One would also need to assess what the 320,000 figure of ‘doubtful voters’ actually adds up to. There are usually two voters in a family of five or six, the average size of a family in India and Bangladesh. This means that for every person on the list there could be at least two others, who have not been registered. A simple calculation here brings up a figure of approximately 640,000 additional ‘others’ or a total of about one million people of ‘doubtful’ descent in the state.

An analysis of Assam’s data for the growth of various religious communities since 1947 is also instructive.

Between 1951 and 1961, Hindus grew at the rate of 33.96 per cent or from 5.8 million to 7.8 million. Between 1961 and 1971, their population rose from 7.8 million to 10.6 million, or at a rate of 34.76 per cent. Between 1971 and 1991 (at the risk of boring readers, let me repeat again that there was no census in 1981 because of the student agitation.) the Hindu population grew to 15.04 million, or a rate of 41.61 per cent over 20 years (decadal average of 20.85 per cent).

In the same period, the Muslim population went from 1.9 million in 1951 to 2.7 million in 1961 (a growth of 38.56 per cent); then to 3.5 million in 1971 (a growth rate of 29.96 per cent) and to 6.37 million in 1991, a jump of 77.33 per cent compared to the Hindu rate of 41.61 per cent. That works out at 38.62 per cent for each decade between 1971 and 1991. Or a rise that is comparable only to the period 1951–1961.

This is why it is hardly surprising that Assam is one of the three states in the country where Muslims number more than 20 per cent of the population. The other two are West Bengal and Kerala—there are historic factors behind this presence in Kerala, especially with large-scale migration of Muslims from neighboring states in the mediaeval period and Arab settlers.

Thus, the population of Assam has risen from about 8.5 million in 1951 to about 11.6 million a decade later; in 1971 it was more than 14.7 million.

Sharifa Begum remarks in an essay35 that as many as 3.5 million people left East Pakistan for India between 1951 and 1961, the figure for 1961–1974 was placed by Sharifa Begum at 1.5 million. This underestimates the large number of Hindus and Muslims who fled that country in 1970-71 during the brutal crackdown on East Pakistan by West Pakistan. That tragedy led to the birth of Bangladesh; of nearly 10 million refugees who had left East Pakistan for security reasons, nearly 9 million returned to a new country: Bangladesh.

At least 1 million, both Hindus and Muslims, stayed back in India.

During the period after 1974, Begum also said that Bangladesh had lost substantial proportion of its population ‘during migration and the famine of 1974-75.’36