A group of activists, lawyers and academics on Saturday condemned the recent remarks made by Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma about Bengali Muslims in the state, describing the comments as “prejudicial and alarmingly hateful rhetoric”.
In an open letter, the group quoted Sarma as having remarked on Tuesday that his job, in context of the special revision of voter lists in the state, was to “make them [Miyas] suffer”.
This “communally-inflamed rhetoric” positions the Bengali Muslim community as “deserving of nothing but suffering at the hands of the Assamese people”, the group said.
The Election Commission is separately conducting a “special revision” of the voter list in the state, which is similar to the usual updates to the electoral roll. Assam is not among the 12 states and Union Territories where the poll panel is conducting the special intensive revision of the electoral rolls.
In Assam, “Miya” is a derogatory word used to refer to undocumented immigrants and is exclusively directed at Muslims of Bengali origin. They are often accused of being undocumented migrants from Bangladesh.
Once a pejorative in Assam, from the common use of the honorific “Miya” among South Asian Muslims, the term has now been reappropriated by the community as a self-descriptor to refer to Muslims who migrated to Assam from Bengal during the colonial era.
The group of activists and academics said on Saturday that the chief minister had not only “brazenly expressed his government’s intent to send objection notices to the ‘Miya’ people” to ensure that at least four lakh to five lakh of them are deleted from the state’s voter list, but also called on “the majority to mount a sectarian economic boycott by paying them lesser than they deserve in informal jobs”.
On Tuesday, Sarma said that he himself was encouraging people to “keep giving troubles” to Miyas. “In a rickshaw, if the fare is Rs 5, give them Rs 4,” he had said. “Only if they face troubles will they leave Assam.”
On the same day, Sarma had claimed that four lakh to five lakh Miya voters would be deleted when the special intensive revision of the voter rolls takes place in the state, and acknowledged that the BJP government had “made arrangements” to preliminarily prevent them from voting.
A day later, Sarma said that BJP workers had filed more than five lakh complaints against suspected foreigners during the special revision.
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Sarma has “explicitly stated that his government has evicted only the ‘Miya’” as part of its eviction campaign, “sparing the ‘indigenous Assamese Muslims’”, the group added.
On January 25, Sarma said that the eviction drives in the state were only targeting Miya Muslims and not the Assamese people.
Since the BJP came to power in Assam in 2016, several demolition drives have been conducted in the state, mostly targeting areas populated by Bengali-speaking Muslims.
The chief minister’s words are “alarmingly divisive and despicable”, the group said on Saturday, adding that remarks “reflect a worsening climate of hatred” towards the state’s Bengali Muslim community.
“While discrimination against the community is not new in Assam, this represents an unprecedented escalation on the part of an elected political leader holding a constitutional post and ushers in a new era of impunity for hate speech in this state,” the activists, lawyers and academic said in the letter.
Sarma’s framing of Bengali Muslims as “‘infiltrators’ or ‘outsiders’ is deeply ahistorical”, the letter said, adding that the persons the BJP leader was referring to “belong to India and Assam in every way”.
Through increased surveillance and policing, weaponising citizenship determination laws to declare Bengali Muslims as “foreigners” and targeting their homes, the state government was “putting together a policy programme that now bears the hallmark signatures of ethnic cleansing”, the letter added.
“The majoritarianism of the government has seismic consequences on the lives of this minority...,” the letter said.
The group said that it condemns the state government’s “discriminatory violence” against Bengali Muslims.
“We also express alarm at the impunity with which the CM continues to openly target a specific group of people belonging to an ethno-religious minority and in doing so, challenge the core constitutional principles of justice, equality and secularism,” it added.
The signatories of the letter include members of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, independent journalists, human rights activists, academics, lawyers, former Indian Administrative Service officer Harsh Mander and several citizens.
Also read: ‘Acknowledging reality not hatred’: Himanta Sarma cites SC judgement to defend Miya Muslim remarks
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