No Question of Joining The Committee: AASU

GUWAHATI: The All Assam Students’ Union (AASU) says there is no question of it deputing a member to the high-level committee formed by the Centre to look into the implementation of Clause 6 of the Assam Accord.

Reacting to the formation of a nine-member high-level committee led by MP Bezbaruah to look into the implementation of Clause 6 of the Assam Accord, AASU president Dipanko Kumar Nath and general secretary Lurinjyoti Gogoi told the media on Sunday that they saw no reason to depute a member from the AASU to the committee.

The two AASU leaders said implementation of Clause 6 of the Assam Accord, violating its Clause 5, is ‘meaningless’. Clauses 5 and 6, according to them, are the two main clauses of the Accord. They said Clause 5 stipulates that ‘all foreigners who entered Assam from Bangladesh after the midnight of March 24, 1971 will have to be identified and deported from the State, and Assam will accept only those Bangladeshis who had entered the State before this cut-off date’. They also said if the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016 is passed in Parliament, it will be a sheer violation of the Assam Accord.

According to them, what the Joint Parliamentary Committee did to Assam – holding hearings on the Bill – was mere eyewash. The JPC, they said, has done what the Centre wanted it to do.

AASU adviser-in-chief Samujjal Bhattarchayya said: “The Centre, by forming the high-level committee for implementation of Clause 6 of the Assam Accord, has made an election-centric move. Let the Centre implement the decisions taken at the tripartite talks held on April 30, 2017 on the Accord. The Centre should implement Clause 5 of the Accord too.”

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