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Comment by gagorder | Hacker News Reader

For Assamese the 'outsiders' are anyone from not Assam. It means the citizens from other parts of India themselves like from Bengal, Bihar

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I am from Assam. Your view is a blatant lie. My immediate right and rear neighboring families in my village are of Bihari origin and they have been living for 4 generations. This is just a small example. Thousands of people who were originally from rest of India have been living there. People of Assam are not protesting against the Indian citizens that have come from the rest of India and settled in Assam. Assamese people( & NE people by large) have been fighting against illegal immigrants from Bangladesh for more than 4 decades. The people's view in Assam is, illegal immigrants are illegal regardless of their religions, be it Hindu or Muslim and should be either deported or distributed across all the states of India so that pressure on small NE states doesn't create demographic imbalances. NRC was a mandate of Assam accord which was the culmination of 6 years long protests of the same issue during 1979-1985. Now this new law called Citizenships Amendment Act(CAA) decrees to grant citizenship to the Hindu immigrants detected by NRC exercise and deny to Muslim immigrants. Not only it provides citizenships to illegal Hindu immigrants, it also paves the way for future Hindu & Buddhist immigrants from Bangladesh to these small states which share porous borders with Bangladesh. Fear of indigenous people becoming a minority is not misplaced. Indigenous people of a state named Tripura has already become minority owing to the influx of Bangladeshi immigrants over a period of time.

There has always been anti-bengali sentiment in assam, even under the British. It was one of the reasons Assam was split away from Bengal in the first place. My family is from the Siliguri Corridor, bordering Assam, and there are plenty of people (from various ethnic groups) living there that migrated not only from Bangladesh/East Bengal but other parts of Assam/North East India in order to flee violence.

I am aware of that. I am also aware of the Nellie massacre. I am not sure how far you read Assam's history. The dis-trust of Bengali language imposition originated during the British era who brought many Bengali babus from Bengal for administrative jobs to their newly acquired Assam(most of the current's NE states). The result was, from 1836 to 1873, Bengali became the official state language in Assam. and for a community whose identity is primarily based in the Assamese language, it was a big blow. Even in present time, in Barak valley of Assam, Assamese is not recognized as a state language. Some politically motivated leaders still keep talking about throwing out the Assamese language from the entire state. Only between 1991 and 2011, the share of Assamese speakers in the state fell from 58% to 48%. This is matched by a quick rise in the share of Bengali speakers from 22% to 29% during the same period. Let's be clear, Bengali is the fourth largest speaking language in the world. All the immigrants from Bangladesh are speakers of Bangla. The suspicions of Bangla as an imposing threat to Assamese identity will remain.

Very much true, and there is certainly a lot of historical baggage there. Also, in earlier times, administratively, Assam itself was much larger before many insurgencies caused the state to be split up, and before that, Bengal was much larger (before the British split it up): https://southasiablog.wordpress.com/2014/01/23/how-did-parti...

Most of the protesters that were interviewed had the demand for a better economy, job opportunities for the youth and better infrastructure. It's less about them vs us, but for a better state of affairs for everyone. Because none of that is available and the government is now giving away citizenship to anyone coming in, the economy will take much more strained than before and things will be difficult for everyone.

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