By RAHUL KARMAKAR / The Hindu
The Beki river is as ‘bent’ as its name conveys. Snaking down from the hills of Bhutan to the north of Assam in India, it has been the source of both joy and sorrow for the people of Kalgachia town in Barpeta district by changing course and ‘bending’ more almost every monsoon season.
The river has left its most contrasting imprint on a 500-metre stretch of the 18-km road connecting Kalgachia with Barpeta town. Here, a lush green paddy field is juxtaposed with a few houses hanging precariously over an expanding bend of the river that has devoured more than half the asphalt road, forcing a gravelled realignment.
The people living here, mostly Bengali-origin Muslims, pejoratively referred to as ‘Miya’, have over the decades learnt to adjust their lives to the Beki’s moods, at times dictated by the India-built 60MW Kurichhu hydropower project in Bhutan upstream. But even the toughest of seasons did not prepare them for a constituency-eroding ‘political river’ undammed by the Election Commission of India (ECI).
Based on the 2001 Census, the ECI released the draft delimitation proposal for Assam on June 20 this year. The number of Assembly and parliamentary seats remains unchanged at 126 and 14, respectively, but many constituencies may be reshaped. The number of reserved seats has been proposed to be increased from 24 to 28.
Assam and four other States were left out of the last such exercise in 2008 due to “security risks”. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and other political entities also did not want delimitation in Assam until the National Register of Citizens (NRC) was updated to weed out “illegal immigrants”, aka Bangladeshis, mostly Muslim.
This story was originally published in thehindu.com. Read the full story here