There have been several hurdles in the implementation of the Act. One clause specified that the complainant should live near the suspect and deposit twenty-five rupees to back up the complaint. This was later reduced to ten rupees. This was an extraordinary clause and stood the concept of laws governing foreigners elsewhere in the world on its head: the complainant and not the person complained against was being put in the dock! The declared objective of the clause was to prevent the filing of frivolous complaints. But it appeared that the Congress Party, whose government had introduced the Act, did not have any intention of implementing it.

As the fears of the agitators grew, minority groups—and these included both Hindus and Muslims of the Bengali ilk—joined hands and formed a political party, the United Minorities Front under the leadership of a former Congressman, Ghulam Osmani. Osmani was also a prominent lawyer in the Guwahati High Court.

The Congress and UMF were the most prominent opponents of AASU’s policies and politics because they felt politically challenged. There were others too who opposed the movement on ideological grounds. These included the leftist parties, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Communist Party of India. Those holding the middle ground like the Janata Party virtually abdicated their role and took shelter behind AASU. The state’s political canvas was essentially divided between those for detection and deportation, however far-fetched these may appear now, and those against.

At this point it would be appropriate to consider the context in which these developments were taking place: the changes in the demographic composition of Assam leading up to the 1980s.

A Little Bit of History

Assam was a part of the Bengal Presidency between 1826 and 1873. For another thirty-one years, until 1905, it remained a province without a legislature. The Partition of Bengal by Lord Curzon in that year disrupted the system and Dacca became the capital of East Bengal and Assam. This did not last long and in 1911, the Partition was annulled amid protests from anti-partition groups. Assam reverted to being a chief commissioner’s province.

In the following years, Assamese nationalists expressed their concern over the unchecked immigration from East Bengal. The British were prevailed upon to introduce the Line System. Under this system, a line was drawn which segregated those areas where migration was allowed from the rest of the territory. A Colonisation Scheme was set up in 1928 to back up the Line System but the effectiveness of both steps was questionable. In an unpublished paper, Virender Singh Jafa, a former Chief Secretary of Assam, was to say5 that the ‘failure of both measures was evident as the immigrant settlers from East Bengal were in occupation of 37.7 per cent of land by 1936 in Nowgong District alone.’ In the space of a decade, the population of settlers from East Bengal rose from 300,000 to half a million or an increase of 200,000 from 1921 to 1931 in Nowgong.