To translate this deficit into a surplus, or at least bring it toward some parity with India, the following steps are a must. Smuggling cannot be stopped any more than illegal migration. But we must make a beginning that has the promise of improving conditions for a larger group of people on either side of the border.

One, the legalization of trade in specific items which are currently major income generators for both sides—cattle and fish, medicines and electrical goods as well as textiles. Some of these items are covered under SAFTA, the South Asia Free Trade Agreement, which has barely inched forward in these past years. Therefore, if India and Bangladesh can conclude bilateral agreements on these items, it will benefit a good number of people dependent on trade and also bring in official revenue for both sides.

Two, the setting up of border trade hubs which will become a focus of collection of goods and their export and import. These border hubs can also have separate labour force centres which will be manned also by immigration officials and district officials of either side who can authorize Work Permits, or the movement of people into specific areas of India—let us start with the North East and West Bengal—for labour-related projects and activities.

We will need a mesh of both economic development projects and political protection, with strong involvement of local groups, which will prevent this system from sliding into another set of failures.

It is a commentary on the long-term ineffectiveness of the anti-foreigner movement that twenty years after the agitation began in 1979, the same issues were still being paraded before the public in Assam by Mahanta’s successors in the student body. Indeed, in April 2000, they went so far as to assert that there should be constitutional protection in state government jobs and for what they called ‘indigenous Assamese.’ This group was defined as those who could establish their descent from the 1951 National Register of Citizens (NRC).

That AASU could table such a demand in its official discussions with the Ministry of Home Affairs was another display of its short-sightedness. This pronouncement left a big question mark over those Indians who had moved to Assam after 1951 and whose names did not figure in the NRC. What would be their fate? How would they prove their identity and their Indian nationality? AASU’s silence on this issue was an indication of its lack of an overall vision for Assam and its role in India and a biased perception of the realities of the border state. It created more confusion over an issue that has been surrounded by public anger and misunderstanding, media hype and social responses ranging from absolute hostility to total irrationality bordering on xenophobia.

AASU’s former general secretary Samujjal Bhattacharyya, who took over as the President of the North East Students Organisation (NESO) in April 2000, went so far as to say that those Indians who had shifted to Assam after 1951 would be untouched as would be those ‘foreigners’ who had crossed over from East Pakistan until 1971.