Why Himanta is wrong - Muslims are not ‘taking over’ Assam

A teenager was gang-raped. A Class X student. She was found by the road, barely conscious. Police had three suspects. One of them was arrested. He drowned, they claimed, while trying to escape. The chief minister of the state where this happened, Assam, condemned the crime. And then announced his theory of what had happened:“Through crimes such as rape, the target is our land, the civilization … The survivor’s family in Dhing told me that they don’t want to stay there anymore … People sell off their property and leave for other places. For a plot of land worth Rs 5 lakh, they are offered Rs 50 lakh.”The town where the teenager was allegedly gang-raped is a Muslim-majority area. The primary suspect, who had drowned, was Muslim. Protests demanding justice for the survivor soon turned into protests demanding that migrant Muslims and Bangladeshi settlers — often used interchangeably in local politics — leave. Gradually, the focal concern appeared to inch away from the gang rape as the antagonism escalated between indigenous Assamese communities — who live in larger numbers in the easternmost districts known as upper Assam — and immigrant Muslim communities — pejoratively called ‘Miya Muslims’ and living in larger numbers in the westernmost districts called lower Assam and the central districts.When Muslim fish farmers from Nagaon (where the teenager had been raped) and Morigaon stopped supplying fish to areas where the threats had been made, chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma condemned in the assembly what he called an “economic blockade” by Miya Muslims. (Muslim-majority Nagaon and Morigaon are some of the state’s largest fish-producing districts.) Sarma then questioned two MLAs who had said that people from lower Assam would go to upper Assam despite the threats: “Why will they go? That means you people, Miya Muslims, will take over … Assam?” Later in the day, he had another message for the people of lower Assam: “There will be no security if you go against the wishes of the people of upper Assam. There will be security if you go as they wish.” The statement got a lot of traction — that Sarma had said he would not allow a Miya Muslim takeover of Assam. The Congress-led United Opposition Forum soon filed a police complaint, alleging that Sarma was trying to promote enmity between different communities by making provocative statements.A day after the takeover statement, Sarma declared that the government would publish a white paper on demographic changes in Assam because, he said, “Hindus are leaving Miya Muslim areas from lower and central Assam … but the Muslim population is increasing in [upper Assam] districts … No Muslim is facing harassment in Hindu-majority areas. But I have proof of Hindus facing problems in Miya-dominated areas.”The demographic shift and Muslims ‘taking over’ theory, not new by any measure, has been a mainstay of Sarma’s rhetoric. Last month, he said Assam was a cautionary tale of how “infiltration from Bangladesh” had become “a matter of life and death” for the state’s indigenous population. The Muslim community accounts for 40% of the state’s population, he added, up from 12% in 1951. He also claimed that the state would turn Muslim-majority by 2041. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r What does data tell us about the Muslim ‘takeover’?The share of the Muslim population in Assam was not the low 12% in 1951 that Sarma said — it was, in fact, close to 23% by that time. Because in the six decades before that, starting in the 1890s, population pressures in east Bengal had led to waves of migration of Bengali Muslims into what is now Assam. The migrants started practising agriculture, adopted the Assamese language and assimilated into the Assamese society. In fact, their “prolific” farming had made Nagaon the “granary of Assam” and increased the state’s jute production to 20% of the country’s output. This wave was especially strong in the 1930s and 1940s, when immigrants from east Bengal were encouraged to farm in the wastelands of Nagaon, Darrang and Kamrup.In Assam’s political context, the year 1951 is an important one — it is the cutoff that a Union home ministry committee proposed to determine if someone was an indigenous person from Assam. If someone lived in Assam in 1951, they and their descendants should be considered indigenous, the panel had recommended. Sarma, too, has said he wants 1951 to be codified as the base year to identify indigenous people of Assam. So, if a documentation exercise like the National Register of Citizens were to be revived at any point, clarity on 1951 population shares would be all the more important. At that time, in 1951, Assam’s Muslim population share was already the country’s second highest among states. (While Jammu and Kashmir was not part of the Census exercise that year, it can be presumed that it would have had the highest Muslim population share were it also considered.) In the six decades since then, the Muslim population has gone up about 1.4 lakh a year against the state average of 3.7 lakh a year. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r Are Assam’s internal demographics changing?A large part of Sarma’s theories about demographic change rely on the shifts within the state (and not just the state as a whole). Specifically, Sarma now points to the districts of Dhubri, Goalpara, Barpeta, Darrang, Nagaon and Morigaon as places where “our land … [is] gone” and that the Assamese community is “struggling to survive in these places.A point to begin the analysis of demographic changes in the districts could, then, be 1971. Because while a recurring demand is to land on 1951 as the cutoff year, the official cutoff for identifying Assam’s indigenous people is actually March 24, 1971 — two days before the Bangladesh Liberation War began and led to large-scale migration out of what is now Bangladesh.In 1971, Assam had five districts with substantial Muslim populations — Goalpara (with a 42% Muslim population share), Cachar (40%), Nagaon (39%), Kamrup (29%) and Darrang (16%). These coincided, almost entirely, with the geographical spread of the early settlers from east Bengal between 1891 and the Partition — in Goalpara, Nagaon, Kamrup and Darrang. But unlike states like Bihar or even West Bengal, the distribution of the Muslim population does not seem to have spread out too much but was instead concentrated in lower and central Assam.The 1981 Census exercise could not be conducted in Assam because of the unrest of the Assam Agitation and the next data record we have is from the 1991 Census. A lot had changed within Assam by then — one of the most important developments of which was the splitting of every single district which had a substantial Muslim population in 1971. So, during the 1980s: From Goalpara came the districts of Dhubri, Kokrajhar and BongaigaonThe districts of Hailakandi and Karimganj were carved out of Cachar The district of Morigaon was split out of NagaonKamrup was the district out of which Barpeta and Nalbari were createdDarrang was divided into Sonitpur and a smaller DarrangSo, by 1991, the districts with the highest Muslim population shares — in fact, all districts with a 20% share or more — were still the same five districts with the highest shares in 1971 or those that had been carved out of them. The only upper Assam district with more than 10% Muslim population was Lakhimpur (14.5%). Since then, as before, the growth in Muslim population has been faster than that of the Hindu population. But it has not been accompanied by any shift in where the population growth is happening. Lower Assam used to be where the Muslim population was the highest — and it has remained so. Central Assam had a significant Muslim population but nowhere close to majority — and that, too, has not changed. Also, while Muslim population growth does outpace Hindu population growth, there are two basic qualifiers to this — that the Hindu population is larger and the base effect will be a factor, and there are just three districts where Muslim population growth sped up significantly between 2001 and 2011 when compared to the growth between 1991 and 2001. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r What does this tell us about shifts in the future?The average annual growth of the Muslim population between 1991 and 2011 was 2.6% against the state’s average of 1.7% and the Hindu population’s 1.2%.If we were to consider a hypothetical scenario in which every aspect of this remains unchanged (which it can’t, but we will come to that later), it turns out that a Muslim-majority Assam does not appear in the offing anytime soon. Sarma had cited 2041 as the year by which the state would turn Muslim-majority, so we go a decade further. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r And this brings us to why even these population numbers are likely to be overestimates. The total fertility rate of Assam’s Muslim community (the average number of children borne by a woman in her reproductive years) is much higher than that of the Hindu community. But it has been declining steadily and is close to reaching replacement level (the point at which population stabilises). Besides, the wanted fertility rate is actually much lower than the actual fertility rate for the Muslim community. This gap is smaller among Assam’s Hindu community — which means access to family planning measures is still an issue. In fact, when women were asked during the last round of the National Family Health Survey if their family planning demand was being met, more than 12% of Muslim said it was not (against 10% of Hindu women) — the highest among Assam’s religious communities. Muslim women were also found to be less likely to use contraception than Hindu or Christian women. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r While much of the state’s political rhetoric is centred on illegal migrants, it is usually accompanied by alarmist statements about how Muslims reproduce. “They should stop having more than two children,” Sarma had said earlier this year. Let us take these concerns at face value.Total fertility rate correlates negatively with education — when access to education goes up, fertility goes down. In Assam, only 86% of Muslim children between the ages of 6 and 17 attend school, against 91% of Hindu children and 89% Christian children, the 2019-21 National Family Health Survey had found. The 2011 Census, too, had recorded a huge gap in literacy — less than 50% in the Muslim community against 68% in the Hindu community. The most certain way to make sure population growth is at a manageable level is evident — education and prosperity. And it should be that much easier because Sarma is not an opposition leader who is demanding improvement in the state’s social infrastructure — he is at the helm.It’s not that the government does not recognise the gap. Sarma had last year announced a socio-economic assessment of the communities identified as indigenous Muslims. Within the state, the distinction between indigenous Muslims and those considered illegal migrant Muslims is a significant one. So, when Sarma says that the Muslim community is taking over the state, the reference is specifically to Bengali-speaking Muslims. But the numbers he cites don’t make that distinction.