Dhruva Saikia
JPC hearing on Citizenship Amendment Bill — Part I
Finally AASU and AGP presented their opinions on the proposed Citizenship (Amendment) to the Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) led by Satyapal Singh on 25 October who was met by Chief Minister Sonowal the same day to be assured that that the JPC would visit Assam on November 2 and 3 to hear more organizations from Assam who find it a bit difficult to travel to New Delhi.
The November 2-3 JPC hearings would be held in Guwahati and Silchar.
The AASU-AGP JPC presentation day was marked by former CM Prafulla Kumar Mahanta’s press conference in Guwahati after his Bangladesh visit and a declaration in Dhaka by Bangladesh PM Sheikh Hasina that Hindus are safe in Bangladesh, Durga Puja is patronized generously. Mahanta, the erstwhile champion leader of six-year long Assam movement against Bangladeshi influx was echoing Sheikh Hasina in Guwahati the same day.
AGP (Asom Gana Parishad) and AASU (All Assam Students Union) are among the plethora of organizations in Assam dubbed by the media and intellectuals as national organizations. These two bodies, one political party and the other a student body, are deemed protectors of Assamese nationalism who uphold a theory that not religion but the language is the prime criteria that determines who is an Assamese and who is not. People belonging to any religion who speak Assamese is an Assamese is the cardinal rule for them.
That the identity of Assamese depended on mother tongue had attracted disapproval in the 60s and 70s from those sections who pointed out Assam was the homeland for numerous tribes and ethnic groups with own dialects and naturally for them Assamese was not the mother tongue. But recurring Assamese-Bengali clashes over medium of instruction and status of official language overshadowed the tribal-ethnic group aspect and the Assamese speaking people on the whole remained firm believers in language oriented nationalism. This resulted in consolidation of Assamese nationalism, brewing of resentment among indigenous ethnic groups and tribes and acceleration of Assamese-Bengali antipathy. For the propagators of Assamese nationalism, Assamese antipathy for Bengali was the capital, without which there seemed no room to profess love for Assam and its people. Since the bloody Assamese-Bengali clashes in 1960 and 1972, bitterness between the two sections of people assumed such a dimension that an Assamese comedian once quipped the three annual festivals of Assam are bihu, flood and Bengali thrashing.
However, Assamese-Bengali clashes, an annual affair for decades, came to a halt in 1985 when AGP, the champion of Assamese nationalism, captured power at Dispur. Nonetheless, the cross views on Citizenship (Amendment) Bill threatens to reignite the dormant anti-Bengali feeling in Assam, if the role of vernacular print and electronic media on the ongoing JPC hearing is any indication. The JPC has received 9000 opinions from across the country, individuals and organizations from various parts of the country have expressed their desire to be a party to the hearing and they are being extended invitation in phases. But when the Bengali organizations from Assam were given the opportunity to present their cases ahead of AGP and AASU, the local media here raised a hue and cry, clealy with an eye on anti-Bengali feeling among the Assam. The sensible Assamese has censured the media for its detrimental role.
