What’s behind this peculiarly fractured response to the CAA from Assam?

Two valleys, two responses

Assam, broadly, is divided into two riverine valleys: Brahmaputra Valley in the north, and Barak Valley in the south. Both are multi-religious and multi-ethnic sub-regions. But, Brahmaputra Valley is dominated by caste Hindu Assamese-speaking groups who have traditionally controlled the state’s mainstream politics, while Barak Valley is partly dominated by Bengali Hindus who have limited leverage in statewide politics.

This skewed ethno-linguistic dynamic between the two valleys is directly linked to the dichotomous response to the CAA from within Assam. Assamese nationalists in the Brahmaputra Valley oppose it, not because it excludes Muslims, but because it includes Hindus. Bengali Hindus in Barak support the act for the same reason. Such is the strange inversion of citizenship politics in Assam.

This divide, however, is neither new nor limited to a single act. For decades, the two valleys have remained psychologically distant from one another — not in dissonance with the painful history of the colonial partition of the Indian subcontinent that awkwardly sliced up Barak Valley into disparate pieces through the Sylhet Referendum of July 6, 1947. The stage-managed exercise fractured a single Sylheti homeland, resulting in a steady trickle of Bengali Hindus to Barak Valley in the following decades.

Many of these Bengali Hindus in Barak with familial legacies in Sylhet eventually fell through the gaps of Assam’s convoluted citizenship determination process made up of the Doubtful (D-) Voter system, Foreigners Tribunals and most recently, the National Register of Citizens (NRC), whose Supreme Court-sanctioned final draft was published in 2019. Therefore, when the BJP brought in the CAA, the community saw it as a lifesaver.

However, the Assamese nationalists of the Brahmaputra Valley see the CAA as an affront to their political legacy. For them, it does what they sought to end for good in 1947: the rising socio-demographic dominance of the Bengali Hindu community in Assam. In that sense, the act revives the ghosts of the Sylhet Partition and in turn, widens the chasm between the two valleys. Not just that, it stands to sour the delicate relationship between the Bengali Hindus and Muslims within Barak Valley itself.

Will anti-CAA sentiments derail BJP in Assam?

In 2016, the BJP won Assam, a state where it had scant presence until then, through cautious social engineering and shrewd political manoeuvring under the nimble leadership of the current chief minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma. Among other things, it successfully managed to co-opt Assamese nationalism into its saffron project. But, the CAA throws a wrench into the works.

The act reaffirms a certain perception within the Assamese nationalists of Brahmaputra Valley that the BJP favours Bengali Hindus over them. They wouldn’t be wrong per se. Long before the party entered Dispur, it had a strong presence in Barak Valley where the powerful Bengali Hindu vote bank ensured its lingering presence. Observers have pointed out how the BJP formed its Cachar district unit in the early 1980s even before it set up the core Assam unit.

Since then, however, the party, with help from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), has cast its net wide over Assam in an attempt to saffronise Brahmaputra Valley. To a large extent, it has been able to use the pan-India Hindutva rhetoric to transform Assamese ethnonationalism that is inherently pitted against both Bengali Hindus and Muslims into an exclusively anti-Bengali Muslim (pejoratively known as “Miya”) political project. The party’s ability to manage and eventually subdue Assam’s anti-CAA protests of 2019 shows this.

But, the ongoing protests by Assamese nationalist groups, such as the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU), show that Assamese nationalism in its original form remains alive in the state. It could potentially end up derailing the BJP’s seemingly unstoppable political journey in Assam. But, the party’s dominance in national politics, CM Himanta Biswa Sarma’s political acuity, fractured Assamese opposition, and the state government’s harsh response to street protests will ensure that doesn’t happen anytime soon.

Angshuman Choudhury is an Associate Fellow with the Centre for Policy Research and focuses on Northeast India and Myanmar. The views expressed are personal.