India’s Northeastern Ethnic Tinderbox

The northeastern Indian state of Assam is an ethnic tinderbox; should there be sparks, it could explode. Northeastern India is home to a vast array of ethnic groups, tribes, and cultures, spread over terrain as diverse as hills, thick jungles, and river valleys. Unlike the rest of India, much of the northeast’s population is Christian, and speaks languages related to Burmese and Tibetan, though the Assamese themselves, who inhabit a sliver of land along the Brahmaputra River, are mostly Hindu, and speak a language closely related to Bengali.

This ethnic diversity naturally has lead to tension, and is behind a recent push by the Indian government to strip 4 million people in the state of their citizenship. Due to local concerns about the ethnic balance in the state, the central government published an update, at the end of July, to the list known as the National Register of Citizens (NRC), which identifies which people were in Assam before March 24, 1971, a day before Bangladesh declared independence from Pakistan. The list was last updated in 1951.

The NRC initiative is not new, and would in fact be the fulfillment of the Assam Accord, an agreement signed by India’s then prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, and Assam’s leaders in 1985, under a deal to end unrest in the state. Under the accord, non-citizens would be deleted from electoral rolls, and deported. Between 1979 and 1985, Assam witnessed an anti-foreigner movement, led mostly by student groups, who targeted mostly Muslim Bengalis. At the height of this agitation, there were massive outbreaks of violence; in particular, on February 18, 1983, thousands of Bengalis were massacred in villages throughout Assam's central Nellie district.

The major point of contention in Assam today is whether the Muslim Bengalis of Assam are Indian citizens – more specifically, were they or their families residents of India before 1971 –  or are they refugees from Bangladesh, who immigrated to Assam for economic or political reasons, and, as such, are citizens of Bangladesh. Members of latter group are often dubbed “infiltrators” by politicians from right-wing groups and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which rules both in Assam and on the national level. Because of the porous border between India and Bangladesh, poor record-keeping, and ethnic similarities between Indian and Bangladeshi Bengalis, it is hard to differentiate Indian citizens from Bangladeshi ones. Bengalis are not native to northeast India, but have played a role in its political, economic, and cultural life since the medieval Ahom kingdom, which is why Assamese uses a variation of the Bengali script. During this era, saints from Bengal converted the rulers of nearby Manipur to Hinduism. During the British Raj, many Bengalis moved to the northeast as merchants and administrators.

The suspicion is that with national elections coming up next year, the BJP is seeking to use local tensions in order to play up its role as the protector of indigenous, tribal, or Hindu groups against the Muslim “other,” an electoral strategy that has often paid off handsomely for the party.

Nonetheless, there have also been tensions due to religion, tribe, and language, and resentment by the Assamese against Bengalis dating back to the early 20th century, when Assam was briefly united by the British with parts of Bengal in the short-lived province of East Bengal and Assam between 1905 and 1912. This stoked fears that the natives of the region, including the Assamese, and other people like the Bodo, would be swamped by Bengalis, who inhabit one of the most densely populated regions of the world. In the past few decades, there have been many riots, bordering on pogroms, such as violent clashes between the indigenous Bodo ethnic group of northwest Assam and Bengali Muslims in 2012.

Assam has already been partitioned several times; many of the other states of the northeast, such as Meghalaya, Nagaland, and Mizoram, were formed out of Assam. Complicating the ethnic makeup in Assam is the large number of ethnic Bengalis in the state, who form a large percentage of the population in some of its districts, especially the Barak Valley, where Hindu Bengalis form a slight majority. Much of the Bengali population of Assam is Muslim, like the Bengali Muslims who form the majority in neighboring Bangladesh. Around 35 percent of Assam is Muslim, around which 80 percent are Bengalis, and the rest Assamese. Of Assam’s 32 million or so people, around 48 percent speak Assamese, and 29 percent speak Bengali. Census figures are not exact, because of the tension and controversy around the linguistic demographics of the state.

That Assamese speakers are no longer the majority in Assam, their eponymous state, and have not been since at least the 2001 census, is a point of grave concern to Assamese; in no other major Indian state is the dominant linguistic group of that state not a majority. The concern among many is that the entire northeastern region of the subcontinent, including parts of western Myanmar, are becoming “Bengalized,” which is why ethnic conflict is so violent and deadly. Tensions are at an all time high, because the identity of the natives of Assam is perceived by the Assamese and other groups to be at stake. Assam is a potential tinderbox in the making, with the citizenship issue serving as a fig leaf for larger ethnic tensions in the state.

Yet, there is still hope for a peaceful resolution, and the central government itself has stated that nobody will be deported before an appeals process is exhausted. Immediate expulsion would lead to widespread violence and likely spontaneous pogroms that would further inflame tensions in the region, which nobody wants. The Bengalis also have an ally in the chief minister of the Indian state of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee, who is a self-proclaimed champion of the Bengali people, whether they be Hindu or Muslim. Banerjee has reportedly threatened “civil war” if the NRC is implemented. She is hoping to leverage an electoral advantage for her Trinamool National Congress (TNC) by playing the Bengali identity card, in hopes of countering the ideology of Hindu nationalism, which would help with containing the BJP’s advance into her state. Finally, unlike neighboring Myanmar, India is a functioning liberal democracy with an apolitical military, so it is unlikely that the state and military themselves would sponsor large-scale violence. In cases of mass violence, the Indian army has always been called in to diffuse the situation.

In all likelihood, given the bureaucratic nature of the Indian state, and the aversion of leaders around the region to another massive outbreak of violence or another refugee crisis, the new NRC list will probably never be fully implemented. Certainly 4 million people are unlikely to be deported, although many may lose the right to vote. This, in fact, would be the ideal outcome for the BJP and many Assamese politicians in that by partially making politically polarizing decisions, they improve their electoral prospects, but by delaying expulsions, they would avoid dealing with the security, political, and reputational fallout that would likely ensue. Nonetheless, tensions remain high at the ground level, and there is no guarantee that occasional outbreaks of violence, triggered by localized disputes, will stop; nor is there any guarantee that such disputes won’t rapidly escalate and lead to wider violence, regardless of the machinations of politicians. It is vital for the long term security of Assam and India’s northeast that a more durable solution be found to the ethnic conflicts brewing there, but as yet, few solutions have been put forth that satisfy all the relevant parties. Thus, tensions will continue to fester for many years.