CAA factor: BJP’s Assam assembly win reveals illegal migration continues to be a big issue

One of the BJP’s trump cards these Assembly polls has been the steady consolidation of its Hindu vote base.

On a day of many disappointments for the BJP, Assam was the silver lining. While the final results will be out later in the day, the emphatic saffron victory in North East India’s politically most prominent state reveals that while illegal migration may be a hyped issue elsewhere in the country, in Assam, its fears are genuine.

By winning a comfortable majority, even more than the 2016 assembly polls, the BJP have created history in Assam: it has become the only non-Congress government to win consecutive terms.

To add to its win, the Assam victory gains significance in that unlike the other states and the Union Territory whose assembly election results were declared on Sunday, this was the only state where the BJP fought to retain power.

Leading the alliance with the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP), the United People’s Party Liberal (UPPL) and the Gana Suraksha Party (GSP), which mainly represents the Bodo and Sarania communities respectively, the BJP swept away the perceived stiff competition from two other alliances: the Congress-led eight-party Grand Alliance, which included the All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF) and the Left, and another contending front of two newly-formed regional parties — the Assam Jatiya Parishad (AJP) and the Raijor Dal, which emerged out of the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protests that swept Assam in 2019.

One of the BJP’s trump cards these Assembly polls has been the steady consolidation of its Hindu vote base. Over the years, the party has sought to highlight the issue of influx in Assam, often accusing the previous Congress governments of harbouring illegal Muslim immigrants in exchange for political support.

It is this narrative that propelled the party to power in 2016 and then again in 2021 as top BJP leaders consistently denounced the Congress-led alliance as an ‘Alliance of Mughals’, which was opposed to Assam’s indigenous interests.

Senior BJP leader and Assam cabinet minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, for instance, launched a blitzkrieg against the alliance for including the AIUDF into its fold.

He went so far as to say that the Congress’s alliance with the AIUDF had turned these polls into a `conflict of civilisations’, alleging that the AIUDF was a communal party, referring to the party’s predominantly Bengali Muslim base.

AIUDF was founded by Maulana Badruddin Ajmal in October 2005 as the Assam United Democratic Front (AUDF). It was relaunched as a national party under its current name in February 2009.

It had become the principal opposition party in Assam, winning 18 of 126 seats in the 2011 legislative assembly election and 13 seats in 2016.

It was telling that, as protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) spiralled in Assam in late 2019, one of the first fire-fighting steps taken by the Assam government was to promise to safeguard land for the state’s ‘indigenous’ population.

State finance minister Himanta Biswa Sarma announced that the government would soon bring a new law prohibiting the sale of land to anyone not considered indigenous to the state.

This was in response to a widely articulated anxiety during the CAA protests that Bangladeshi migrants have eaten into land meant for local communities.

The CAA expedited Indian citizenship for undocumented non-Muslim migrants from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan. In Assam, the BJP had claimed it would naturalise Hindus left out of Assam’s National Register of Citizens.

Updated in 2019, the register is meant to separate Indian citizens living in the state from so-called illegal migrants. The final list left out over 19 lakh applicants.

Another worry among the ethnic Assamese is that the Act would encourage fresh migration from Bangladesh. And more migrants, they fear, mean more land alienation.

Historically, the specter of the ‘land-hungry’ migrant – a phrase first used by British bureaucrat CS Mullan in the 1931 Census Report -- has endured in the state.

It is embedded in bitter historical memory, of Bengali Muslim peasants being settled in large numbers in the early 20th century by the colonial government, apparently to ‘grow more food’ and as cheap labour.

The poll results also showed that the Congress, despite the defeat, has a fair presence in the state. However, the subject of illegal migrants has proved to be a mill around its neck.

One of the BJP’s trump cards these Assembly polls has been the steady consolidation of its Hindu vote base.

Apart from that, the Congress has lacked a powerful leader in the state after the death of Tarun Gogoi, the state's longest-serving Chief Minister, in November 2020.

Apart from economic issues, the Congress had promised to pass a resolution in the Assembly against implementation of the CAA, 2019, in Assam. Given the state’s land situation and emotive sentiments, the move seems to have backfired.