On October 21, the All Assam Students’ Union went on protest in Jorhat, burning an effigy of Bharatiya Janata Party president JP Nadda. Ga...
On October 21, the All Assam Students’ Union went on protest in Jorhat, burning an effigy of Bharatiya Janata Party president JP Nadda. Gathered outside the district commissioner’s office, they shouted slogans against the BJP chief, the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Nadda’s offence: he had promised that the Citizenship (Amendment) Act would be implemented soon – it had only been stalled because of the pandemic.
The CAA, passed by Parliament in December last year, makes undocumented non-Muslim migrants from Bangladesh, Aghanistan and Pakistan eligible for Indian citizenship. Protests against the legislation, which swept across the country, started first in Assam, killing at least five.
Assam has its own specific concerns about the CAA, tied to the state’s National Register of Citizens, published in August 2019. Meant to be a list of Indians living in Assam, one of the stated aims of the NRC was to sift undocumented migrants from “genuine” citizens. Assamese nationalist groups like the All Assam Students Union, which see migration from Bangladesh as a threat to their community, have long demanded this citizen count. The terms of the exercise were drawn from the 1985 Assam Accord, the cornerstone of Assamese nationalist politics over the last three decades.
When the final list was...
