VOTES AND THE CAA

On January 25, the Assam minister for finance, education and health, Hi-manta Biswa Sarma, announced that the state government would introduce a bill which will make a person who has not studied Assamese as a subject till Class 10, even if s/he had schooled in the English medium, ineligible for a government job in Assam. This criterion would also apply for admission to state medical and engineering colleges. Assamese was to be made compulsory up to Class 10.

Once the bill is passed, his own children, Sarma admits, will not be eligible for government jobs in the state, as they study outside Assam and have not studied Assamese in school. However, it is a small price to pay for what the government hopes to gain in return—the electoral support of Assamese-speaking people who have been agitating against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, for nearly two months. Unlike the rest of India, protesters in Assam are not worried that the CAA—pushed hard by the BJP-led Union and state governments—excludes Muslims. Rather, they fear it gives citizenship to illegal Hindu Bangla-speaking immigrants from Bangladesh, who, together with the Muslim Bangla speakers in Assam, may outnumber the Assamese in their own state.

This fear of losing their language and culture stems from the declining number of Assamese speakers and the growing number of Bangla speakers in the state. Assamese speakers went down to 48 per cent in 2011 from 58 per cent in 1991 while Bangla speakers in the state went up to 30 per cent from 22 per cent