With the Assam government on November 25 tabling the Tribhuvan Prasad Tewary Commission and T U Mehta Commission reports on the 1983 Nellie massacre, the Himanta Biswa Sarma government seems to be preparing the ground for a frontal attack on the Congress over its “failure” to stop undocumented migration from Bangladesh. Leader of the Opposition Debabrata Saikia of the Congress has alleged the reports were placed in the Assembly to further “communalise the prevailing situation” in the state.
The Nellie massacre of February 18, 1983, was the most violent flashpoint of the Assam agitation against undocumented migration from Bangladesh, taking place over several hours. The official death toll was 1,800 — mostly Bengali-origin Muslims — but the unofficial figure is 3,000. While 668 FIRs were registered in two months, nobody was arrested.
The BJP has always pointed out that it is the only party apart from the Asom Gana Parishad to have consistently flagged “illegal immigration” from Bangladesh, as L K Advani wrote in his 2008 autobiography, My Country My Life. He recalled that Atal Bihari Vajpayee had flagged “infiltration” from East Pakistan as a newly elected Jana Sangh MP in the Lok Sabha in 1957. In 1980, at the founding session of the BJP in Mumbai, Vajpayee laid the blame for the Assam agitation on the Congress, which, he said, encouraged “infiltration” for selfish motives.
Advani believed that the genesis of the problem lay in the attempt of the Muslim League of Jinnah to “infiltrate” Assam from East Bengal before the Partition to claim it as part of Pakistan, something that could happen only in the case of Sylhet district and not the rest of Assam due to the efforts of nationalist leader from Assam, Gopinath Bordoloi.
He added that while a few Congress leaders in the state attempted to address “infiltration” after Independence, they ultimately reversed their stance because the central leadership wasn’t interested.
In the early 1980s, as the Assam agitation raged, Vajpayee, Advani, and Jaswant Singh visited the state to flag “infiltration” from Bangladesh. The party, which was a small and new entity at the time, also boycotted the 1983 Assembly elections in Assam.
It opposed the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act, 1983, for Assam — it was also part of the Assam Accord of 1985 — on the ground that the onus to prove before the tribunal that a person was a foreigner lay with the authorities, unlike under the Foreigners Act, where the onus is on the suspected foreigner to prove their citizenship. The IMDT Act was later struck down by the Supreme Court in 2005, as it was “ineffective”. The court struck down the law, acting on a petition by former Assam CM and current Union Minister Sarbananda Sonowal.
The BJP from the outset also had reservations about the Assam Accord as it believed that 1951, instead of 1971, should be the cut-off date for citizenship. “Shockingly, by fixing 1971 as the cut-off year, the Accord accepted the illegal immigrants infiltrating between 1951 and 1971 as genuine citizens of India,” Advani wrote in his autobiography.
While Union Minister of State for Home Affairs Sriprakash Jaiswal in July 2004 told the Rajya Sabha that 1,20,53,950 illegal Bangladeshis were living in India, including 50 lakh in Assam, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh went on record to contradict the minister, Advani wrote.
BJP stand in subsequent years
Over the years, the BJP has kept bringing up the Nellie massacre. Current Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, then a party spokesperson, wrote in The Asian Age on July 14, 2012, that the Congress was to blame for not doing anything to stop undocumented immigration and going ahead with the 1983 elections that ultimately led to the violence.
“They (the Congress) looked the other way when the Assam agitation was raging in the early 1980s. The agitation demanded that the electoral rolls be cleansed of the ‘illegal immigrants’ before holding the elections in 1983. In fact, over the decades, the Congress has attempted to regularise the illegal settlements as it was consistent with their vote bank-based politics,” she wrote.
In 2012, when violence broke out between the Bodos and Bengali-speaking Muslims in Assam, the BJP brought out a booklet titled “Congress Responsible for Assam Bloodbath”. This 64-page booklet contained a statement Advani made in Guwahati on July 31, 2012; an article by then Kamal Sandesh (BJP mouthpiece) editor Prabhat Jha; a statement by RSS leader Suresh “Bhaiyyaji” Joshi calling for detection, deletion, and deportation of all “Bangladeshi infiltrators”; and articles by Ram Jethmalani, Swapan Dasgupta, Tathagata Roy, General Shankar Roychowdhury, among others.
The Nellie massacre was referred to five times in the booklet, with the publisher’s note signed by the BJP as an organisation saying, “Despite the infamous Nellie massacre … and the Assam Accord of 1985, no serious efforts had been made to identify and deport the illegal infiltrators”.
In its August 16-31, 2012, issue, Kamal Sandesh also focused on the Assam situation. Its report recalled the Nellie massacre, calling it the “biggest genocide” in Indian history, and added that the massacre and the Assam agitation of 1979-85 forced the government to sign the Assam Accord, which remained a dead letter as only a few hundred undocumented immigrants were deported.