Assam’s foreign nationals’ problem needs to be sorted out urgently, for India’s sake. The situation currently brewing in the state was only to be expected, after one government spent decades not just protecting alleged illegal migrants, but also turning them into a vote bank that effectively kept them in power for ages.

What happened at Batadrava the other day, when the homes of people alleged to have been involved in the burning of the Batadrava police station were demolished, should be an unmistakable indication of a ‘zero tolerance’ policy that is becoming clear in such matters. We now have another minister being deputed to visit Barpeta in lower Assam where he has said that there too land has been illegally occupied.

There has been a series of developments over the past decades that successive governments of the past have tried to brush under the carpet. However with the political climate, and colour, of the country changing, it is becoming increasingly obvious, especially after laws such as the biased Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act being removed by the Supreme Court, that the government will draw in the net in all matters concerning illegal migrants and encroachers. Add to the current scenario the Assam government’s decision to issue identity cards to religious minorities and the picture becomes even clearer.

There was a time when alleged illegal migrants under the garb of religious ‘minorities’ called the shots electorally in a number of districts in lower Assam. Things have since changed, with the community no longer under the protective umbrella of a particular ‘secular’ party, having chosen to side with another group that was created quite to accommodate the political aspirations of one rich ‘minority’ family. With that happening, the community became increasingly identifiable, with ruling parties of the past no longer interested in them, while ruling parties of the present–both national and regional–declaring they did not want their votes.

The issue has been complicated further by ‘intellectuals’ and ‘mediapersons’ who have pulled the human rights violations card on Assam, one gentleman going as far as calling Assam’s detention camps “concentration camps” which is far from the truth as they have been put in place as per provisions of  the Indian Constitution.

What still seems to go unnoticed (at least that is how certain political parties and ‘intellectuals’ would like it to be) is the fact that the illegal migrants issue has spilled over into the rest of India. The anti-CAA movement that began in Assam, for example, spilled over onto the capital of the country, while some,  in retaliation, even threatened to cut off the Northeast from the rest of the nation as they “had the numbers”.

The only solution to all of this is that the nation now stands together and deals with the illegal migrants issue as one the country–and not a state–has to deal with, without making it a turf war in which one state pitches against another in a dangerous game of political one upmanship and electoral gains. 

(In Association with EOI)