Outsiders vs Us rhetoric gains ground as BJP seeks to clinch Assam elections

“If the BJP doesn’t win the Assembly election, nobody will be able to save Assam from barbaadi,” says 52-year-old Girish Lakhar, a resident of Guwahati.

Barbaadi (destruction). It is a word you hear frequently hear from BJP supporters on the campaign trail in Assam, where the first round of polling is on Monday.

When BJP supporters talk of ruin, it means just this: They are scared of the rising influence of “outsiders”, Bangladeshi immigrants whose population, they claim, are rising to a point where they will outnumber the original Assamese population.

It is a theme that is steadily gaining ground across the state. For the Assamese Hindus and Marwaris, the growing influence of outsiders is the most important issue of the election. A recent pre-poll survey by AC Nielsen suggests more than 52 voters want a government that will drive the immigrants out.

In the Guwahati head office of Badruddin Ajmal’s All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF), its spokesperson Champak Kalita narrates a story to argue that the BJP ploy of polarising the election won’t work.

He says when the 15th-16th Century saint and reformer Srimanta Sankerdev got Naamghars–houses for congregational prayers–constructed in Assam, he called their pillars Laikhuta after the Muslim prayer La Ilaha Illallah. (Khuta means pillar.)

Kalita argues that people of Assam are liberal and inclusive, they do not believe in the BJP’s brand of Hindutva. So, the BJP’s strategy of polarising voters by talking about the growing number of Muslims will not work.

But people like Kalita are in a minority. Most of them believe the BJP has succeeded in portraying the Congress as a party that favours illegal immigrants and undermines the interest of the original Assamese.

And the BJP is candid about it. Its chief ministerial candidate Sarbananda Sonowal says his party is raising the issue of illegal migrants aggressively in the campaign. In election rallies, Hemanta Sarma Biswa, the BJP’s poll strategist, mocks chief minister Tarun Gogoi by questioning his Ahom blood. “If he had the blood of Lachit Borphukan–a 17th century Ahom warrior who defeated the Mughals in the Battle of Saraighat near the Brahmaputra–in his veins, Gogoi would have driven the Bangladeshis from Assam by now,” Sarma says.

According to the 2001 Census, more than three crore Bangladeshis were living in India, many of them in Assam. Though the latest figures are not available, BJP leaders argue every year thousands of Bangladeshis cross over into Assam through the porous borders near the Barak Valley. Since the journey from Bangladesh to Assam costs a pittance and takes just a few minutes, every year many from the neighbouring country undertake it to escape poverty, unemployment and persecution in their native land.

According to BJP estimates, 32 per cent of Assam’s population is of migrant origin. This influx is said to have begun from East Bengal at the beginning of the 20th century. Then there were two more waves, one during the Partition and another before and after the 1971 India-Pakistan war that led to the creation of Bangladesh.

In 2006, Sonowal, who was then a leader of the AGP, challenged a government of India Act introduced in 1983 that made it almost impossible to identify and deport illegal immigrants who had crossed over into Assam after March 25, 1971.

When the Supreme Court struck down the controversial Act, Sonowal became an icon of the native Assamese. Now that he is the BJP’s chief ministerial candidates, the party believes it will automatically get the votes of people who want the outsiders thrown out.

The BJP’s record on the issue is, however, dodgy. “When Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister, he declared that all illegal immigrants would be driven out of Bangladesh. But, after making this lofty promise, Modi did not do anything,” says Prakash Kumar, who runs the Congress control room from a secluded house in Guwahati’s busy GS Road area.

“The issue of illegal immigrants is just another poll jumla for the BJP. Like beef, love jihad and other divisive slogans, the party will dump this slogan too after using it during elections,” he argues.

The BJP has, in fact, given a new twist to the immigration story. It is now promising to give refuge to every Hindu immigrants from Bangladesh living in Assam, even those who came years after the 1971 war, on “humanitarian grounds.”

The BJP’s promise is a clear violation of the SC order, says Kalita. By trying to divide immigrants on communal lines, the BJP is playing an extremely dangerous game in Assam, he says.

The third stakeholder in the electoral contest, Ajmal’s AIUDF, is watching the pot boil. Ajmal, a perfume baron whose trade is spread across several countries, had formed the party just a few days after the SC struck down the act that allowed citizenship rights to those who had settled down in Assam till 1971. He claims to represent the interests of the immigrants and nurtures them as his vote-bank.

His party believes that it will benefit from polarisation of voters because of the BJP’s aggressive stand on the issue of Bangladeshi immigrants. “The Congress will be squeezed out because its stand on this issue is ambiguous. People who fear the rise of the BJP will vote for AIUDF because it fights for their rights. We will emerge as king makers with at least 25 seats,” says the party’s spokesperson. The AIUDF has 18 seats in the current Assembly. This year it is contesting on 70 seats.

As the divide widens, many people are bringing up the barbaadi word during discussions. The BJP supporters because they fear a future without the BJP in power.

And those who believe in Assam’s secular, syncretic values because they fear their future under the BJP.