As Assam prepares to go to polls on Monday, the promise made by BJP and Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) of building a state free of Bangladeshis has fallen on deaf ears.
As Assam prepares to go to polls on Monday, the promise made by BJP and Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) of building a state free of Bangladeshis has fallen on deaf ears. People in the state believe the issue is dead and that political parties bring it up only during elections.
“Help us win 40 [of the total 126] seats and form the government, we will deport each and every Bangladeshi infiltrator,” BJP former national president Rajnath Singh said. The AGP made a similar commitment. “Give us a chance, we will press the Centre to implement every word of the Assam Accord,” AGP president Chandra Mohan Patowary said.
However, following years of experience, people are not ready to believe the promises. “The people are conscious and they can’t be taken for a ride all the time. We will buy their promises only when we see some visible actions,” Shankar Prasad Roy, president of All Assam Students’ Union, said.
The general feeling is that the AGP and the BJP did very little to solve the problem for fear of losing ground and the Congress has been always viewed as a patron of the infiltrators.
“After the elections are over, the issue falls back to where it was. All that we have seen over the years is its politicisation,” a political analyst said.
The upgradation of the National Register of Citizens is a step forward to identify and deport the migrants but it has to be genuinely pursued through administrative and legal processes and kept above politics, he added.
The influx of the migrants into Assam appears to have left perceptible changes in the state’s demographic pattern.
Bangladeshi migrants are a majority in seven of the state’s 27 districts. There are no specific figures to suggest the number of illegal migrants in the state but estimates vary from 10 lakh to 50 lakh in a state with a population of over three crore.
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