Talk:Assam Movement

This article seems very one-sided. For example, it refers to Muslims as "illegal aliens" even though source 7 says "Most Bengali-speaking Muslims in Assam and Bengal have a history going back to the 1860s." It suggests that Indian police officer K.P.S. Gill himself attacked and killed a student, but the article referenced does not say that at all.

Request move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the proposal was moved. --BDD (talk) 17:59, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Assam agitation → Assam Movement – Per WP:UCN Assam agitation only gets 3,880 hits on GBooks. Assam movement gets 5,860 --Relisted. -- tariqabjotu 17:53, 29 June 2013 (UTC) Darkness Shines (talk) 15:42, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

• I looked at the last page for each, and there were 173 results for "Assam movement" and 177 for "Assam agitation". Even this isn't accurate for determining the most common name, as some of the books only contain the words close together, not the exact phrases. Peter James (talk) 09:54, 23 June 2013 (UTC)
• In a borderline case like this, I guess we should move to the slightly more comprehensible, accessible name. It looks like a proper noun and therefore should be capitalized either way. Red Slash 06:02, 1 July 2013 (UTC)
• Support: A study by Manirul Hussein [1] calls it "Assam Movement". Both Sanjib Barua and Hiren Gohain, two writers who have discussed it in the journal Economic and Political Weekly and elsewhere, even as it was on and later, called it Assam Movement [2], [3]. Chaipau (talk) 11:27, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

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The Lead is still poor

Chaipau, I am not satisfied with your lead revisions:

According to the leaders of the movement all immigrants from foreign countries who had not been legally granted citizenship were aliens. It was difficult to identify illegal immigrants since "in India having documents of identification was the exception".

References

The first sentence is not WP:NPOV which says, among other things, do not state facts as opinions. If you do, you confuse the heck out of the readers. What is "According to the leaders" doing here? Isn't that the normal understanding of "aliens"? The wording in the source is more accurate.

The second sentence seems to be making an argument making it appear as if the Assamese demands were unreasonable. Here you are stating an opinion as a fact. This too is a violation of NPOV. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 23:25, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

@Kautilya3: Sure, it is a work in progress. The first sentence is a whole lot more NPOV than what was there earlier. Yes, what the leaders were demanding was legal. If so, why did the GOI not accept the demands, let the agitators go home and avoid all the bloodshed? In fact the GOI (1) passed a law (IMDT) applicable only to Assam and (2) insisted on 1971 as the cut-off year (it is 1951 in the rest of the country). These issues are yet to come (in NPOV language). So be a little patient. Chaipau (talk) 23:46, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

Please don't expect Wikipedia to answer for GOI. It is not our job.

Combing back, it is not really possible to write a LEAD without writing the body first. So I will await further writing on your part. Please take a look at National Register of Citizens for Assam and COPY whatever you can use from there. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 00:02, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

The Background section of an old version of the Citizenship Amendment Act also has useful material. (It was unfortunately rejected as being UNDUE for that page.) -- Kautilya3 (talk) 00:16, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. Wikipedia does not answer for anyone. It just puts out what has been already said in an encyclopedic fashion. I do understand that. I have material to refer to for now. I shall dip into these other articles when needed. Chaipau (talk) 00:37, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

Bangladeshi migrants

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

I will call the East Bengalis that migrated to India before 1971 as East Pakistani migrants and those after 1971 as Bangladeshi migrants. India has promised Bangladesh, when it was formed, that those people that migrated before 1971 would not be considered "Bangladeshis". In the Assam NRC, all those people have been included as Indian citizens. (But no such clarification has yet been made for the rest of India.) The whole CAA+NRC exercises are being conducted to detect and deport the Bangladeshi illegal migrants. But the question of how many such illegal migrants might be there has eluded most people. In his book, Kamal Sadiq wrote:

Notice how the population growth rate [for Assam] shoots up sharply from the 1950s in these districts and continues to grow after the independence of Bangladesh.

But I haven't been able to verify this from the data he presents. Comparing the 1971 and 1991 census for Assam (there was no census there in 1981), we see a population growth of 53% over two decades, which amounts to 2.149% annual growth rate. In what appears to be an authoritative report:

• Saikia, N.; Joe, W.; Saha, A.; Chutia, U. (2016), Cross Border Migration in Assam during 1951-2011: Process, Magnitude, and Socio-Economic Consequences (PDF), Delhi: Indian Council of Social Science Research

the authors confirm this. In Table 2.1 (p. 24), they give the figure of 2.135% for the period 1971-1991. The comparative figure for the whole of India is 2.172%. So, Assam's population growth was lower than the rest of India. See also the Figure 2.5 on p.25, which shows the picture visually.

Unfortunately, this does not fully settle the question. Assam's natural population growth has been lower than the rest of India till about 1991 (due to lower fertility rate and higher mortality rate. See the rest of Chapter 2.) After 1991 it caught up with the rest of India. So, some migrants did arrive during 1971-1991. But they cannot be anything like the exorbitant figures of 10 million or 20 million that are bandied around. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 13:01, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

References

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Data on illegal migrants

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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In the section above titled "I could put doubtful next to your name...", I wrote some remarks about what I thought were slowing numbers of immigrants from Bangladesh. I scratched it out when I realized that I had misinterpreted the Fig 3.1 of the report as giving "estimates". It was in fact giving census data, i.e., showing the number of people who indicated to the census takers that they had immigrated. That is not a very reliable indicator of the reality.

Later in Chapter 3, the authors do show detailed estimates of their own based on the demographic data of Assam. The numbers of incoming East Bengali/Bangladeshi immigrants (along with their descendants) are as follows:

• 1951-1961: 295,785
• 1961-1971: 312,495
• 1971-1991: 1,121,949 (for two decades)
• 1991-2001: 1,742,044

The figures are alarming to say the least. Rather than a decline, they actually show an astronomical growth. If the first two decades after independence (when East Bengal was part of Pakistan) the total number of immigrants was a little over half a million, it exceeded 1 million in the next two decades after Bangladesh became independent. Even more remarkably, it almost quadrupled in the decade afterwards (from something like half-million per decade earlier to about 2 million in a decade). It is unfortunate that the authors didn't have the data available for 2011. So, we can't tell whether it is a continuing uptrend or a temporary blip. But with the data available, it has to be said that whatever the Indian government has been doing isn't working and radical measures are warranted.

The total number of immigrants between 1951-2001 (along with their descendants) is estimated at 4.2 million. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 11:47, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

References

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

• Saikia, N.; Joe, W.; Saha, A.; Chutia, U. (2016), Cross Border Migration in Assam during 1951-2011: Process, Magnitude, and Socio-Economic Consequences (PDF), Delhi: Indian Council of Social Science Research

Recent immigrants

@Kautilya3: thanks for these references. Please note that we are looking at the situation only up to the 1981 at most here, since that the background of the Assam Movement. Nevertheless, what is mentioned in the this and other pages need to be consistent. Chaipau (talk) 18:01, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

Chaipau, I don't buy this argument. While the official "Assam movement" supposedly ended in 1985, the problems continue and the unrest also. Weiner is reporting the Census Bureau's estimates, which have only vague resemblance to reality, and become laughable for the 1971-1981 period. The ICSSR figures are much more thorough. I suggest that we use both. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 02:51, 17 December 2020 (UTC)

@Kautilya3: Sure, that belongs in the legacy/aftermath section when it becomes available. There has been some surprises too in the data (NRC). For example, it seems that a large section of the immigrants were Hindus and not Muslims and this challenges some of the basic premises of the movement. Weiner published his estimates in 1983, and those were the numbers that form the backdrop of the Movement and represent the best estimates from then even though they might look not so accurate on further analysis.

I agree that the Assam Movement problem persists. As Weiner has said: "The inability of the authorities to distinguish between illegal and legal Bengali settlers is at the moment the most pressing element of the problem. No matter what date is chosen as the cutoff point to determine de facto citizenship-" (replace Bengali with immigrant). This problem goes beyond Assam.

Chaipau (talk) 10:06, 17 December 2020 (UTC)

@Kautilya3: A solution could be—a dedicated article Post-colonial immigration in Assam. Chaipau (talk) 12:37, 17 December 2020 (UTC)

Sourcing

Recent edits have significantly changed the article and, together with the move, the general direction seems to be toward a rather euphemistic view of history in line with Indian nationalism, even if some paragraphs have seen improvements.

I don't care enough to invest further efforts into the issue, but wish to document one issue that was immediately apparent. The lede now states:

when the draft enrollments in Mangaldoi showed high number of non-citizens in 1979 AASU decided to campaign for thoroughly revised electoral rolls

The quoted source, Pisharoty's Assam: the accord, the discord, does not, however, state this. The relevant passage reads: “ In his speech, the then chief election commissioner (CEC) S.L. Shakdher emphasised on the need to avoid omissions and improper additions to the electoral rolls and referred to ‘large-scale inclusion of foreign nationals in some states, including the North East’.”. In other words: the author merely quotes a contemporaneous statement by a politician. The choice to quote this statement instead of directly stating the alleged fact, should indeed be treated as a vote of no confidence in its accuracy. To misrepresent a source in such a way is a clear violation of policy, and it strains credulity to believe this isn't readily apparent.

There are other statements with similar issues, such as the idea, immediately preceding the above, that "it was known since 1963 that foreign nationals had been improperly added to electoral rolls" which is sourced to a government report, i. e. a first-party source. --Matthias Winkelmann (talk) 01:21, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

@Matthias Winkelmann: The basic structure of the article follows the historical framework established by Myron Weiner—and I am struggling to figure out how this could be a "euphemistic view of history." Here are some additional thoughts:

• Shakdher was not a politician but the CEC. CEC's are usuall manned by civil servants of high standing, constitutional positions that are protected from political interference " It is very difficult to remove the authority of the Chief Election Commissioner once appointed by the president, as two-thirds of the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha need to present and vote against him for disorderly conduct or improper actions."
• "It was known since 1963..." comes from Reddi, who was also a civil servant.
• That the Mangaldai electoral roles (and its suspected misrepresentation) set the ball rolling is well known. Nevertheless, I agree that the citations can be improved to illustrate this point.

It would do us all good to familiarize yourself with the subject before making blanket statements. This is a thorny issue, no doubt, and it is very easy to fall into some of the false narratives that are prevalent.

Chaipau (talk) 02:49, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

I have now added additional citations and citation quotes that connect the Mangaldai findings and the beginning of the Assam movement (, Pisharoty 2019, Reddi 1981). Chaipau (talk) 12:36, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

References