After a lull of two years, anti-CAA agitation to resume across the Northeast

After a lull of about two years, students' organisations in the Northeast will resume the anti-CAA agitation across the region from Wednesday.

Members and leaders of the North East Students' Organisation (NESO) will stage a demonstration in each district and sub-division headquarters with a renewed demand to scrap the CAA and constitutional safeguards for the indigenous communities in the region.

"People of the Northeast have not accepted the CAA and will never accept it. This act will reduce the indigenous people into a minority. The Northeast can't be used as a dumping ground for illegal migrants. Assam has already taken a lot of burden by accepting the migrants till March 24, 1971 and can not accept more such migrants," Chief advisor of NESO, Samujjal Kumar Bhattacharjya told reporters in Guwahati.

NESO comprises student bodies representing various communities and tribes in Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh and Tripura.

The CAA, which was passed in December 2019, seeks to allow non-Muslim migrants from Bangladeshi, Pakistan and Afghanistan, who settled in India till 2014 due to religious persecution, to apply for Indian citizenship. But organisations in the Northeast are opposed to it saying this would allow a "large number" of post-1971 migrants to get Indian citizenship and thereby, reduce the indigenous communities into minorities.

Bhattacharjya is a senior leader of the All Assam Students' Union, which led the strong anti-CAA agitation in 2019. At least five agitators died in police firing in Assam during the agitation in January 2020. Agitations had to be stopped due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

"We will continue to oppose the CAA till it is scrapped," Bhattacharjya said. The AASU wants detection of the "illegal migrants" with March 24,1971 cut-off and constitutional safeguards to the state's indigenous population, as agreed in the historic Assam Accord signed in 1985.