The Big Story: Dangerous games

The furore over the National Register of Citizens in Assam is fast devolving into a show of brinkmanship between the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Trinamool Congress. On Thursday, Trinamool members of Parliament attempting to enter Assam were stopped at Silchar airport and allegedly manhandled by the police. They spent the night at the airport before being forced to leave next morning. If BJP-ruled Assam will not let the Trinamool in, Trinamool-ruled West Bengal has the same qualms about BJP leaders. Earlier this week, after Kolkata’s civic body denied BJP president Amit Shah permission to hold a rally in the city, Shah challenged Banerjee to arrest him as he went ahead with the programme. Much of this posturing is influenced by the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, as Banerjee grows into one of the loudest opposition voices and the BJP makes a determined pitch for Bengal. As they wrangle over the citizenship issue in Assam, however, one brand of identity politics is pitted against another. It is a dangerous game.

The final draft of the National Register of Citizens, which is aimed at creating a list of Indian citizens in Assam and identifying undocumented migrants, left out 40 lakh names from the 3.29 crore who applied. In the outrage that followed, Shah justified the counting exercise with the BJP’s favourite preoccupations: scaremongering about issues it claims relate to national security, accusing detractors of standing with “illegal” Bangladeshi immigrants, making a distinction between “infiltrators” and “refugees”. The last was a reference to the BJP’s oft-repeated position that Muslim immigrants are a threat to the country but India is a “natural home” for Hindus fleeing religious persecution in neighbouring countries. It was chilling, communally coded rhetoric, and it seems to be catching as the demand for a citizens’ register spreads to other states. It requires a secular rebuttal that firmly asserts tolerance and humanity, that calls the bluff about national security.

In her harangue against the BJP, however, Banerjee only chose to emphasise ethnic rather than religious identity, positioning herself as the champion of Bengali interests. As the list emerged, she warned of people becoming refugees in their own country and called the counting exercise another “Bangali khedao” or “expel Bengalis” movement. The phrase conjures up the “Bongal kheda” movement of the 1960s and ’70s, when thousands of Bengalis were forced out of the North East by campaigns of ethnic assertion. Assamese cultural nationalism itself has long been directed against Bengalis and Bengali language. The current citizens register exercise is a lingering after-effect of the Assam Movement, which raged from 1979 to 1985, turned violent and spurred the rise of militancy in the state. While it began as a protest against the inclusion of Bangladeshi migrants in the state’s electoral rolls, the ethnic subnationalism of the movement was also directed against Bengali settlers from the neighbouring state. Banerjee treads heavily into this bitter divide with her agitations against the citizens register. Just how explosive it is can be gauged by the fact that even the Trinamool’s senior leadership in Assam has resigned in protest against the standoff in Silchar, not wanting to be held responsible for the threat to law and order.

Both Shah and Banerjee have invoked brands of identity politics with long histories of violence. In a volatile state like Assam, which has seen ethnic assertions that turned into armed insurgencies and frequent massacres of minorities, this is particularly irresponsible. The siege of the Trinamool legislators in Assam was undemocratic, but both parties need to choose their words with care.

The Big Scroll

  •   Shoaib Daniyal points out that Mamata Banerjee’s appeal to Bengali identity is an attempt to stave off the BJP’s appeal to Hindutva in Bengal.  
  •   Earlier, Ipsita Chakravarty argued that Banerjee’s remarks could feed into an old and bitter divide in Assam.  

Punditry

  1. In the Indian Express, SY Quraishhi writes that the elections in Pakistan were fair and transparent.
  2. In the Hindu, G Sampath points out why Rahul Gandhi should withdraw from the prime ministerial race and focus on a Karnataka-style alliance.
  3. In the Telegraph, Jean Dreze writes that the poor are guinea pigs for immature financial technologies.

Giggles

Don’t miss...

Girish Shahane on why he liked Emily Bronte’s distance from India and why she might have an Indian connection:

“Since then, dozens more poems by her have been discovered and printed, but the most famous remains one from the book, called No Coward Soul Is Mine, which would be an apt title for a biography of the author.

The poem hints at the influence of Indian thought, possibly filtered through the German poetry and fiction she read in Brussels where she spent a year learning French and German. The deep impression made on European authors by early translations of Kalidasa’s Shakuntala (or Abhijñānashākuntalam) and Buddhist and Hindu texts has been extensively analysed, but that analysis has not, to my knowledge, been extended to the Brontë sisters’ writings.”