The cacophony of distorted events from Bangladesh tell us the realities of the grimmer times ahead, in South Asia at large. The truth of vandalism is a smear to the democratic ethos which Bangladesh’s founding father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman aka ‘Bangabandhu’ had dreamt of the country’s future. Moments of disarray don’t necessarily bring anarchy of such proportion that Bangladesh has recently witnessed. This rigmarole has been brewing for quite some time now. The antagonistic forces embezzled the trigger for the protests — thirty percent government job quotas for Bangladeshi freedom fighters’ families. This quota was struck down and now stands at a five percent quota for the descendants of freedom fighters and two percent for indigenous and other groups in the country. Sheikh Hasina’s main blunder was to try to contain the student protesters with the might of the state machinery. This changed the nature of the protests as well. Despite the Hasina government having relinquished its quota endeavours, the neo-protests culminated in the resentment of the masses, heralding an uprising. Hundreds lost their lives as the protests soon turned violent. It became a concoction of hate mongering and anarchy as this protest was soon taken over by the anti-Hasina mob, in the guise of student agitation.
The state machinery including the police and the military couldn’t cope with the substantial mob that was heading towards Ganabhaban, a heavily-guarded complex in the capital Dhaka that served as Hasina’s official residence, on the 5th of August. Hasina was briefed by Army chief General Waker-us-Zaman about the tense situation as the Army refused to suppress the protest and enforce curfew, sealing Hasina’s fate. The message was clear that she no longer had the army’s support to stay in power resulting in her fleeing the country to India. Post this, her residence was ransacked and a state of total lawlessness prevailed across Bangladesh. Several Hindu temples and minority Hindu houses were desecrated and burned down as the protests were hijacked by anti-democratic and Islamic fundamentalist forces.
As Hasina shelters in India, and a new interim government headed by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus has been installed by the Army to serve as the Chief Adviser of the interim government of Bangladesh, New Delhi has been watching with optimism for diplomacy to regain momentum given the ongoing severities that the minority communities continue to face, in the name of protests.
ASSAM’S APPREHENSION ABOUT MASS IMMIGRATION FROM THE TURMOIL-HIT COUNTRY :
The undercurrents of the unsettling developments in Bangladesh have made many in India sense that the Hindu minorities have been facing atrocities on religious grounds. India shares its longest international border with Bangladesh on the east and the north-east, and legit apprehension about mass immigration from the turmoil-hit country into India’s porous north-east, especially Assam, is prominent. Recently, a few of the refugees were apprehended by the BSF on the Assam-Bangladesh border. Also, concerning reports of Bangladeshi Hindus and other minorities trying to flee that country and enter India, has increased manifold over the past weeks. Overall, there has been an acute void in the diplomatic balance among the two neighbouring countries.
With the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 granting Indian citizenship to Hindu immigrants from Bangladesh up to the cut-off date of December 2014, this fresh refugee crisis, if not contained, could open a pandora’s box for antagonism within the state of Assam. The ‘Assamese speakers’ within Assam have already seen a steep decline over the decades and most of this can be ascribed to the rising population of non-native and non-Assamese speakers within the state. It is an unfortunate reality that in a small state like Assam, given that merely forty percent of its residents consider Assamese as their mother tongue, there looms a considerable apprehension within the native population amidst the reports of the latest pandemonium from Bangladesh.
History has it that in 1971, during the wee hours of the East- Pakistan liberation war, there was mass exodus of both Hindu and Muslim refugees into India’s eastern and north-eastern borders. The then Indian state responded with much promptness. India efficiently handled the crisis although it wasn’t a signatory to the 1951 UNHCR Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol. India opened its borders, involved various NGOs for relief measures, carried out massive diplomatic efforts to mitigate the crisis and also interceded militarily for liberating Bangladesh and acted as a peacemaker. Yet, lakhs of undocumented immigrants entered Assam, West Bengal, Tripura, and other bordering states, post Bangladesh’s liberation.
Subsequently, after 1971, there have been unprecedented changes in the demography of Assam and Tripura. With several Bangla speaking Muslim majority pockets emerging overnight, in the peripheral districts of Assam bordering Bangladesh post 1971 to becoming the ascendant community in majority of the ‘Char Chapori’ (Brahmaputra flood plain) areas today, the Assamese find themselves in a peculiar foray.
Students’ movements against the illegal immigrants from Bangladesh have rocked Assam since the early eighties. The Assam movement that began in 1979 at the backdrop of reports of non-citizens being registered on the electoral rolls for the 1980 General elections. Soon the movement intensified and with the sacrifice of 860 Assamese people, and six relentless years of protests, the Assam Accord of 1985 was legitimised by the Government of India. Yet, the Bangladeshi infiltration issue remained the hot bed for politics throughout the decades, till this day. No doubt, at present the active illegal immigration has declined to a large extent, but the demographic damage that supervened forty years ago to the culture and ethnic fabric of Assam is irreversible. But, the Bangladesh of today has again been burning and the impact that it may bestow upon the vulnerable state of Assam is beyond comprehension if India opens its borders for Bangladeshi undocumented and unvetted immigrants to enter into the country.
It is unfortunate that the militant islamists have been persecuting Hindus and other minorities in Bangladesh, but the Government of India should also be compassionate towards the genuine concerns of Assam – being a small state with limited resources and endangered ethno-cultural disposition, it just cannot be burdened with the task of mitigating political calamities emerging out of other countries. New Delhi should rather focus on strengthening its border security and take into confidence the current regime in Bangladesh in order to contain the instability in that country, without jeopardizing Assam’s interests.
- Written by Banraj Kalita.