Assam Movement
The Assam Movement, also known as the Anti-Foreigners Agitation, was a popular uprising in Assam, India, from 1979 to 1985, that demanded the Government of India detect, disenfranchise and deport illegal aliens. Led by All Assam Students Union and All Assam Gana Sangram Parishad the movement defined a six-year period of sustained civil disobedience campaigns, political instability and widespread ethnic violence. The movement ended in 1985 with the Assam Accord.
It was known since 1963 that foreign nationals had been improperly added to electoral rolls—and when the draft enrollments in Mangaldoi showed high number of non-citizens in 1979 AASU decided to campaign for thoroughly revised electoral rolls in the entire state of Assam by boycotting the 1980 Lok Sabha election. The Indira Gandhi government that followed could not accept the demands of the movement leaders as it came at considerable political cost and the movement escalated to economic blockades, oppression, violent pogroms and lasting ethnic conflict. The political nature of this movement was heavily debated among scholars in the journal Economic and Political Weekly. The accord became possible under the Rajiv Gandhi ministry when the emphasis was on negotiation and compromise which both sides made, and particularly because Rajiv Gandhi was less concerned with Congress 's electoral fortunes.
The Assam Accord did not resolve the problem of foreigners' names in electoral rolls because the Illegal Migrants Act, 1983 passed by Indira Gandhi's government soon after the disastrous 1983 elections made it practically impossible to prove anyone in Assam was an illegal alien.
Background
Political Demography of Assam
| Period | Estimate | Type |
| 1947–1951 | 274,000 | Refugee |
| 1951–1961 | 221,000 | Muslim Pakistani |
| 1961–1971 | 424,000 | Muslim Pakistani |
| 1971–1981 | 1,800,000 | All immigrants |
| Period | Estimate |
| 1961 | 295,785 |
| 1971 | 698,199 |
| 1991 | 2,121,770 |
| 2001 | 4,235,124 |
Assam, a Northeast Indian state, has been the fastest growing region in the Indian subcontinent for much of the 20th century with the population growing six-fold till the 1980s as against less than three-fold for India. Since the natural growth rate of Assam has been found to be less than the national rate, the difference can only be attributed to a net immigration.
Immigration in the 19th century was driven by British colonialism—tribal and low castes were brought in from central India to work as labourers in tea gardens and educated Hindu Bengalis from Bengal to fill administrative and professional positions. The largest group, Muslims peasants from Mymensingh, immigrated after about 1901—and they settled in Goalpara in the first decade and further up the Brahmaputra Valley in the next two decades. These major groups were joined by other smaller groups that settled as traders, merchants, bankers, moneylenders, and small industrialists. Yet another community who had settled in Assam were Nepali dairy farmers.
The British dismantled the older Ahom system, made Bengali the official language, and placed Hindu Bengalis in colonial administrative positions. By 1891 one-fourth of the population of Assam was of migrant origin. Assamese nationalism, which grew by the beginning of the 20th century, began to look at both the Hindu Bengalis as well as the British as alien rulers. The emerging Assamese literate class aspired to the same positions as those enjoyed by the Bengali Hindus, mostly from Sylhet.
The Bengali Muslims, who came in mainly from Mymensingh, were cultivators who occupied flood plains and cleared forests. They were not in conflict with the Assamese and did not align with the Bengali Hindus. In fact the Assamese elite encouraged their settlement. In the post-partition period as Assamese nationalists tried to dismantle Bengali Hindu dominance from the colonial period, the tea garden labourers as well as the Muslim Bengalis supported them. Ever mindful of being the neighbour of the populous and culturally dominant Bengali people, the Assamese were alarmed that immigration not only had continued illegally in the post-independence period but that illegal immigrants were being included in electoral rolls.
Cross-border immigration
Immigration from East Bengal to Assam became cross-border in character following the Partition of India—the 1951 census records 274,000 refugees between 1947 and 1951, most of who are estimated to be Hindu Bengalis. On the basis of a natural growth rate, it was estimated that the immigrants numbered 221,000 between 1951 and 1961. In 1971, the surplus over the natural growth was 424,000 and the estimated illegal immigrants from 1971 to 1981 was 1.8 million.Immigration of Muslims from East Pakistan continued—though they declared India as the birth country and Assamese as their language, they recorded their religion correctly. As the immigration issue was growing the immigrant Muslims from Bengal supported the Assamese language movement—by accepting the Assamese language, supporting the official language act in contrast to the Bengali Hindus who opposed it, and casting their votes for the Congress.
Legal Instruments
The Assam Movement involved a tussle over the determination of immigrants, refugees and citizens as defined in their legal contexts. At the time of the Partition of India in 1947 when British India was divided into India and Pakistan the legal instrument prevalent that determined foreigners was the colonial-era The Foreigners Act, 1946. The law that determined Indian citizenship, The Citizenship Act 1955, was enacted a few years later in the context of the Constitution of India. In addition to these instruments, Assam had the National Register of Citizens for Assam which was based on the 1951 census; no other Indian state had a similar document. At that time Assam constituted nearly the entire contiguous Northeast India and included the present-day Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Mizoram and Meghalaya though it did not include Manipur and Tripura.There were a number of attempts by the government to change the mechanisms of detecting foreigners or the meaning of Indian citizenship. In 1983 the Congress government enacted the Illegal Migrants Act that modified the mechanism of determining foreigners in Assam, while keeping the old mechanism intact in the rest of the country. After the Supreme Court of India declared the Act unconstitutional in 2005, the government attempted to change the mechanism once again the same year, which too was declared unconstitutional the next year. The NRC was revised under the supervision of the Supreme Court of India and the final draft created in 2019. In 2019 the BJP government enacted the Citizenship Act, 2019 which created pathways to citizenship for immigrants of all religions except Islam, and since have refused to accept the draft NRC as a legal document.
Foreigners' Tribunals, 1964
After the 1961 census, the Registrar General of India estimated, with inputs from intelligence reports, that there were about 220,000 "infiltrators" in Assam from East Pakistan. In 1962 the central government devolved its power to detect foreigners in Assam to district police and administrative heads and created Border Police units in some districts. In 1964 the Foreigners Order was enacted that created a mechanism to verify the citizenship of suspected infiltrators; and though tribunals could be created anywhere in the country, they were used primarily in Assam. At first four tribunals were created—in the undivided districts of Goalpara, Kamrup, Darrang and Nawgong where most infiltrants from East Pakistan were expected to have settled—but by 1968 the number had gone up to nine. In these tribunals the hearings were conducted by a single person, usually a magistrate, an officer who then had both executive and judicial powers. Many of the suspected infiltrators were the illiterate poor and the big landowners, who benefited from the cheap labour they provided, gave them legal aid to defend themselves at the tribunals. Among the many criteria determining the citizenship of the accused, oral affidavits by locally known citizens and inclusion in the electoral rolls were two.In 1965, during the run up to the Indo-Pakistani war, the Government of India directed the Assam Government to expel Pakistani infiltrators but the implementation had to be given up when a number of Assam legislators threatened to resign. These tribunals were finally shut foen in 1972 on the claim of most infiltrators being caught; and also because after the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971 the adversarial East Pakistan was replaced by Bangladesh, a friendly nation.
Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act, 1983
In the wake of the violence in the 1983 elections, the Indian government, led by Indira Gandhi, enacted the IM Act. This act was applicable only in Assam, whereas the rest of the country followed The Foreigners Act, 1946—the key difference was that whereas the onus of the proof of citizenship was with the accused, the IMDT Act put the onus of proof on the accuser. The Supreme Court of India repealed it in July 2005 as unconstitutional based on a public interest litigation filled by Sarbananda Sonowal, a former AASU student leader. In response, the Government of India passed the Foreigners Order, 2005. This too was set aside by the Supreme Court in 2006.Foreign nationals in electoral rolls
The Indian Ministry of External Affairs in 1963 reported for the first time that foreigners were being enlisted in Indian voters list by politically interested parties. remarks that ironically the position of the report is remarkably similar to the position taken by the Assam movement leaders at the end of the next decade. In August 1975, the Home Ministry had instructed the state governments to use criminal investigation departments to identify illegal aliens in electoral rolls. In October 1978 S. L. Shakdhar declared foreigners' names were being included in electoral rolls in a large scale and that this was done at the demand of political parties—a claim repeated by a cabinet minister in the Rajya Sabha in November 1978.These reports were noticed in Assam—AASU included "expulsion of foreigners" in their sixteen-point charter of demands in July 1978; and after Shakdher's announcement in October 1978 it called for a three-day program of protest demanding "reservation of 80 percent jobs for locals".