Harsh Mander: Corrosive rhetoric against Bengali-speaking Muslims is tearing Assam apart

The frontier state of Assam – incidentally the land of my birth – is today seething with animosity, fear and resentment. It is tearing apart. Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has done all he can to weaponise the legitimate anxieties of the Assamese people concerning indigeneity and land, to manufacture and stoke hatred against Assamese Muslims of Bengali origin. This is a community that is both a religious and linguistic minority in Assam. He constructs them as the foremost enemy of the indigenous Assamese people.

The parallels that he draws with Israel are particularly telling. Indigenous Assamese people, who he says are in a minority in 12 of the state’s 35 districts, should learn from Israel ways to survive and prosper despite being surrounded by “enemies”. He declared at a programme to commemorate the martyrs of the Assam agitation of the 1970s and ’80s, “I would urge Assamese to learn from Israel. In the Middle East that country is surrounded by Muslim fundamentalists. With Iran and Iraq as neighbours, Israel with a small population has become an impregnable society…”

What he unfailingly glosses over is that the Assam agitation was never a struggle against people of any religious identity. It opposed Bengali immigrants in Assam,...

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