Exclusive| “Assam Accord goes in vain if Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016 gets passed”: Tarun Gogoi

Guwahati, January 1, 2019:

Former Chief Minister of Assam, Tarun Gogoi on Tuesday said that the Assam Accord will go in vain after the Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) cleared the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016 to amend the Citizenship Act 1955 in the Parliamentary session.

Speaking to InsideNE, Gogoi said, “Although people are celebrating the first day of the New Year, but 2019 has also brought us bad news as the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016, will be tabled in the winter session of the Parliament. We must come together and oppose the bill so that the emotions of the Assamese people are not hurt. The National Register of Citizens (NRC) has already lost its value and the future of the people is in jeopardy.”

It may be mentioned that the BJP dominated JPC headed by Rajendra Agarwal on Monday has cleared the bill to be placed in the ongoing Parliamentary session, rejecting the opposition of thousands of peoples’ and organizations’ memorandums from Assam.

The bill seeks to grant citizenship to Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians the immigrated from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan after six years of residence in India instead of 12 whether they possess any proper document or not to prove their migration from these countries.

On the other hand, the Assam Accord was a Memorandum of Settlement (MoS) signed between representatives of the Government of India and the leaders of the Assam Movement in New Delhi on 15 August 1985.

A six-year agitation demanding identification and deportation of illegal immigrants was launched by the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU) in 1979. It culminated in the signing of the Assam Accord.