In Assam, the spectre of the ill-famed NRC updating exercise continues to haunt the state Government and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leadership. Authorities are deeply embarrassed over the shocking exposure of how an innocent family at Sonitpur district has been victimised by the brutal, insensitive ways of the state administration. Family members of Dulal Chandra Paul, 66, of Sonitpur who died last Sunday while in detention as a foreigner, have now refused to accept his body for cremation. Instead, they have urged upon the State Government to send it to Bangladesh!
Along with thousands of others in Assam, Dulal Paul was somehow deemed an illegal ‘Bangladeshi foreigner’ by National Register of Citizen(NRC) updating authorities. Ironically, nobody else in his family including son Ashis, was subjected to similar indignities. They duly found their names included in the final NRC list.
It was in October 2017, that the luckless Dulal was arrested and sent to a detention camp, where his mental and physical health deteriorated sharply. A few days ago, officials notified his family members that he was in a critical condition and had been referred to Guwahati Medical College hospital.
On Sunday (Oct 13), Dulal died. According to Ashis, he had not been treated properly and kept exposed to a corridor within the hospital! Ashis told the local media that the authorities had overruled all protests as they excluded his father from their final list as an Indian.
Since he had been declared an illegal Bangladeshi migrant, they should send his body for a cremation to the neighbouring country, argued Ashis.“Or else, they should immediately admit their mistake and declare him as an Indian,” he insisted.
This has put the state and NRC officials in a quandary. The matter remained unresolved till Tuesday night, as officials discussed the situation. Efforts made by a team of Assamofficials that tried to meet the family members did not succeed, as they encountered angry demonstrations and roadblocks. Two organisations---the Hindu Yuba Chatra Parishad and the Bajrang Dalwere responsible. Their spokesmen alleged that Dulal’s death was only one example of the administration was targeting only Hindus, but not genuine ‘infiltrators.’ They further alleged that State Finance Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, (who had also expressed his disillusionment with the NRC work) had not deigned to visit the afflicted Paul family even for courtesy's sake, although he was visiting the neighbourhood.
Observers said that in the communally surcharged ambience of post-NRC Assam, sucheruptions of mass anger were inevitable. A Guwahati-based newsman told Bangla Tribune that in view of the sensitivities involved, most political parties and organisations, not to mention the Government as a whole, had refrained from commenting publicly. There were a palpable tension and panic among Bengali-speaking Hindus and Muslims, the main targets of the NRC exercise, in most districts of Assam.
In the three Bengali-majorityBarak valley districts, the ruling BJP was strongly condemned by the local newspapers and other media, for its failure to live up to its pre-Lok Sabha-poll pledges. One of these had assured Bengali Hindus that detention centres in Assam would be closed permanently. Instead, under the BJP, new centres were being built and it was the Hindus who had been victimised, it was claimed.
For the BJP, Silchar MLA Shiladitya Deb tried to assuage angry Hindu sentiments, pointing out that under the proposed Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB), the Hindus in Assam or elsewhere would all be treated as Indian citizens. He also explained that the NRC exercise was the brainchild of the Congress party and the updating had been carried out on the orders of the Supreme Court. The BJP had nothing to do with it, he stressed.
Assam Congress leader Ripun Bora, regretting the death of Dulal Paul, alleged that the BJP had wrongly handled the entire NRC updating exercise. While genuine citizens had not been listed and harassed, many ‘foreigners’ had been included because of corruption within the state government officials who had appointed to carry out the work.
This drew a further riposte from Biswa Sarma, who alleged that most people belonging to the minority communities had been killed during the long Congress rule. He called the minority leader Badruddin Ajmal’ a merchant of death ‘. In turn, Ajmal denounced the proposed CA bill as palpably communal and anti Constitutional, warning that Muslims would fight it to the bitter end.
Clearly, Dulal’s death had opened up the proverbial Pandora’s can of worms in the Assamese political arena, yet again. Regardless of the eventual fallout, there was little likelihood of all this bringing in even a morsel of comfort for the aggrieved, angry Paul family.