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With their capacity to accommodate social movements that they bring into the political process, India’s democratic institutions are often praised. We can include demands expressed through civil disobedience and the politics of the street.

The Assam movement once seemed to be a stellar success of Indian democracy which started in 1979 and ended in 1985. But in retrospect its failures have become more apparent. The movement, led by the All Assam Students Union and the All Asom Gana Sangram Parishad, saw extraordinary mobilization against illegal immigration and the enfranchisement of non-citizens that, campaigners believed, risked turning the “indigenous” people of Assam into a political minority.

The Congress government, headed by Hiteshwar Saikia, resigned and the movement was ended with an agreement between the Indian government and the movement leaders. The Asom Gana Parishad, led by Prafulla Kumar Mahanta, in the elections that followed in 1985 was voted to power.

Assam’s population largely constitutes with the immigrants for Bangladesh. And it was never in dispute. British officials viewed Assam as one of the subcontinent’s last frontiers to be settled by immigrants. The Partition of 1947 could not stop the flow that began in the 1920s, of land-hungry peasants from East Bengal to sparsely-populated Assam. It intensified when Hindu refugees joined the flow. Identifying a Bangladeshi is not a simple matter because of extensive blurring between citizens and non-citizens. No wonder that the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act (IMDT) passed by Parliament in 1983 gave Bangladeshi nationals, suspected of illegally entering Assam, the protection of a quasi-judicial process

 There was an unofficial song for The Assam movement’s composed by musician Bhupen Hazarika in 1968, anticipated the movement and warned that “unless the Assamese save themselves, they will become refugees in their own land”. Another version of the song expressed pride that there are “martyrs now who can say that if Assam dies, we too shall die”. This part of the Assamese memory remains silenced in Indian public discourse which has little space for regional realities that don’t fit standard constructions of India’s modern national history.