The only blood that sub-inspector Kabir Singh Limbo has seen spilled in the Nellie area has been in very bad road accidents on National Highway 37 as traffic whizzes past. Limbo has been in charge of the tin-roofed Nellie police outpost for a year-and-a-half. During monsoons, Limbo says, parts of the highway linking Assam’s Goalpara…
The Assam agitators have taken a lot of inspiration from the RSS, reports Chaitanya Kalbag The RSS’s position on the North-East has been enunciated very clearly in a 104-page book titled What ails India’s North-East? written by Bhanu Pratap Shukla and published by Suruchi Sahitya, the Sangh’s propaganda wing. In a preface titled As I…
By Chaitanya Kalbag, Contributing writer NEW DELHI — India’s northeastern border state of Assam is waiting with trepidation for the results of a citizenship census that could have major political, sectarian and diplomatic consequences just months before the country’s next general election. The National Register of Citizens, which will identify mostly Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh…
Of the 5 million illegal immigrants in Assam, only 2,442 had been expelled between 1985 and 2012 The issue of citizenship in India has been rendered very complex by a thicket of laws, rules and executive fiats. Article 6 of the Constitution says anybody from East or West Pakistan who enters India after July 19,…
Not because it wants to solve the foreigners issue In Assam, a Chief Minister who is unpopular in her own party is being kept on, a minority government is being propped up, and the powers that be seem uninterested in solving the foreigners issue. In Manipur, the Assembly has been suspended while the Congress(I) works…
By Chaitanya Kalbag ‘One hears the echoes of the movement for an independent Bangladesh in Assam today’, said a Dacca newspaper recently. The situation in Assam and the north-east is as difficult as it is complex. Although decades of political and economic indifference have pushed the Assamese into their present agitation, the movement has already…
For Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), it is a make-or-break election in Assam. Of the four states and one union territory going to the polls in April and May, Assam is the only one where the BJP–having suffered defeats in Delhi and Bihar–stands a decent chance of snatching power. Except in…
The issue of citizenship in India has been rendered very complex by a thicket of laws, rules, and executive fiats. Article 6 of the Constitution says anybody from East or West Pakistan who enters India after July 19, 1948, must apply for citizenship. It is also governed by the Foreigners Act of 1946, the Passport…
Assam’s register of citizens is a poisoned chalice What will India do with 1.9 million illegal immigrants in Assam? The publication of the final National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam on August 31 marked the end of a mammoth six-year project, the largest winnowing of a population in our history. It might be the…