Word: assam
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...Issuing temporary work permits is a nonstarter in Assam, where the growing population of Bengali-speaking Muslims - the euphemism for which is "demographic shift" - is seen as both a political and an economic threat to the ethnic Assamese majority, who are mostly Hindu. "There is a very substantial geographic belt in which the Assamese are rapidly becoming a minority," says V.R. Raghavan, an adviser at the Delhi Policy Group. "They want to retain their dominant position...
...result is a toxic mix of immigrant backlash, Islamophobia and militant separatism, says Uddipana Goswami, a social scientist at Jawaharlal Nehru University who has written extensively about the northeast. Ethnic Assamese political parties and separatist groups like the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) have all taken up the anti-immigrant cause, as have other non-Muslim minorities. A series of bomb attacks in the state capital Guwahati on Oct. 30, 2008, killed more than 60 people, and local police say that militants agitating for an ethnic Bodo homeland, who have clashed violently with local Muslims, are to blame...
...task of controlling both illegal migration into Assam - as well as militant groups such as ULFA that operate in the border areas - falls to the 160,000 troops of India's Border Security Force (BSF), half of whom guard the frontier with Bangladesh. At the biggest gateway between Assam and Bangladesh, a junction of the Brahmaputra River near a market town called Dhubri, the BSF's Water Wing patrols 24 hours a day by speedboat. Ferries carry laborers from the remote villages downstream to jobs in Dhubri, Guwahati or Siliguri, and each one is stopped by BSF guards, who check...
...fence has made a difference: there were about 4,900 arrests for illegal crossings last year, compared to more than 10,000 in 2005. But P.K. Mishra, inspector general of the BSF's Assam and Meghalaya Frontier, seems to know that he has an almost impossible task. He has visited the U.S.-Mexico border fence and seen how difficult controlling illegal migration is. "Even [though] they have all the technical equipment, they can't stop it," he says...
...Terror Equation Outside of Assam, the debate over Bangladeshi migrants has been subsumed into India's larger struggle against terrorism. In a speech in Guwahati last September, L.K. Advani, leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, connected the dots. "Assam as a whole is today fighting for survival," he told the crowd, who gathered as the season's monsoon floods were subsiding. "And the threat to its survival has come from a flood of another kind - the flood of illegal migrants from neighboring Bangladesh. Now, India is facing not only the threat of infiltration, but also of terrorism from...