On a day on which Opposition parties had called a hartal in Assam to protest the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said on Tuesday that he would resign if “even one new person”, other than those who have applied for inclusion in the National Register of Citizens (NRC), gets citizenship under the Act in the state.
“Who will go and apply, calling themselves foreigners?” he asked as he insisted that “very few” people would seek citizenship under the CAA in Assam.
“All these days, the protesters have been saying that 20-25 lakh people will come in (because of the law)… Everything will be clear in 45 days because once the applications are done, it will be clearly seen in the online portal… Apart from those who had applied for the NRC, even one new person cannot come to Assam,” Sarma said in his first remarks on the matter since the Centre notified rules for implementing CAA. “If even one new person enters, the first to resign will be Himanta Biswa Sarma,” he added.
When the final list of the NRC was released in Assam in August 2019, more than 19 lakh out of the 3.3 crore applicants were excluded from it. At the time, Sarma had told The Indian Express that around 5-6 lakh of those excluded had migrated from Bangladesh due to religious persecution before 1971.
Meanwhile, earlier on Tuesday, the Assam Police moved quickly to prevent protests. In the morning, 16 Opposition leaders were served legal notices by Guwahati’s Deputy Commissioner of Police (crime), directing them to withdraw their call for the hartal and warning them of legal action if they do not do so. The hartal was called by the United Opposition Forum, which is composed of regional parties and state units of national parties opposed to the BJP.
The 16 leaders were Bhupen Borah of the Congress, Lurinjyoti Gogoi of the Asom Jatiya Parishad, Akhil Gogoi of the Raijor Dal, Bhaben Choudhury of AAP, Ripun Bora of the Trinamool Congress, Swarna Hazarika of the RJD, John Ingti Kathar of the All Party Hill People’s Conference, Charan Deka from the Purbanchaliyo Lok Parishad, Abdul Aziz of the Samajwadi Party, Parash Barua of the NCP (Sharad Pawar), Ram Narayan Singh of the Shiv Sena (UBT), Ajit Bhuiyan of the Jatiya Dal, Pankaj Kumar Das of the CPI (ML), Mihir Nandi of the All India Forward Bloc, Kanak Gogoi of the CPI, and Suprakash Talukdar of the CPI(M).
Barricades were strewn across Guwahati on Tuesday, but it was mostly business as usual in the city.
A small protest was held inside the Assam Congress headquarters in Guwahati, where members of the party burned a copy of the CAA. Despite the small scale of the protest, police personnel had been deployed in large numbers outside the office and the gate was completely barricaded by police during the course of the protest.
In Sivasagar district, multiple activists of the Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti were detained after they held a protest there.
The discontent against the CAA in Assam predates its enactment into law. The state had seen protests against the then Citizenship (Amendment) Bill from early 2019, before the last Lok Sabha election. When protests flared up in different parts of the country in December 2019, with the enactment of the CAA, Assam saw some of the most heated protests in which five people were killed.
On Tuesday, CM Sarma claimed that people who have led agitations against the Act will be proved wrong once the applications under the Act are completed. “In a few days, the people of Assam will know who were responsible for the deaths of the five martyrs,” he said, referring to the five people killed in the 2019 protests.
He also said “very few” people would apply for citizenship under the CAA in the state. “This is not even a matter of worry in Assam… It (the number of applicants) will be very few. Who will go and apply, calling themselves foreigners? In my constituency, there are somewhere around 2,000. In Barak, there might be a bit more – 50,000, 60,000, 70,000. In the Brahmaputra valley, who will go and say ‘I am a foreigner, please give me citizenship’?” he asked.
