MOIRABARI (India): For more than two months, Sarifa Begum has been a virtual prisoner in her small neighbourhood on the banks of the mighty Brahmaputra river in Assam. Like many Muslim settlers in Assam, Sarifa Begum is living in fear of deportation — or even death. The gaunt 42-year-old has lost her job as a housemaid and is struggling to feed her family.
“We are starving because I can’t go out to work,” said Sarifa Begum, a mother of four children and her family’s only breadwinner. “We are the targets of ethnic Assamese. They will kill us if they get a chance.”
Sarifa’s forefathers were among hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants who moved from former East Pakistan to Assam decades ago in search of a better life.
Local Assamese resented the influx, and tensions boiled over in 1983 when Assamese, led by student leaders, killed some 3,000 Muslim settlers.
In response to that massacre, the Indian government granted citizenship in 1985 to all settlers from the former East Pakistan who came to Assam before 1971.
In a stroke, millions of migrants became Indian citizens. But hundreds of thousands of others, who came after 1971, remained illegal.
WAVES OF MIGRANTS: Since then, hundreds of thousands more have swamped Assam, trying to escape grinding poverty in Bangladesh. They have strained resources in the oil-rich tea-growing state of Assam, and tensions have fuelled several ethnic insurgencies.
Compounding the plight of Muslim migrants is the fact the national register of citizenship has not been updated in Assam since 1970. Many migrants fear that whatever documents they possess will not be recognized.
Sarifa Begum, herself, has an Indian birth certificate, but says some Assamese groups have dismissed it as a forgery, a common complaint among legal migrants, many of whom are now calling for identity cards.
In May, in response to the authorities’ failure to get to grips with the problem, ethnic Assamese groups began a new campaign to oust illegal settlers. The campaign has seen thousands of Muslims flee their homes and threatened to snare millions of legal Muslim settlers like Ms Sarifa.
The lush paddy fields and the sandy, shifting plains of the Brahmaputra that divide India and Bangladesh are natural transit routes. Hundreds take rickety boats each week to cross the river, which at some places is five kilometres wide, into India.
The legal migrants, who now form almost 30 per cent of Assam’s 26 million population, are mainly farmhands or fishermen in rural areas. In towns, they work in construction, as rag-pickers, rickshaw pullers or maids.
Despite spending years as neighbours, many ethnic Assamese and migrant Muslims view each other with unease and the settlers find safety living among their own.
LEGAL SHIELD WITHDRAWN: Matters may become worse for the settlers after India’s highest court this month scrapped a law that made deportation difficult because it put the onus of proving a suspect migrant’s citizenship on the complainant.
The law was framed in 1983 to prevent a witch-hunt against legal Muslim settlers, but ethnic Assamese say it ended up protecting illegal migrants.
With that legal shield gone, Muslim settlers are apprehensive.
“We are afraid, today or tomorrow, we will be kicked out of Assam,” said Nasiruddin Ahmed, a 90-year-old retired college principal whose family came to Assam from East Bengal, now Bangladesh, more than a century ago.
“We hardly move out of our settlements after dark,” added Fozili Rahman, a cook who came to India before 1971.
Legal settlers, who say they face discrimination and persecution because of their origins, are campaigning for identity cards so they can prove their Indian citizenship.
“We have been here for generations, but our persecution hasn’t stopped. Let there be some way of telling the legal migrants from illegal settlers,” said Haroon Rashid, chief of a Muslim students’ organization.
In 2002, India’s then home minister Lal Krishna Advani of the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party said there were 20 million illegal Bangladeshis in India, calling them a security risk. Assam’s authorities and student leaders insist that naturalized citizens will be protected.
But human rights activists fear an escalation in violence.
“Immediate measures are required to assure security for all,” said human rights lawyer Hafiz Choudhury. —Reuters
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