GUWAHATI, Dec 21 - The Guwahati Senior Citizens� Association (GSCA) today unanimously adopted a resolution urging the Government of India to introduce vital amendments into the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) with a view to safeguarding the fundamental rights of the people of the North East in general and Assam in particular.
The association, at its meeting held at the Pensioners� Bhawan here with its president DN Chakravartty in the chair, stated that in the wake of the partition of India and the subsequent partition of Pakistan, over 12 million people came from erstwhile East Pakistan and present-day Bangladesh to the north-eastern region in general and Assam in particular, thus putting a great pressure on the population of the region.
While a small part of East Bengal and Bangladesh refugees were given shelter by a couple of western and northern states of the country, the major burden of these refugees had to be borne by Assam and West Bengal alone, the meeting observed.
The latest decision of the Government of India to give shelter to the persecuted and uprooted people from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, it said, will invariably put tremendous pressure on the population of Assam which is already overburdened with several million refugees and infiltrators from East Pakistan and present-day Bangladesh.
The association appealed to the Government of India to consider sympathetically the genuine grievances of the people of Assam and their growing apprehension about the possible unbearable pressure on the people of the State in the wake of large-scale influx of refugees from Bangladesh, which can trigger a disaster on the State�s socio-political structure and its overall economy.
Moving the resolution, GSCA president Chakravartty said that while the Assamese people are fully conscious of the national obligation of the people of India towards the persecuted and uprooted Hindus and other minorities from Pakistan and two other nations of the great Indian subcontinent, the rest of the country should not lose sight of possible threats towards the very existence of the numerically weak Assamese people whose political and economic independence would be jeopardised by the massive influx of refugees from those countries.
Hem Chandra Sarma, secretary, public relations, read out the secretarial report in the absence of secretary Baneswar Khound.
The meeting condoled the deaths of Senehi Begum, Nabin Chandra Sarma, Deepali Das Bhuyan, Rajen Barthakur and Akhtar Hussain, besides ten other persons including the five youths who lost their lives during the recent police firing. Surendra Kumar Baruah, Uttam Baruah, Neelakanta Nath, Mahendra Bora, Kularanjan Das and Prof Nasreen Hazarika also took part in the discussion.
