Discussions on social media demonstrate the deep schism in Assam’s society today. A large section of the intellectual class seems to endorse what’s happening and argue that the reason why the BJP was voted to power was because the saffron party promised to deal with illegal migrants with a strong hand. They argue that illegal settlers had been given a free hand in the past by elected governments and politicians, who turned these “Bangladeshis” into their vote banks.***The issue of illegal migration gained momentum when former Governor of Assam, General SK Sinha (Rtd) who was a former Vice Chief of the Indian Army, in November 1998 penned a report titled ‘Report on Illegal Migration in Assam.’ Sinha sent this 22-page report to the then President KR Narayanan.The report laid the blame for all Assam’s ills including insurgencies led by the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) to insurgents’ alleged free access to and from Bangladesh. This report was never contested by scholars but it fed into the persecution complex already embedded in the mind of the Assamese intelligentsia that Bangladeshi immigrants were the bane of their lives and the usurpers of their space – a Lebensraum of sorts that they occupied because of the failure of the political class to check this.The Sinha Report has become a sort of Magna Carta for the BJP, which came to power in Assam in 2016 with the express purpose of sorting out illegal migration once and for all. Those who have looked at the Report claim to have found glaring factual inconsistencies in it. The report conveniently overlooked Assam’s forgotten history of being once part of the Bengal Presidency; which resulted in a large section of Bengali speaking population settling in Assam long before India’s independence.
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