“Ssssshhhhh!!!! Do not bring in the religious angle. Let’s not communalise the issue. We are a secular country!”

This is the utterly toxic liberal logic of tolerance and secularism that is responsible for weakening our society more than anything else, besides dampening the Hindu Kshatriya spirit of resistance, of fighting the enemy back. So much so that the reality is in front of us, but we are scared to acknowledge it in the way it exists.

We prefer to remain silent instead of standing up to speak for an issue that is genuinely concerned with our culture, language and scarce resources. We find solace by fuming anger from the comfort of our homes, but choose to be politically correct while speaking at public forums! And anyone who makes an honest attempt to raise the problem, self-professed liberals are quick to label him/her as Islamophobic or xenophobic! But, usage of the term Hinduphobia to describe a certain media narrative amounts to being communal for these same liberals who swear by secularism and all their talk of unity in diversity!

Not many days had passed since the brutal lynching and killing of Sanatan Deka, a poor Hindu vegetable seller by a Muslim mob in Hajo, Assam. It was soon followed by another gruesome incident of stabbing and killing of one Rituparna Pegu over a minor tiff involving a chair, by a group of five Muslim men in broad daylight in the heart of Guwahati city. In yet another case that came to light much later, a 20-year old boy Saurav Das from Dibrugarh district in Upper Assam was murdered by three Muslim men on the charge of dating a girl from their community who resided in the neighbourhood. His body was later disposed off in the nearby Sesa river. But, hey wait! Why bring in the religious angle again? C’mon, the arrogant liberal ego will be offended!

Well, a repetition of the same trend happened in Sonitpur district of Assam yet again on August 5, 2020, when Hindus throughout the country and abroad too were celebrating their civilisational victory of a tedious legal battle of over 500 years involving numerous lies and deceptions perpetrated by this same liberal-secular lobby. In Thelamara-Sutipahar (Bhora Singri) area under Thelamara Police Station in Tezpur, illegal Bangladeshi migrants settled in the area had attacked a rally that was taken out by the local people of the area led by the Dhekiajuli unit of Bajrang Dal, Ram Sena and Vishwa Hindu Parishad to mark the Bhoomi-Pujan ceremony of the Ram Mandir at Ayodhya.

In this dastardly act of violence, at least 12 members of the Bajrang Dal, VHP and Ram Sena were grievously injured. It was when the rally was approaching towards the Gauri Mandir situated in a small hillock in the area, popularly known as Suti-Pahar, for performing puja on the occasion, that the Bangladeshi migrants had attacked the members of the rally with lethal arms and weapons. It was reported that the attackers also kept about 25 persons captive for a long time, and set ablaze 12 motorcycles and a Tata Magic van too. On receiving information, police and security forces rushed to the spot and safely rescued the captive members. The police also resorted to firing to disperse the mob for bringing the situation under control. Curfew was later imposed under Section 144 of the CrPC in Thelamara and Dhekiajuli areas by the district administration.

The most important question that arises here is – When one side is actively seeking for violence at even the most minor instances, does it not lay bare the liberal hypocrisy of all civilisations and cultures being tolerant and secular? Naïve, ignorant Hindus who prefer to choose silence rather than engaging themselves in an honest debate on the issue have failed to realise that it is this same silence that has indirectly helped nurture a soft political vote-bank; a vote-bank that multiplies too fast and one which is based on selective ignorance of the long-term socio-political implications of the problem of illegal immigration.

There has always been a malicious attempt on the part of the urban English-speaking media houses supported by an elite cabal of “eminent public intellectuals” to portray the issue in a way that seeks to garner as much sympathy as possible for those “poor, economically deprived migrants” (read Muslim migrants, not the Hindi-speaking Bihari migrants although). Unfortunately, this has downplayed the real concerns of national security and increasing pressure on limited agricultural land and resources created by the spate of illegal migrants from across the border. With time, the issue has been reduced to the binaries of Hindu-Muslim divide in the media and academic circles, rather than generating a sense of political awareness that the fear of becoming an alien in one’s own land has more to do with culture and not religion.

This recent attack in Tezpur by illegal migrants upon members of the Hindu community with the use of lethal arms raises another important question – What is the source from where these people of doubtful nationality who mostly survive on menial jobs such as day labourers, rickshaw-pullers, etc. procure arms? Indeed, it stinks of a bigger nexus involving many players that have been working at several different levels to Islamise India.

In fact, it was way back in 1992 that an internal report prepared by the Union Home Ministry had suggested that illegal immigration has vastly changed the “demographic landscape” of the eastern border states of India, especially Assam and West Bengal. Although Bangladesh has been steadfast in its continuous denial of the fact that its citizens regularly cross over the border to India, but the country’s census figures tell a different story altogether of the missing millions.

Sharifa Begum, a demographer at the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies in Dhaka, calculated that nearly 3.5 million people “disappeared” from East Pakistan between 1951-61, probably as a result of the Partition. She indicated that another 1.5 million may have entered India between 1961-74. But, according to journalist Sanjoy Hazarika, an important fact which is mostly kept under the wraps is that a quarter of the 10 million refugees who came to India during the 1971 liberation war probably stayed behind. Intelligence reports have also pointed fingers at the Jamaat-e-Islami and its patron, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan, which have been using madarsas that have sprouted in increasing numbers along the Indo-Bangladesh border to infiltrate migrants into India to be used as spies.

The Census data of 2011 reveals a steep rise in the migrant population in nine border districts of Assam. While Muslims constituted 30.9% of the population in 2001, this share jumped to 34.2% in 2011. Dhubri, the constituency of AIUDF chief Maulana Badruddin Ajmal, had the largest Muslim population of 80%. Barpeta, another border district in Lower Assam, showed the highest growth rate of Muslim population between the two census years, i.e. around 12%. The expansionist nature of Islam and the rapid mushrooming of mosques in several places here have made the native population wary and fearful of the consequences that await them if they happen to become a minority in their own state in the near future.

A Report on ‘Illegal Migration into Assam’ submitted to the President of India by the then Governor of Assam Lt. Gen (Retd.) S.K. Sinha in 1998 clearly showed that the Muslim population of Assam rose by 77.42% in 1991 from what it was in 1971. Comparatively, in the same period, the Hindu population had risen by a mere 41.89%. This rapidly changing demography has led to heightened ethnic tensions in the recent past, with conflicts breaking out frequently in different parts of the state; e.g. in July 2012, violence broke out between members of the Bodo tribe and Bengali-speaking Muslims in the BTAD area, when unidentified miscreants, suspected to be Muslims, killed four Bodo youths at a place called Joypur in Kokrajhar district.

The attempt to be politically correct has often meant either overlooking or completely ignoring the official figures which have shown a disproportionate increase in the Muslim population of Assam over the past few decades. Political correctness aside, the issue of illegal immigration from across the porous land border with Bangladesh is a serious economic, political and cultural problem that has silently been invading the Assamese society from within. No other issue in the last 70 years has vitiated the political climate of Assam more than the immigration problem. At a time when the issue of migration has toppled governments and global political paradigms in the West, not anticipating a popular reaction from the indigenous people of Assam where almost one-third of the population has become that of migrants is politically too naïve! Their fear of cultural and political decimation and eventually becoming a minority at the hands of a foreign force is a palpable emotion which is no longer to be dismissed lightly.

References:

  1. https://www.assamtribune.com/scripts/detailsnew.asp?id=aug0620/state053
  2. Environmental Change and Acute Conflict: Bangladesh and Northeast India by Sanjoy Hazarika.

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