Prime Minister Narendra Modi spent December 12 extending assurances about the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which had been passed in Parliament the previous day. In the midst of a busy campaign trail in Jharkhand, Modi’s Twitter handle offered up a bag of promises.

For good measure, the prime minister offered up the same tweet in Assamese too.

Modi was referring to the Assam Accord of 1985, of which Clause 5 and Clause 6 are key components. In a series of tweets, he made an all-out effort to assuage the concerns of his “brothers and sisters of Assam” over CAB.

The flurry of tweets was perhaps inevitable. A day earlier, even as the Bill was being debated in the Rajya Sabha, Assam erupted in violent protests. Guwahati, the capital city, resembled a battlefield. Piercing the massive security cover, agitators went on a rampage, paralysing the area surrounding the state secretariat complex. 

The amended Citizenship Act seeks to grant Indian citizenship to refugees who entered the country from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan on or before December 31, 2014. However, the law applies only to people belonging to six faiths — Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians — and not Muslims. 

Ever since it was introduced in the Lok Sabha for the first time in 2016, in its earlier version, all the northeastern states boiled with agitation against the Bill. The Bill lapsed with the dissolution of the previous Lok Sabha in May this year. Due to these protests, it was brought in a modified version this time, granting concessions to a large number of areas in the region protected by the Inner Line Permit and the Sixth Schedule of the Indian Constitution.

But, according to protesters, these relaxations have only made the situation worse for the people in Assam. Unlike its neighbouring states, only seven out of 33 districts in Assam have been relieved. With most of the neighbouring areas exempted, many in the state argue that the new law will create an additional burden of lakhs of immigrants from Bangladesh. The protests were, therefore, spontaneous and violent.

Caught unprepared, the prime minister understood the political risk. Promising the implementation of the Assam Accord, a long-standing demand of the Assamese and other ethnic groups in the state, seemed a viable strategy.

This was repeated the next day too, targeting a bigger audience. Some of the major newspapers in Assam carried a full-page advertisement in which Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal made an appeal to the people. In an effort to allay the public’s concerns, Sonowal also invoked the implementation of Clause 6 as a key commitment of the BJP.

The Accord was signed in 1985 between the central government, the Assam government and the leadership of the Assam Movement. It was the culmination of a six-year-long agitation demanding the expulsion of illegal Bangladeshi foreigners from the state. In Clause 6, the Accord promises “constitutional, legislative and administrative safeguards, as may be appropriate…to protect, preserve and promote the cultural, social, linguistic identity and heritage of the Assamese people.”          

Over the decades, while a number of initiatives under the clause have been completed in the cultural sphere, the key issues regarding constitutional and legislative protection remain to be resolved. As severe protests had broken out in January 2019 after the previous version of the Bill was passed in the Lok Sabha, the Modi government, allegedly attempting to quell public fury, set up a committee in this direction. 

But siding with the protesters, MP Bezbaruah, a retired bureaucrat and the chairman of the committee, refused to be part of the panel along with its five other members. In July, the reelected Modi government made a fresh attempt to constitute another “high-powered committee” — this time with 14 members, almost all of them being new faces. 

Headed by Biplab Kumar Sarma, a former judge of the Gauhati High Court, the new committee has held talks with dozens of organisations representing the interests of different ethnic and linguistic communities in the state. The committee, tasked with giving suggestions to the government to introduce the promised safeguards, is yet to submit its final report.

But will the implementation of Clause 6 by the Modi government calm the tempers against the amended Citizenship Act in Assam?  From the views expressed by some key stakeholders, it seems unlikely.

Lurinjyoti Gogoi, general secretary of the All Assam Students Union, the organisation that was one of the signatories of the Accord, asserts that logically, there is no relation between the two.

Gogoi told Newslaundry: “Clause 6 was inserted [in the Assam Accord] because Assam had agreed to accept foreigners up to March 24,1971. So the government cannot propose it [the implementation of the clause] as a bargain to us for accommodating more foreigners under the new citizenship act.” 

The Centre’s sudden push to implement Clause 6 of the Assam Accord, after years of disinterest and at a time of fiery protests against the new citizenship law in Assam, has indeed raised questions.Gogoi is not the only voice who has viewed this as a bargaining tool by the BJP-led government.

Political scientist Sanjib Baruah, in an article in Frontline, termed the move “a Faustian bargain”, a cluster of “material benefits set aside for them [the Assamese people] in exchange for their support for the CAB”. The government hoped, as he wrote, that the introduction of political reservation in the State Assembly and Parliament,along with other constitutional safeguards, would make the Assamese public opinion friendlier to the CAB. 

But in the backdrop of the mass protests against the Act in the state, “clearly, the ruling party’s political calculation of offering the Assamese a Faustian bargain has not quite worked out as planned,” Baruah pointed out.

The key argument against the Centre’s move to push through CAA in return for implementing safeguards under Clause 6 is its “self- contradictory” nature. 

According to senior journalist Haidar Hussain, the principal objective of the Assam Accord was to determine a cut-off date — in this case, March 24, 1971 — for identifying and expelling illegal Bangladeshi immigrants from Assam. This was enshrined in Clause 5 of the Accord. 

“Both the clauses [5 and 6] are essentially linked to each other. So how can the BJP now allow foreigners to come till December 2014 on one hand while promising to grant safeguards on the other?” Hussain asked. “The posture is therefore totally self-contradictory and violative of the Assam Accord.”

Critics also pointed out that this is not the first time a committee has been formed to introduce safeguards in the state. AASU’s Gogoi said that during previous governments under the Congress and the Asom Gana Parishad too, such committees and sub-committees were formed. 

“By forming this committee, the BJP is trying to give the impression that only they are genuinely concerned about the interests of the Assamese people. In reality, this is just an attempt to fool the people,” Gogoi said.

Echoing similar complaints, the Congress, the principal Opposition party in Assam, have made jibes at the BJP. Debabrata Saikia, the Leader of the Opposition in the Assam Legislative Assembly, questioned the government’s intentions.

“In their Vision Document ahead of the Assembly election in 2016, the BJP promised that the Assam Accord would be implemented in letter and spirit,” said Saikia. “But contrary to that, they are only violating it now by bringing CAA. So you cannot trust them for implementing Clause 6 too.”

While the violation of the Assam Accord seems to drive much of the criticism, some have also pointed out the “impossibility” of executing certain safeguards under the BJP. 

Haidar Hussain said that certain provisions would require the approval of a two-thirds majority in both houses of Parliament — which the BJP currently does not have.

“Such numbers are required for constitutional amendments, like the reservation of a certain number of seats for the Assamese people in the State Assembly and the Lok Sabha,” Hussain said. “Therefore, without a two-thirds majority, what Narendra Modi and Amit Shah are saying is nothing but a political gimmick.” 

Moreover, another key bottleneck in introducing safeguards under Clause 6 is the definition of “Assamese people”. The definition was not much of a problem when the Accord was signed. But, as Sanjib Baruah wrote, due to the particular history of demographic politics in Assam over the decades, “defining the Assamese people has been more of a challenge to successive State governments of Assam than anyone expected”.

Nilay Dutta, a senior advocate and a member of the newly-formed committee, said they were yet to come up with a conclusion in that direction.

“Around 1,000 petitions have been submitted to us by different organisations till date,” Dutta said. “Among the issues discussed, definition of the ‘Assamese people’ has been a prominent one.”

The fact that the Citizenship Act has been amended much before granting safeguards has not gone down well with many in Assam. This has shown the lack of true commitment of the BJP to protect the interests of the state, said Lurinjyoti Gogoi.

“They have been in power at the Centre for six years now,” he said. “If at all they were genuinely interested to implement it [Clause 6], it should have been done before amending the citizenship law. One cannot be exchanged for the other.CAA must go.”