Harass Miyas: Why Himanta Biswa Sarma’s unconstitutional appeal is Assam’s survival mantra  

The sentence came without disguise. “We want to steal some votes of Miyas,” Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said, not as an aside but as intent. “Miyas should actually not even be able to vote here; they should vote in Bangladesh.” This was not rhetoric reaching for applause. It was power speaking aloud, unconcerned with echo or consequence.

He went further. “I myself have told the BJP people that they should keep giving complaints… so that they have to run around a little, are troubled.” Trouble, he made clear, was not collateral damage. It was the objective. The suffering, he suggested, should be intimate and everyday. “In a rickshaw, if the fare is Rs 5, give them Rs 4. If they complain, “Assam police know what to do.”

From a sheltered distance, such words produce instant outrage. But outrage belongs to safe places. In a jungle, when a tiger appears, morality collapses into instinct. You can run and hope to live, be killed, or kill. There is no right or wrong, only survival. Sarma’s language was not meant for an ideal republic governed by law and restraint. It belongs to a politics that sees itself in the jungle, staring at a tiger, convinced that only force can decide who remains standing.

In Assam, the Miyas are the tiger. 

Let us first clarify who the Miyas of Assam are. The term Miya does not refer to all Muslims. It is a pejorative label used specifically for Bangla-speaking Muslims who are immigrants from Bangladesh. While population movement from what was once East Bengal, later East Pakistan, into Assam predates Independence, the Partition of India decisively altered its legal status. After 1947, such migration became illegal.

None of these migrants entered India with visas or applied for citizenship through lawful channels. Ask yourself a simple question: if you wish to visit Bangladesh or Pakistan today, do you apply for a visa or do you quietly cross the border in the dead of night? If the former is the only acceptable option for Indians, why should India legitimise those who slip across its borders illegally? And let us not forget a basic fact—Assam is a state of India.

Once these migrants entered Assam clandestinely, many were regularised through a corrupt state machinery that produced identity papers in exchange for bribes. Once such documentation exists, citizenship becomes legally irreversible. Paper, in India, has extraordinary power. With it, the right to reside becomes almost untouchable.

At this point, a familiar counter-argument arises: what is so alarming about refugees crossing borders? Migration, after all, is a global and historical phenomenon. Refugees deserve compassion and dignity. That is true. But the question that is often brushed aside is this: what about those who bear the consequences of this influx? What are they expected to do—silently watch themselves turn into a minority in their own land?

Interestingly, this fear was first articulated not by an Assamese nationalist but by a British official. In 1931, C.S. Mullan, Superintendent of the Census, wrote words that now read as uncannily prescient: “Probably the most important event in the province during the last 25 years, likely to alter permanently the whole structure of Assamese culture and civilisation, has been the invasion of a vast horde of land-hungry Bengali immigrants, mostly Muslims from the districts of eastern Bengal.”

Mullan’s assessment was not rhetorical; it was numerical. Muslims formed barely 9 per cent of Assam’s population in 1881. This rose to 19 per cent by 1931 and 23 per cent by 1941.

The influx soon acquired institutional backing. In 1939, the provincial government of Assam, led by Sayeed Mohammed Saadullah, opened grazing reserves to settle immigrants under the banner of a “Grow More Food” campaign. During a visit to Assam in 1943, Lord Wavell, the British Viceroy, cut through the euphemism. The real objective, he observed, was not food but demography: “Grow More Muslims.”

At that time, nothing about this was illegal. India was still undivided. But independence changed the rules. In response to widespread allegations of continued illegal immigration from East Pakistan, Assam prepared the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in 1951, based on that year’s census. The exercise revealed that nearly 1.5 million illegal immigrants, about one-sixth of Assam’s population, were living in the state. What happened to them thereafter remains undocumented.

In 1963, the Registrar General of Census reported that 2,20,691 illegal immigrants had infiltrated Assam. The situation intensified after the 1971 India-Pakistan war and the creation of Bangladesh. The 1971 Census recorded an increase of 8,20,000 Muslims in Assam—4,24,000 more than what could be explained by natural population growth. In 2004, the then Minister of State for Home Affairs, Sriprakash Jaiswal, informed the Rajya Sabha that India housed 1,20,53,950 illegal Bangladeshi immigrants, five million of whom were in Assam. 

A year later, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court—headed by Chief Justice R.C. Lahoti—made a scathing observation:  “The presence of such a large number of illegal migrants from Bangladesh, which runs into millions, is in fact an aggression on the state of Assam and has also contributed significantly to serious internal disturbances in the shape of insurgency of alarming proportions.”

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One statistic proved politically explosive. Assam’s voter base grew by almost 50 per cent in less than a decade—from 5.7 million in 1970 to over 8.5 million in 1979. This triggered the six-year Assam Agitation against illegal infiltration, culminating in the Assam Accord. The Accord mandated updating the 1951 NRC but fixed March 1971 as the cut-off date. In effect, Assam agreed to absorb all migrants who entered between 1951 and 1971 as Indian citizens.

If one is tempted to dismiss this as a chauvinist Hindu Assamese narrative against Muslims, an inconvenient fact intervenes. In 2012, a petition was filed in the Supreme Court by Motiur Rahman, an Assamese Muslim. He argued that the 1971 cut-off would legitimise millions of foreigners who entered Assam after 1951, threatening the survival of indigenous communities.

That’s the point. This is not a Hindu-Muslim conflict. It is a battle between the indigenous and the illegal.

How, then, does one define who is indigenous and who is illegal? Where should the cut-off lie? Set aside historical numbers and examine the most recent census. Between 2001 and 2011, Assam added 45.5 lakh people. Of these, 24.4 lakh were Muslims and only 18.8 lakh Hindus. In simple terms, for every 100 people added to Assam’s population, 54 were Muslims and 41 were Hindus. This is striking because Muslims constituted only 31 per cent of the population in 2001, while Hindus made up 65 per cent. Population experts will tell you that such a pattern is biologically implausible without external inflows.

For the record, Assam’s Hindu population fell from 73 per cent in 1951 to 61 per cent in 2011, while the Muslim share rose from 24 per cent to 34 per cent—making Assam the state with the highest proportion of Muslims in India. Between 2001 and 2011, India’s Muslim population rose modestly from 13.4 per cent to 14.2 per cent. In Assam, however, it jumped from 30.9 per cent to 34.2 per cent. No other Indian state, even those with significant Muslim population, shows a comparable trajectory. Elsewhere, population growth has been driven by citizens. In Assam, it has been propelled by imports. That’s why Assamese-speaking Muslims remain numerically miniscule and feel as threatened by Bangla-speaking immigrants as any other indigenous group.

The NRC exercise of 2019 proved a dump squib. Only 1.9 million people were excluded, far fewer than earlier estimates. Less than half of them were Bangla-speaking Muslims of Bangladeshi origin. Why? Because most illegal migrants had already acquired identity documents and entered voter rolls through well-oiled illegal nexuses.

If most Miyas are legally documented citizens, can a chief minister legally encourage their harassment? Certainly not. Constitutionally and legally, such an exhortation is indefensible.

But the same Constitution and legal framework failed to prevent illegal immigrants from becoming citizens because Indian officials abandoned due diligence and converted paperwork into a weapon of fraud. The situation resembles a courtroom where everyone knows who committed the crime, but without evidence, there can be no conviction.

Human rights advocates insist—correctly—that immigrants, even illegal ones, deserve dignity. What this argument often overlooks is that indigenous people are human too. Refugees flee persecution, but Bangladesh-to-Assam migration has been overwhelmingly economic. Assamese resentment stems from an assault on land, resources and culture.

To be fair to Miyas, they are extremely industrious. They excel in most professions they enter. While earlier generations laboured in fields and construction sites, younger ones are succeeding in academics, sports and professional domains. Indigenous enterprise, by contrast, has often lagged. For decades, Miyas ran rickshaws, tilled land and built houses cheaply, and society did not object. That is why Sarma can ask people to pay less but cannot ask them to stop using Miya-driven rickshaws. Without them, people would simply have to walk.

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What Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma is now advocating is, in effect, economic apartheid. His strategy is to attack the economic incentive that draws Miyas to Assam. The Chief Minister has repeatedly called for the economic and social marginalisation of Miyas, urging citizens not to sell land to them, rent houses to them, or employ them, and calling on businesses to reserve jobs, housing, transport work, and urban commercial spaces exclusively for Assamese youth. He has made it clear that his government would deliberately create utpaat (disruptions) for Miyas, while staying within the bounds of the law. 

The logic is blunt. If legal reversal is impossible, make settlement unattractive. Eviction drives, crackdowns on child marriage and polygamy, and now making entry to electoral rolls difficult are designed to make Assam uncomfortable for Miyas. Undoubtedly, it is an electorally potent narrative for the BJP chief minister, but it also aligns with the larger interest of genuinely legal citizens of Assam.

It is his answer to a fundamental question that even the Constitution offers no clear reply: why should Assam shelter citizens of another country who entered India illegally, bypassing every lawful process? The answer doesn’t pass constitutional muster, but Assam has yet to discover a better one. The only risk is that this approach should not be conveniently forgotten after the Assembly elections this spring.