The problem of illegal migration from Bangladesh into India, and especially into its North East, brings together all the skeins of the problems that have been outlined earlier, to produce one gigantic brew of bitterness and conflict that is constantly churning and erupting and shows little or no sign of abatement. What makes any solution of it difficult is the fact that two neighbouring nation are involved, both poor—one more so than the other—with the outflow from Bangladesh being basically a strategy for survival. Matters are not helped by the scant global or even regional interest in helping India and Bangladesh do the simple things which could ease this crisis and improve conditions. The most brutal illustration of this confrontation was seen in 1983, on the rice-fields outside the little roadside town of Nellie in Assam.

Chapter Four

The Roads to Nellie

In February 1983, the Government of India and the Election Commission—at that time nothing but a compliant lapdog of the government—undertook the organization of elections to Assam’s 126 state legislature seats and fourteen seats to the Lok Sabha. The decision to hold the elections flew in the face of logic and showed crass insensitivity to local concerns and rising emotions.

Assam was a tinder-keg of hatreds and suspicions, of animosity and confrontation. For just under four years, a group of young men from the All Assam Students Union (AASU) had seized the political initiative and captured the imagination of people in the Brahmaputra Valley by picking on a theme that was to spark both fear and anger. AASU said that the original people of Assam were being marginalized by a relentless flow of illegal migrants from Bangladesh, patronized by political parties, especially the Congress Party. The immigrants, they said, were largely Muslim and their presence in Assam threatened to overwhelm the local ethnic groupings and to take political, economic and social power out of the hands of the Assamese. Citing highly inflated figures, AASU triggered spasms of protests that wrecked the local economy and virtually brought the government in the state to a halt. The Assamese, it said, were already a minority in their own land and the state would soon be consumed by Bangladesh. There were not less than four million Bangladeshis in Assam and demands were made for the deportation of those who had come to India after 1951. This demand was scaled down to post-1961 and finally to post–1971, when Bangladesh was created.

The students and their political advisors declared that Bangladesh was renewing the unfinished agenda of Partition—when Pakistan’s founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah saw Assam snatched away from under his nose by a determined effort from Assam Congressmen led by Premier Gopinath Bardoloi, who was strongly supported by Mahatma Gandhi.1