Himal Interviews: The plight of Bengali Muslims in Assam
In June 2025, Himal Southasian launched a podcast series titled Partitions of the Heart in collaboration with Karwan-e-Mohabbat, hosted by the peace activist Harsh Mander. The inaugural season, called ‘Muslim Life – and Death – in Modi’s India’, focuses on the deepening crisis of Muslims in the country. Since 2017, Mander and Karwan-e-Mohabbat have done the extraordinary and difficult work of documenting a rising wave of hate and crimes against India’s Muslims, and of lending support and solidarity to victims of communal atrocities. In Mander’s words, “We live in deeply troubled times of visceral, everyday hate, violence, fear and division. The first step towards healing our growing fractures is to talk and listen to each other.”
This series is part of the effort to bring forward meaningful conversations on the increasing marginalisation and vilification of Muslims in India. In the season’s first episode, Mander spoke to Hilal Ahmed, an academic and writer about his positionality as a practising Muslim and as a scholar looking at Muslim lives and the Muslim experience.
This interview was recorded on 19 April 2025. It has been edited for brevity and clarity.
You can listen to audio versions of this conversation on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Glossary
Baksa: A district in North-western Assam, India, within the Bodoland Territorial Region.
Nellie: The Nellie massacre took place on 18 February 1983 in the Nagaon district of Assam. It remains one of the deadliest episodes of mass violence in post-independence India.
D-voter (Doubtful Voter): A category of people in Assam whose citizenship is considered uncertain or disputed by India’s government.
Citizenship Amendment Act: The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), 2019 is an Indian law that provides an accelerated pathway to citizenship for persecuted religious minorities: non-Muslim migrants, specifically Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians, from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.
6A: In the context of Indian citizenship, Section 6A is a unique provision within the Citizenship Act of 1955 specifically designed to address migration into Assam following the 1985 Assam Accord.
C S Mullan: Census Superintendent of Assam who authored the 1931 Census Report
Radhakamal Mukherjee: Early 20th-century sociologist and migration scholar
IMDT: The Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act, 1983 (IMDT Act) was a unique law applicable only in Assam to detect and deport illegal immigrants who entered after 25 March 1971.
Baburisation and Mughalisation: Terms used primarily by Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma and the BJP to characterise what they describe as a demographic and cultural threat posed by illegal migration from Bangladesh.
Harsh Mander
I have great pleasure to to introduce you to speak with Aman Wadud. I was thinking back to how long have I known him. It really dates back to 2014. It was when the election campaigning for the 2014 general election was at its height. And a massacre broke out in a very remote village in the district Baksa, where you had to cross rivers and enter forests, where a group of gunmen came in and they slaughtered about 50 women and children mainly. I had gone there initially as part of a fact-finding team and in a sense, I never, never left after that. The enormity of the suffering and the injustice held me in Assam. And I had made a call for young people to volunteer. And foremost among them was this young law graduate called Aman Wadud. In the entire dispute about citizenship and people being deemed foreigners, people detained in the detention centers, Aman Wadud is the person people turn to with the greatest trust. Aman Wadud also went off to the US for a year, for his LLM in Houston. And then he had many opportunities to stay there, but he said, “I love my country and I must go back.” And here he’s back. He’s now an equally active lawyer, but also recently, he has formally joined politics – the Indian National Congress. Why do not we start with a little bit about, I spoke briefly about this journey of 11 years. Would you like to tell us a little more about this journey?
Aman Wadud
I was in Delhi from 2011 to 2013 and I wanted to become a big-time lawyer, but soon I realised the scale of the problem that Assam is facing. I can’t do much from Delhi so that’s what made me come back to Assam. And when I was in Assam, there was a period where I was thinking how can I make a difference? So I met you at the Guwahati Town Club, where I was asked to gather some people for some talk on what was happening, as on 2 May, there was a massacre in Baksa district, in a small village called Narayanguri across adjacent to Manas National Park. So it was then I met you, I exactly remember the conversation and I asked you, “What can I do?”
This is when you asked me, what is your profession? And I said, I’m a lawyer, I have a law degree. I'm practicing here. So you told me to record 164 statement and that became like my agenda for the next few months.
HM
I’ll explain what this 164 is about to our listeners. The children, when I went, knew who the killers were. They remembered every detail. They were not strangers who had come in,and Assam has a sad history of complete impunity after communal violence. Nellie is arguably at least one or two of the worst communal massacres that happened in 1983 in Nellie. And you would find it hard to believe that not a single person has even been prosecuted, let alone charged with that massacre, also concentrating on women and children. And so we were determined that after this massacre in Baksa, the same story of impunity should not happen. And it was very clear to me that if the statements of the children were taken, we didn’t depend on the police to take their statements they presented before a magistrate and that was the responsibility that Aman took up. That was the 164 statements.