Citizenship Amendment Bill biggest issue in Bengal in coming civic and assembly polls

As Union home minister Amit Shah tabled the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB), 2019, in the Lok Sabha, the reaction from Trinamool Congress’ (TMC) lawmakers reaffirmed citizenship screening would emerge as the biggest political issue in West Bengal in the coming civic body elections and the crucial assembly polls in 2021.

The CAB proposes to give citizenship to Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians if they entered India from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan on or before December 31, 2014.

It has sharply divided political and intellectual opinion with the TMC, Congress, Left parties, and Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) opposing religion as the criterion for citizenship and the pointed exclusion of Muslims.

Records at the state refugee, relief and rehabilitation department show that the number of refugees entering India from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1947 was around three million. After the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, the number rose to six million.

Descendants of these refugees, the majority of whom were Hindus, settled down across the state and rest of the country. Significantly, an undefined number of Muslims also entered West Bengal illegally in the last few decades, a fact no political party denies.

While chief minister Mamata Banerjee and her TMC have vowed not to allow the implementation of CAB in the state, it is the biggest agenda for the West Bengal unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which emerged as the main opposition force after winning 18 of the state’s 42 Lok Sabha seats in the April-May elections.

In the Lok Sabha campaign, both Amit Shah and Prime Minister Narendra Modi highlighted the infiltration issue in every rally and said they would be pushed back.

Both the BJP leaders said that these infiltrators had been used as vote bank by the Left and later by the TMC. This, coupled with the nationwide BJP wave, paid a dividend.

The TMC started a well-organised counter-campaign after thousands of Hindus were excluded from the final National Registrar of Citizens (NRC) in Assam, triggering fear among voters in West Bengal.

At public rallies, Mamata Banerjee is even advising people to lodge police complaints if they have lost identity-related documents. The Left parties and Congress, who became allies in the recent by-polls, are opposed to CAB as well.

“CAB and NRC are two sides of the same coin. We all have some document to prove that we are citizens of India. Someone cannot just come and question our citizenship status,” Banerjee said at a victory rally in Kharagpur on Monday morning, setting the mood, as the Lok Sabha was witnessing noisy scenes.

“We have seen how 1.9 million Hindus got excluded from NRC in Assam. We will not allow that here,” she said.

That citizenship screening would decide the fate of elections became clear when the BJP was defeated in by-polls to all the three assembly seats last month. Among these, was Kharagpur.

The BJP’s state unit president Dilip Ghosh had wrested it from the Congress in 2016. The by-poll was held because Ghosh was elected to the Lok Sabha. Losing Kharagpur to TMC was a shocker for the BJP.

In the other two seats of Karimpur and Kaliagunj, Hindus, especially descendants of refugees from Bangladesh, were supposed to be the main vote bank of the BJP.

Keeping its focus on the influx of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, the BJP highlighted CAB while the TMC campaigned against the bill, saying it will make aliens out of legitimate citizens. The TMC’s strategy paid off.

“We have to do introspection,” Dilip Ghosh said after the defeats.

“We had a remarkable lead in the Lok Sabha polls in this area. We lost because people did not accept NRC,” his party’s candidate for the Kaliaganj seat, Kamal Chandra Sarkar, said.

On Sunday, hours before Amit Shah presented CAB in Parliament, Ghosh said, “The TMC is misleading people. The bill does not intend to adversely affect Hindus. It is being brought to protect those who entered India as refugees from different countries.”

Political analyst and columnist Suvashis Maitra all political parties in West Bengal are uncomfortable over CAB but if one goes by the recent assembly by-polls, the BJP is in a disadvantageous position.

“It all depends on what the government will seek from people to prove their citizenship status. If the documentation process is complicated, people will not like it,” Maitra said.

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