CAA is a letdown, but Bengali Hindus in Assam are unlikely to ditch BJP

Fleeing religious persecution and violence, Niranjan Baishnab’s family crossed over from East Pakistan to India in the 1960s. They made their home in Malinibeel, a wetland near Silchar, a city in southern Assam’s Barak Valley.

Once a natural reservoir, Malinibeel is now home to large numbers of Hindu migrants who settled here after 1971 and live in a sprawl of tin huts. “Every year during the monsoon, our homes get flooded,” Baishnab said. “No, the local MLA does not turn up here.”

In 2019, when the National Register of Citizens was updated in Assam, Baishnab’s name was not on the list.

The NRC was a massive screening drive carried out in Assam to identify Indian citizens. It left out 19.06 lakh residents of the state, who failed to furnish documents that proved they or their ancestors had arrived in the state before March 24, 1971.

For those Bengali Hindus excluded from the register, and staring at a potentially stateless future, the Bharatiya Janata Party held out hope through the Citizenship Amendment Act.

In 2019, the Narendra Modi government passed the CAA, a contentious law that fastracks the citizenship of non-Muslim refugees from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Widespread protests across the country against the exclusion of Muslims forced the government to...

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