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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | What the NRC reveals about the challenges of being Bengali in Assam -Paramita Ghosh

What the NRC reveals about the challenges of being Bengali in Assam -Paramita Ghosh

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published Published on Sep 9, 2018   modified Modified on Sep 9, 2018
-Hindustan Times

The NRC exercise is about identifying illegal immigrants within Assam. So why are the Bengalis saying they are being targeted?

In the subcontinent, people have lugged suitcases. Said goodbye to old neighbours and acquired new ones. They have changed cities, hammered nameplates on different doors, sometimes in one generation or in each of them. Moving in has never meant that you won’t move out.

You may even get an answer out of a T-shirt about its place, or factory of origin, but not out of a person. This is true of the people of Assam. Even before it became a state of independent India, Assam was a meeting ground of several dynasties, tribes, traders, immigrants. It was also a place where Bengalis of all faiths learnt to pull together, be watchful of the other, and yet be cordial. And both were accepted by the Assamese as part of Assam, till, as they say, “they couldn’t”.

We are looking up the Bengali connection today, simply because the National Register of Citizens (NRC) exercise being conducted in Assam, does not include the names of 40 lakh people (approx) in the register’s final draft. Four lakh (approx) from the Bengali-dominated Barak valley have not made it to the list. There is worry now on every brow. What if this is by design, ask the inhabitants of the valley.

“Every 10 years, the Assamese spring something like this on us,” says Sanjib Deb Laskar of the Barak Valley Bengali Literary and Cultural Association, in Silchar, the headquarters of Cachar district. “In the ’50s, thousands of Bengali Hindus and Muslims relocated to or from East Pakistan due to violence and returned [after the Liaquat-Nehru Pact] to Assam to find their names missing from the electoral rolls of 1952 and the NRC of 1951. In the ’60s, Assamese was imposed in our schools; our resistance got Bengali back but now and then they send a circular asking if schools are following the ‘state language’ when they know in the Barak valley that’s Bengali, and it’s there not as a favour but by law. From the ’70s to the ’80s, they ran the ‘Bideshi kheda’ movement, in which the target shifted from outsiders to illegal immigrants to Bengalis in general. Now they have the NRC.” Many families could not apply for inclusion in the final draft of the current NRC because they could not supply the legacy data of which the 1951 NRC is a key document.

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Hindustan Times, 8 September, 2018, https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/what-the-nrc-reveals-about-the-challenges-of-being-bengali-in-assam/story-WWTy7KEf4YQpTCZwoT9fEI.html


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