Why Northeast India opposing Citizenship Amendment Bill(CAB)
The Citizenship Amendment Bill(CAB), 2019 passed by Lok Sabha on 9th Dec. The Bill provides Indian citizenship to Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian refugees from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan. Anyone belonging to these religions who entered India on or before 31 December 2014 can apply for Indian citizenship. The only condition is that the petitioner has to prove they migrated due to religious oppression. The Bill will majorly target the Muslims living in the country as they may be asked to prove their identity. The Bill is being widely discussed among the Indians. Some see this bill as a step closer to Complete Hindu Rashtra (which is the ideology of the ruling Bhartiya Janta Party). Others see this bill as another opportunity of Muslims persecution. The opposition claims the Bill is against the fundamentals of the Indian constitution as its Article 14 doesn’t allow any discrimination based on caste, creed, race and religion.
Many groups and parties are opposing the bill citing it is discriminating against people based on religion. There have been protests across different areas of India to oppose the bill. But the major protest broke out in the Northeast region of India. Northeast India is different from the rest of the states. Northeastern states has been given some autonomy and special power by the central government to exercise. What makes them more sensitive is that they share 1880 km of border with Bangladesh, 1624 km border with Myanmar and more than 500 km of the disputed border with China. Indian citizens from other parts need a special permit to visit many of the regions in the Northeast even for tourism. In such a situation the central government has passed the Citizenship Amendment Bill(CAB) which will widely impact the demographics of Northeast India and it triggered protests in the region.
Protest in Northeast India
The People of Northeast India, especially Assam, the largest state in Northeast India have been strongly opposing the Citizenship Amendment Bill. The reason for them is not that the new bill will discriminate against people based on religion to give citizenship but the bill will stock the region with ‘Hindu infiltrator’ as the bill will give citizenship to Hindu Migrants which came to India till 2014. As the bill will be made into law, more than 2 million Hindu Bangladeshi living in the Northeast will become Indians. The Indian government has claimed that only 800 thousand Hindu migrants living in the region will get citizenship. But according to different studies and surveys made by different agencies, more than 2 million migrants are living in Assam presently. According to the RTI( Right to Information) application filed by an independent activist, more than 10 million Bangladeshi Migrants have entered India.
Assam has a population of 31 million. More than 15 million of the Assamese people speak Assamese- the official language of the state. Around 9 million people speak Bengali. Others speak Hindi and regional languages. The influence of Bengali language has been slightly increasing in the region and the Assamese see the Hindu Bengali migrants as the origination of this problem. The fear is the loss of their identity. The case of Tripura, the second most populated state in the Northeast, is even worse. Bengalis represented more than 70 percent of Tripura’s population while the Tripuri population amounted to less than 30 percent. And the threat to their identity is very real here. Northeast never accepted the Bengali migrants in the region. They were provisioned to live ‘temporarily’ as the situation in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) was worse due to the ongoing Civil War(1970), and northeast India shares a 1,880 km long land border with Bangladesh. Then Assam Accord was made in 1985 which gave citizenship to migrants who came to India before 24 March 1971, irrespective of religion. Even after several attempts, the government failed to reinforce it. And the migrants, both Hindu and Muslims kept flowing from Bangladesh to India majorly looking for jobs and a better life.
Indian Government was well aware that there will be protests in the Northeast region. So many regions have been exempted from CAB. Tribal areas of Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura are listed in such areas. But the whole Northeast sees this as a trap of Central Government for them. They doubt the intention of government as they may bring another amendment to include those areas as well. So the whole northeast wants to show themselves united. Another fear for them is the continuous flowing of illegal migrants. CAB will further attract more Hindu Migrants from Bangladesh since it is based on religion and safeguards Hindu. Currently, more than 10.7 million Hindus lives in Bangladesh and many are suppressed as Islam is primary religion. So the possibility to give citizenship to incoming Hindu Migrants scares the people living in Northeast since most of them are settling there. Citing the above reasons there has been shut down all across northeast India. There has been internet shutdown in many regions of Northeast.
