Religion is a factor although the Assamese-speaking Muslims (who are converts going back only a few centuries) or Assamese-speaking Sikhs are largely exempt from this rule. Thus, Bengali-speaking Muslims, both by language and religion, are prime suspects as these factors are common to the majority of the population of Bangladesh. In addition, the Bengalis have long been resented by various linguistic and ethnic groups in the Brahmaputra Valley as a group which allied with British colonizers to undercut Assamese interests. It is part of public memory that Bengali officers helped to inflict Bengali as the official language on the province briefly before American Baptist missionaries, with the publication of the first Assamese language magazine, Orunodoi (meaning Sunrise), persuaded the British that Assamese was a separate language which should be used for official purposes in the province of its birth.

Nationality is not viewed as a gift bestowed by the Indian Constitution but one that owes more to customs stemming from a group’s view of history, however small or narrow that vision may be. Such a historical approach is also determined by oral traditions of the community, passed down several generations.

All these came into play during the anti-immigrant movement in Assam of the 1980s. The agitators took the line that Bangladeshi Muslims were pouring across porous borders and the Government of India was disinterested in the issue.

1980s and Agitation

The Government of Assam, then run by a portly Socialist named Golap Borbora, appeared unable to shake itself out of a daze. The students called the shots and negotiated directly with the prime minister.

Ah o ah

Ulai ah

Khed oh khed

Bidekhik khed

(Come, come

Come out of your homes

Chase, chase

Chase the foreigner away)

This pithy slogan became the rallying point of every meeting, the call to arms of every procession and protest, during daytime or with mashaals or torches at night; of pickets and sitdown demonstrations outside oil refineries and government offices. Schools and colleges closed for weeks at a time: the students were all out at pickets and protests, ignoring their studies, a decision that many of them later rued.

The atmosphere was electric, crackling with excitement and the romance of passion, of conviction. The student leaders appeared to be setting the agenda and forcing the government to yield, time and again. Curfews were declared and defied, forcing administrators to withdraw their orders.

Assam lurched from round to round of confrontation but Prime Minister Indira Gandhi refused to budge. Talk in practical terms, she told the agitators in several rounds of talks in New Delhi and Assam. Agree to 1971 as the ‘cut off year’, she said, the year of the Bangladesh war when Indian troops, aided by Bengali liberation fighters known as the Mukti Bahini, crushed Pakistani troops, forcing their ignominious defeat within a few weeks of the outbreak of war.