You can trust the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to foment trouble anywhere. You can trust the Hindutva party to communalise any situation. It can create a Hindu-Muslim situation out of nothing. And that's the last thing that Northeast needs at this time.
The comments of Vijay Goel, the party's in-charge of political affairs in Assam, ought to be seen in this light. Goel, who led a delegation of party leaders and MPs from Assam to the Election Commission Monday, wants to see Bangladeshi Muslims as infiltrators and wants Bangladeshi Hindus to be registered as voters in the state. The party wants to create a new votebank, it also wants more polarisation.
True, the way the BJP looks at the illegal migrants issue in Assam is nothing new. The party has always seen the problem through a religious lens. Every time it has been out of power, the saffron party has fallen back on religious issues. And to take recourse to such a route necessarily means communalising a problem. There's also a nice phrase describing such an act — it is called fishing in troubled waters.
Twenty-five years after the Assam Accord, the illegal migrants issue in the state is not so much of an emotive issue. Parties of all hues, saffron, red or the tricolour, have played only with the political sentiments of the people of Assam and betrayed them in myriad ways. All that the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP), for the two times that it stormed to power, did was loot the state's exchequer. The issue of illegal migrants remained confined to those sheets of paper that were signed by the All-Assam Students Union (AASU) and the All-Assam Gana Sangram Parishad (AAGSP).
The AGP, having realised that its political clout was on the downswing, primarily because of its gross inertness and abject inefficiency, bandied with the BJP in a brazen act of expediency. It has had a love-hate relationship with the BJP over the last decade or so; it's probably love time again with Assembly elections just around the corner. The goodwill of the people of Assam that put them in power in 1985 be damned.
The illegal migrants issue is not a major poll plank anymore, not because illegal Bangladeshi migrants have disappeared; but because the people know that their beliefs have been made a mockery of time and again. The disenchantment has not died down, it is simmering as an under-current. And it is this dormant anger that the BJP wants to stir up all over again. For all the years that its National Democratic Alliance (NDA) was in power, all the BJP had done was twiddle its thumbs on the illegal migrants issue. Just as it had sat on Article 370 and Kashmir. The BJP can only create problems, it cannot solve any.
But then during election times, you never talk about your ability to solve a problem. All you need to do is go on a propaganda overdrive. To do so, you need to resort to Goebbelsian tactics — propagate lies. Goel said this on Monday, "As of now, about 90 percent are not Bangladesh Muslims, but are Hindu Bengalis who are from Assam or those who have come into India." Anyone familiar with the demographic situation in Assam would know this is one preposterous statement — it is one big and white lie.
With the AGP-BJP you never know till the last moment whether they are sleeping in the same political bed, or are going separate ways. But one thing is certain — illegal migrants have not disappeared from Assam. And the problem is something that needs to be solved, not compounded.
