Voters’ List Revision

The process for a special summary revision has been ongoing since infiltrators—East Pakistanis and Bangladeshis—entered Assam’s electoral rolls. While the draft rolls will be published on November 12, the final rolls are scheduled to be out on January 4. The exercise will comprise, among other things, the identification and removal of duplicate entries, as well as the removal of names of deceased voters and individuals who have permanently shifted to other states. It will also include infiltrators – East Pakistanis and Bangladeshis – and the entry of names of those who have reached voting age. The team will also examine the need to set up new polling stations in areas where the total number of voters at a station exceeds the 1200 mark. The summary revision is going on since the Partition of Bengal is otherwise a regular process. However, it is important to remember that Assam’s electoral rolls have consistently been highly defective. It is widely accepted that Assam’s electoral rolls contain names of a large number of illegal migrants from erstwhile East Pakistan and present-day Bangladesh. Illegal migration to Assam has a history that dates back to India’s independence, coinciding with the establishment of East Pakistan. But a demographic invasion of Assam has been ongoing since the Partition of Bengal in 1905, when the British regime split Bengal and clubbed Assam with the newly created Eastern Bengal. In 1906, infiltrators – East Pakistanis and Bangladeshis – had infiltrated the Muslim League, which was born in Dhaka; its primary objectives included, among others, pumping in a large number of Bengali-speaking Muslims to outnumber Assam’s indigenous population and prepare ground for including Assam in Pakistan.  In the 1901 British India census, Muslims constituted about 15% of Assam’s total population; that was approximately 5.03 lakh Muslims out of the total population of the province. Though the Muslim League tried its best to include Assam in East Pakistan through the Grouping Plan in 1946, the region finally remained a part of independent India, thanks to the untiring efforts of Gopinath Bardoloi, Bhimbar Deuri and others. However, the conspiracy persisted, with a systematic influx continuing first from East Pakistan and then from Bangladesh, as the Supreme Court of India noted that Assam has been experiencing a demographic invasion that threatens India’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. It is very unfortunate that while Bardoloi and his two worthy successors, Bishnuram Medhi and Bimala Prasad Chaliha, took steps to detect and deport the illegal migrants, the subsequent Congress regimes took an exactly opposite stand and protected the infiltrators. The Congress was bent on protecting the interests of the infiltrators; this policy is best reflected in the notorious Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act, which Parliament passed in 1983 when Indira Gandhi was the Prime Minister and Hiteswar Saikia was Assam’s Chief Minister. The country in general, and the people of Assam in particular, must be occasionally reminded that a large number of infiltrators—specifically East Pakistanis and Bangladeshis—have found a place in Assam’s electoral rolls largely due to the support of successive Congress regimes. The issue came into big focus in 1978 when the Mangaldoi Lok Sabha seat fell vacant and a special revision of electoral rolls became necessary to hold a by-election. It then came to light that several thousand new names – all illegal migrants – were already in the electoral rolls. This triggered the historic Assam movement spearheaded by the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU) in 1979, which lasted till 1985. The basic demands of the Assam movement comprised three Ds – (i) detection of illegal migrants, (ii) deletion of their names from the electoral rolls, and (iii) deportation of those people from the country. It is very much on record that while the people of Assam irrespective of caste, creed, religion, language and ethnicity supported the AASU movement, the Congress and Communist parties vehemently opposed it. This is ample proof that the Congress and Communist parties were against the detection of illegal migrants in Assam. Measures taken by the Congress government to suppress the movement led to the supreme sacrifice of over 850 persons, most of them students and youth, between 1979 and 1985. Though the AASU was almost lured into signing the Assam Accord in 1985, it soon came to light that the Congress government at the Centre only resorted to hoodwinking the AASU. This newspaper, immediately after the signing of the Assam Accord, clearly pointed the issue out. This newspaper had, in the 1990s, also presented a detailed analysis of how a conspiracy is on to convert Assam into an extension of East Pakistan or Bangladesh. A report of the then Assam Governor, Gen (Retd) SK Sinha, in 1998 had also clearly proved the same. In 2006, the Supreme Court too had clearly mentioned the issue in its landmark judgement quashing the IMDT Act. No one knows exactly how many thousand or lakh illegal migrants have their names in Assam’s electoral rolls. It is in this context that the special revision is very important.