Guwahati— Long after midnight, as most of Assam slept, security forces were quietly at work along the state’s winding border with Bangladesh. Twenty individuals, identified as illegal Bangladeshi intruders, were intercepted and pushed back across the boundary — one more chapter in what Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma is now calling a daily, non-negotiable mission.
“Assam will fight. Pushbacks will continue,” CM Sarma posted on X on Saturday, invoking an old Hindi proverb — “Laaton ke bhoot baaton se nahin maante” — meaning those who won’t listen to reason must be dealt with firmly. It was the language of a state that has spent decades wrestling with one of India’s most politically charged infiltration issues and which now appears to have run out of patience.
A crisis of decades
To understand why 20 people being walked across a border at night made front-page news, you need to understand Assam’s particular history with migration.
The trouble, in its modern form, traces back to 1971, when millions of people from what was then East Pakistan — and would soon become Bangladesh — fled across the border to escape the horrors of war. The mass illegal migration into Assam was on a scale that fundamentally altered the demographic fabric of the state and it continued.
What followed was years of simmering resentment. By 1977, during a routine by-election in Mangaldoi, large numbers of alleged illegal migrants were discovered in voter rolls. That single revelation lit a fuse. It gave birth to the Assam Movement of 1979–1985, led by the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU), which demanded the detection and deportation of all illegal migrants who had crossed over after March 25, 1971.
Over six long years of that movement, 855 people gave their lives in the hope of an infiltration-free Assam. The agitation ended with the signing of the Assam Accord in 1985 — an agreement that set March 25, 1971 as the official cut-off date for identifying and deporting foreigners. But decades later, the wound has never quite closed.
Everyday Pushback
CM Sarma said on April 25 was notable not just for the number — 20 in a single night — but for what he revealed about the pace of operations. According to the Chief Minister, security forces are currently pushing back an estimated 20 to 30 illegal migrants every day along the Assam border. Quietly. Methodically. Without waiting for slow-moving legal processes to catch up and taking the help of the Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act, 1950.That last point matters. CM Sarma freely admitted that large-scale deportation through formal legal channels is simply not practical on the ground. The sheer volume of cases, the procedural demands of identification and documentation, the diplomatic protocols involved — all of it makes the formal system sluggish to the point of ineffectiveness. The pushback route, while controversial, is the state government’s answer to that bottleneck.
The larger picture
What Assam is grappling with is not just a border security problem — it is a question of identity, resources, and belonging that has resisted easy answers for generations.
The state has tried legal mechanisms. The final updated National Register of Citizens, published in August 2019, contained 31 million names out of a total population of 34 million — leaving out nearly 1.9 million applicants. That exercise was as contentious as the problem it tried to solve, raising fresh questions about who belongs and who doesn’t.
Now, the CM Sarma government has chosen a more blunt instrument — boots on the ground, silent operations in the dead of night, and a public declaration that this will not stop. Whether it deters future infiltration, satisfies the long-standing anxieties of Assam’s indigenous communities, or simply pushes the problem further down the road without resolving it — that remains to be seen. But for now, along the dark, rain-soaked stretches of Assam’s border, the pushbacks continue. Every single night.
