to break the shackles of exploitation and oppression for which the ruling classes have divided them into narrow sections and have fuelled fratricide to kill each other while helping the owners of the means of production to prosper. Therefore, the working class should not be allowed to become a victim of the ruling class’ nefarious propaganda.
During the NRC fiasco, Reliance Industries Ltd posted its highest profit in the first quarter of 2018-19, Adani too managed to gain a huge profit and Antigua revealed that the Modi regime had cleared the citizenship request by PNB fraud accused Mehul Choksi, the uncle of the main culprit Nirav Modi. Using the cacophony over the NRC final draft, the BJP is trying to put the Rafale Jet scam to the backburner. The Modi regime is using the opportunity to help the Raghubar Das-led Jharkhand Government to suppress the Pathalgadi movement of the tribal people against the BJP and its regime by building a narrative around “Bangladeshi infiltrators” in Jharkhand. These all incidents need to be shared with the people so that the conspiracy can be exposed.
It’s time that the communists expose it to the Axomiya and Bengali people that their common enemies, the feudal landlords, the comprador capitalists and big foreign corporations who are trying to annex the people’s land and livelihood, must be defeated through a collective action and only then can the people live in a truly harmonious society with employment, food, shelter, clothing, universal healthcare and education.
Unless the communists uphold this goal and negate the jingoistic fervour of the ruling classes, it will be impossible to stop the cavalcade of the Hindutva fascists and their local appendages in West Bengal and Assam. Let the demand of burning down the Assam Accord and the NRC rise throughout Assam, let the politically aroused Axomiya people and other aboriginal people assert that the land and resources of Assam belong to them and to all other oppressed and exploited people but not to those who fund Narendra Modi and loot Assam and let the Axomiya poor be united with the Bengali poor in fighting against the common enemies, because only then the beginning of the end of the Hindutva fascist Modi regime-led Indian colonisers and their patrons can be seen.
