Bill Of Frights

As the Citizenship Bill clears Lok Sabha, northeast allies begin to desert the BJP.

- Rabi Banerjee

ON JANUARY 3, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was in Silchar, his second stop for the day in the northeast, as he launched the BJP’s campaign for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. Silchar is a small town in upper Assam, inhabited largely by refugees who came from Bangladesh in 1947 and during the 1971 war.

Addressing a rally in Silchar, Modi announced that his government would try and pass the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016, immediately. It would confer citizenship to Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, Christians and other non-Muslims from Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan, whose names were missing from the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam. After the NRC’s latest revision, nearly 40 lakh people were left out, of which six lakh were from Silchar.

Following Modi’s announcement, the Asom Gana Parishad, a member of the National Democratic Alliance, announced its decision to pull out of the coalition government in Assam. The AGP said it did not expect Modi to make such a crucial announcement even before the joint parliamentary committee had submitted its report. AGP president Atul Bora said his party was leaving the coalition. “We thought the prime minister would not act in haste,” he said. “I had met the prime minister and the home minister several times. They assured us that they would look into the issue. But they stabbed us in the back.”

The AGP came to power in the 1980s, riding on the support of the indigenous people of Assam. AGP founder Prafulla Kumar Mahanta signed the Assam Accord in 1985, which brought peace to the ethnically-torn Assam. Under the accord, all illegal immigrants from Bangladesh who entered India after March 1971 were to be sent back. The accord called for the setting up of an NRC in Assam. The AGP and its allies are angry that the new bill is against the letter and spirit of the accord.