India’s northeastern state of Assam goes to polls starting Saturday. For more than four decades, issues of immigration and citizenship have gripped the polity of the ethnically-diverse state bordering Muslim-majority Bangladesh.
But those core issues are missing from the election campaign this year, replaced by a two-pronged approach taken by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP): promises of development, employment and welfare schemes, and simultaneously creating fears of Muslim migrants taking over the state.Prominent Assamese intellectual Hiren Gohain said he believes the BJP, which is fighting to hold on to Assam in this election, was uncertain about its hold over the masses in 2016 and therefore had chosen to stress the Assamese identity in that election.
“This time, there is a stress on the Hindu identity,” Gohain told Al Jazeera.
In other words, BJP’s Hindu supremacist politics, which thrive on hate campaigns against Muslims, seem to have overtaken ethnic Assamese nationalism, prevalent for decades in Assam.
NRC, CAA missing from the discourse
This is the first election in Assam since a controversial National Register of Citizens (NRC) – a citizenship verification process that attracted international criticism – was published in 2019.The NRC initially was an exercise exclusive to Assam, where a push against any undocumented migrants, irrespective of religion, has been on for decades. A final list, published in August 2019, excluded nearly 1.9 million residents, a large number of them Muslims, who constitute more than one-third of the state’s population.
Those excluded in the NRC were asked to prove their citizenship in quasi-legal tribunals or risk being declared foreigners and stripped of their rights, including the right to vote.
The publication of the NRC in Assam was closely followed by the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which paved the way for Hindu, Christian and other minorities from India’s Muslim-majority neighbouring countries to get Indian citizenship.
In Assam, the CAA effectively allowed migrant Hindus excluded by the NRC to receive Indian citizenship. The controversial law triggered large-scale protests in Assam while the fate of the Muslims excluded in the NRC remained unclear.
In 2016, the right-wing BJP came to power in Assam, asserting the Assamese identity and assuring people it would “weed out illegal foreigners”.
Leading the right-wing party’s campaign in the state this year is 52-year-old Himanta Biswa Sarma, a politician who spent decades with the opposition Congress party, projecting himself as a secular leader, before jumping ship to join the BJP in 2015.
Sarma’s political rhetoric, now tailored to fit the BJP’s anti-Muslim image, has largely centred around one rival: Muslim politician Badruddin Ajmal, chief of the All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF) and member of India’s Parliament.
