CALCUTTA, 19 February 2005 — With its vote bank shrinking in India’s northeastern region, the Bharatiya Janata Party has kicked up a row over the recruitment of Muslims in Assam’s police force.
After enforcing a general strike this month in protest against what the party and its provincial ally, Asom Gano Parishad, call “excessively high percentage” of Muslims among newly recruited police constables in Assam, the two parties have launched a statewide agitation to get the recruitment revoked by hook or by crook.
The two parties are gunning for Assam’s Congress Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi and Home Minister Rakibul Hussain alleging a sectarian bias in the selection of police constables, a charge the government flatly denies.
Last year, the Congress party-led state government announced 5,500 vacancies in the constabulary. Half a million candidates applied. When the list of successful candidates was declared this month, all hell broke loose.
Approximately 40 percent of those who have landed jobs happen to be Muslims. Both the BJP and AGP say that illegal Bangladeshi immigrants have been deliberately recruited by the home minister with the chief minister’s blessing.
According to census figures, Muslims account for 30 percent of Assam’s population but in several districts their percentage is over 50.
The BJP says that Muslim candidates also paid hefty bribes to Hussain to join the police force.
But the BJP’s biggest grouse is that the Congress government is appeasing its vote bank. The BJP and its ally insist that Bangladeshi immigrants vote blindly for Congress which bends all laws to retain their unflinching loyalty.
Unsuccessful candidates too are holding demonstrations across Assam to the great delight of opposition parties.
Assam government spokesman and Rural Development Minister Ripun Bora says the “population pattern” of the state is reflected in the list of successful candidates.
Hussain and Hussain accuse BJP of misleading people and fomenting communal strife in a state which witnessed bloody bouts of sectarian violence in the early 1980s.
But BJP sees an “evil design” in the provincial government’s recruitment policy. “How can Congress which claims to be a secular party allow its recruitment policy to be guided by sheer religious considerations?” asks AGP General Secretary Dilip Saikia.
Chief Minister Gogoi is firm in the face of BJP’s all-out campaign. He has publicly and repeatedly backed Hussain accepting moral and administrative responsibility for the recruitment.
Thousands of protesters have blocked streets and burned Gogoi and Hussain in effigies in the last few days but the administration is not unnerved.
“I saw my name in the list of successful candidates and the next day I found another list where my name was struck off,” said an angry youth, protesting outside the Congress headquarters in Guwahati, the state capital.
The government denies the charges. “If anyone can prove the charge that a particular community has got the majority of the posts, I shall retire from politics”, said Hussain.
“The opposition parties are panicky because there are no issues to harp upon. So they have raised this bogey of anomalies in recruitment in the police constabulary,” says Borah.
