Image for representation purposes only. File
| Photo Credit: ANI
GUWAHATI
At least 400 people, mostly from Afghanistan and Pakistan, were granted Indian citizenship under the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) of 2019 before Bangladesh-born Dulon Das.
Unlike the case of the others elsewhere in the country, his status as the first to become a beneficiary of the CAA in the northeast has triggered protests in Assam since the Centre confirmed his citizenship at 3.41 p.m. on August 13.
Several political parties and students’ organisations have slammed the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies at the Centre and in Assam for going against the spirit of the Assam Accord of 1985 to legitimise foreigners who entered the country illegally as Indians.
The CAA offers fast-track Indian citizenship to persecuted non-Muslims who entered the country from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan before December 31, 2014. In Assam, the law contradicts the 1985 accord, which allows citizenship to foreigners who have lived in the State before March 25, 1971.
The midnight of March 27, 1971, was the cut-off date for updating the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam. The complete draft of this register, published in August 2019, excluded 19.06 lakh people out of 3.3 crore applicants for failing to provide proper documents to establish their citizenship.
“Settling Hindu immigrants is in line with the BJP’s communal agenda for votes, even if it means going against an accord the people of Assam are sentimental about. Our party wants the Assam Accord to be implemented in letter and spirit so that all post-1971 foreigners are detected and deported,” senior Congress leader and MLA Debabrata Saikia said.
“The citizenship to a man from Bangladesh is an insult to the indigenous people, specifically the 855 people who sacrificed their lives during the six-year Assam Agitation that led to the Assam Accord. It is all the more painful because the citizenship was granted ahead of India’s 78th Independence Day and the 39th anniversary of the accord,” Lurinjyoti Gogoi, the president of Assam Jatiya Parishad, a Congress ally, said.
After the rules of the CAA were notified in March, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said the number of people to take the CAA route to citizenship in the State would be negligible. He also ridiculed Opposition parties and pressure groups for claiming the CAA would open the floodgates for at least 2 crore Bangladeshi nationals.
“This is not about how many people will become Indians through the CAA. This is about the concerns of the indigenous people already burdened with those who came in droves between 1947 and March 1971. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other BJP leaders have betrayed the Assamese people,” All Assam Students’ Union (AASU) president Utpal Sarma said.
The AASU and the Assam Jatiyatabadi Yuba Chhatra Parishad had spearheaded the anti-foreigner Assam Agitation of 1979-1985.
The 50-year-old Dulon Das, who entered India illegally in 1988 from Bangladesh’s Sylhet district, has been living in Silchar, the nerve centre of the Bengali-dominated Barak Valley in southern Assam. Among the documents he submitted with his CAA application in April was a land deed in the name of his father, who purchased a plot of land in Sylhet’s Borogram village in 1986.
Silchar-based lawyer Dharmananda Deb said Mr. Das did not apply for the NRC but neither had he any case pending against him at any Foreigners’ Tribunal nor was he marked a doubtful voter. He was registered as a voter in 2007 and received his voter identity card in 2013.
A driver by profession, Mr. Das also acquired PAN and Aadhaar cards and purchased a plot of land in Silchar. He married an Indian woman and the couple has two sons.
His brother and sister, who followed him to India, are applying for citizenship under CAA too, Mr. Deb said.
