Now, anti-bjp front in Assam?
GUWAHATI: The Modi government’s Citizenship Amendment Bill, which seeks to give citizenship rights to non-muslims from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan, has plunged Assam into turmoil, creating an unprecedented common ground for bitter political rivals, the Congress and the Asam Gana Parishad (AGP), leaders of both parties said.
The open overtures from the Congress, including from former chief minister Tarun Gogoi, on at least two occasions, suggest possibilities of potential new political fronts in the future. At present, however, the common ground, leaders of both parties said, is limited to resisting the bill.
Given Assam’s political equations, the Congress and the regionalist AGP, once a political giant, have been bitter foes but the citizenship bill has found them speaking in a similar voice. The Congress has even said the AGP should join forces with it. Ripun Bora, the chief of Assam’s Congress unit, said he doesn’t rule out a political understanding in the future.
Bora, also a Rajya Sabha MP, said: “Depending on the situation and the cause of Assam we can have political talks with them (AGP).” “In politics nothing is impossible, in politics everything can happen, politics is the compulsion of the situation, if situation demands then we will think it out,” he added in an interview.
“Depending on the situation and depending on the cause of Assam, we can have talks with them (AGP)..., we can work together.”
Asked about the possibility of the two parties coming together, AGP leader Prafulla Kumar Mahanta, a former chief minister and the architect of the 1985 Assam Accord, said: “The only common ground now is that the citizenship bill violates clause 6 of the Assam Accord and is against the popular wishes of Assamese people.”
He said all future course of action will be decided by his party’s central committee, which he has urged to be convened immediately. The widely cited Clause 6 of the accord states that the identity of Assamese people will be accorded constitutional safeguard.
Mahanta said he had floated the idea that the strategy now ought to be that “all organisations and parties should come on a common platform that should be led by the All Assam Students Union (AASU)”. AASU is an influential mass students’ body that has a unit in every educational institution, from schools to colleges, across Assam. Bora, an economist by training, was once part of AASU , the same outfit that led a sixyear anti-foreigners agitation in the 1980s and which gave birth to the AGP. He joined the Congress soon after that period and is a former state minister. “Foreigners” in Assam is commonly used to refer to immigrants from Bangladesh.