While the ‘40,07,707’ number thrown up by the final draft of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) on July 30 is likely to go down when the final list is published on December 31, it has become a cut-throat political bogey for both the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Trinamool Congress (TMC), with each trying to establish a partisan narrative that suits them in the run-up to the 2019 general elections.The Congress, which sowed the seeds of the NRC by bringing in the Assam Accord in 1985 to “detect, delete and deport” undocumented foreigners residing in the state, is looking utterly confused on whether it should own up to the NRC process as “its baby”, as veteran Assamese party leader and astute politician Tarun Gogoi has stated, or to join the opposition bandwagon led by TMC chief Mamata Banerjee.To understand the BJP’s intended narrative, you have to refer to the press meet held by party chief Amit Shah in New Delhi on July 30 and his speech in the Rajya Sabha thereafter.First, the press meet. Shah said, “The opposition is politicising this issue for vote-bank politics. The NRC is an issue about national security and national security is most important for us.” He also said, “When you are talking about rights, what about the rights of the Assamese people who have lost their jobs because of these ‘illegal’ migrants? The NRC, which is a result of the Assam Accord, is a step towards protecting the rights of Indians.”While in the course of his statements in the press meet, Shah clearly tried to project the “ghuspetia” or the undocumented immigrants as only Muslims from Bangladesh, thereby trying to give a religious colour to the 40 lakh number to add muscle to an already popular belief among his party’s electorate, he also sent out a message to his core constituency, Hindu Bengalis in Assam (mainly the Barak Valley) and West Bengal, that his party would “soon” bring in the Citizenship Amendment Bill to protect the Hindu Bangladeshis reportedly residing in these states.This is a significant departure from the party line, as the BJP, which has been playing out a delicate balancing act in Assam thrown up by the massive opposition to the Bill in the last few months, had tried to keep the issue of the NRC update and the Citizenship Bill separate. Taking part in the discussion on NRC in the Rajya Sabha on July 31, Shah said though the Accord was brought in by Rajiv Gandhi, “Congress did not have the courage to implement it and now the Modi government is doing what Congress could not.”Unlike Shah, though, Assam chief minister Sarbananda Sonowal was less upbeat while meeting reporters a few hours after the NRC final draft was out in Guwahati, underlining that “It is only a draft”. When asked about Mamata Banerjee’s vociferous accusation that the NRC was “discriminatory” towards Bengalis in a press meet she held a while before Sonowal’s, he chose to avoid responding to it directly, leaving many Assam watchers a bit baffled.However, if you see the subsequent comments of state BJP leaders, including that of the party’s North East Democratic Alliance (NEDA) convenor Himanta Biswa Sarma, you can get close to pinning down the reason behind this caution. Sarma said on July 31 that “almost 13-14 lakh” among the 40 lakh figure “are Hindus who may have voted for the BJP”.Though the state government and the NRC authorities are tight-lipped about the religious or community break-up of the 40 lakh statistic, a district-wise break-up of the July 30 figure, put together by reporters closely following the NRC update process from the popular Assamese news channel Pratidin Time, can help point to some answers. Though senior journalist with the channel Mrinal Talukdar, who helped the reporters put together the exhaustive list, categorically told The Wire that “It is not an official list as the deputy commissioners and the NRC authorities have strict instructions not to disclose to media any break-up of the total number, religion or community or district wise, so it may have a 5-10% margin of error from the official number”, it, nevertheless, addresses both the cautious approach of the state BJP leaders and the party chief’s attempts to own the NRC process.Till now, the party was battling the growing impression among the majority voters in the state that it was betraying them by trying to bring in the Bill which would favour Hindus Bangladeshis. Though a majority of them are Hindus, the Assamese speaking and other indigenous population don’t quite see the “illegal infiltration” issue from the religious angle.Assam has 33 districts, out of which nine are Muslim majority. In 2016, Sarma had famously asked the Assamese community to “chose your enemy” by pointing out that nine districts have become Muslim majority from six in 2002.The Muslim-majority districts, as per the 2011 Census, are Dhubri, Barpeta, Darrang, Hailakhandi, Goalpara, Karimganj, Nagaon, Morigaon and Bongaigaon.However, according to the Pratidin Time list, broadcast on August 3 evening, out of these nine Muslim-majority districts, only five feature among the top 16 districts when it comes to approximate distribution of rejections from the 40 lakh number. The rest of the 11 districts are Hindu majority.The estimated district-wise NRC list. Courtesy: Pratidin TimeWhile Muslim-majority Darrang district heads the list with 31.95% of the applicants finding themselves out of the final draft, the Hindu-majority Hojai is right under it with an estimated 30.30% of its residents out of the final draft. While the third position is held by Bongaigaon (where the Hindu population is lower than the Muslim population by barely 2%), the Hindu-majority Kamrup (Metropolitan) district stands next. The other Hindu-majority districts that feature within the top 16 districts of this estimated list that have seen the maximum rejection of applications are Tezpur/Sonitpur, Dima Hasao, Baksa, Udalguri, Karbi Anglong, Biswanath, Lakhimpur, Tinsukia and Cachar.If you see the assembly-wise break-up of these districts, an interesting pattern surfaces. Out of the 59 assembly segments in these districts, 31 were pocketed by the BJP in the 2016 assembly polls. Add to this the six won by its alliance partner Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) and eight by the Bodo People’s Front (BPF), it throws up a rather interesting figure – 45 out of the 86 seats that the BJP and alliance partners grabbed in the last assembly polls are within these districts. Only 11 from these segments had gone to the Congress and four to the All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF), whose core constituency lies with the Bengali Muslims.If you see these figures through the lens of the 2014 Lok Sabha results too, when the BJP had its best show ever in Assam by winning seven out of the 14 seats, these areas are significant for the party. Barring the Jorhat and Dibrugarh Lok Sabha constituencies, the others fall within the top 16 districts that found a mention in the Pratidin Time list.Though these unofficial figures can’t be used to state for sure that most of those who have been left out of the final draft belong to one particular religion or community or voter base, it can’t be overlooked though that there is a considerable presence of Hindus in these districts, particularly Hindu Bengalis, Nepalis, Assamese, plains and hill tribes, and Hindi speakers, among others.What is also interesting is that some of the Muslim-majority districts, particularly Dhubri and Karimganj, which share a border with Bangladesh, have seen only an estimated 8.4% and 8.46% rejection rate of applications.“This is most likely because more than any community, the Bengali Muslims of Assam have been conscious of entering their names in the electoral rolls particularly because they have been accused of harbouring undocumented Bangladeshis for a long time. Many Bengali Hindus may have come before the cut-off date of 1971, used by the NRC to establish the applicants as citizens of the state, but they may not have been very conscious of keeping documents. It could also be that some of the Hindus may have entered Assam from Bangladesh after 1971. If you see the stark depletion of the number of Hindus in Bangladesh after 1971 and hear of the famous cases like that of Unomoti Biswas entering from that country illegally into Assam with the help of touts and then getting caught, it can also be deduced as so,” stated a senior Guwahati-based journalist, refusing to identify himself here as this is “a sensitive matter”.Abdul Latif, a Goalpara-based advocate who has been representing many suspected foreigners in the local Foreigners’ Tribunal, told this correspondent something similar recently about this tendency among the Bengali Muslims, “Since the Assam agitation days, most Bengali Muslims have been conscious of their Indian citizenship. This is true of those affected by the floods too, even though they may have moved from one sand bar to another. The first thing they do after shifting to a new place is ensure that their names are included in the local electoral rolls. They have always been in the fear that otherwise they would become an ‘undocumented Bangladeshi’. This aspect has also put some people in trouble, as the Tribunals at once begin to doubt the person after finding out that he/she has been named in more than one assembly segment.”These estimated numbers also give a better clue to understand why Mamata Banerjee has thrown in the gauntlet over the NRC issue, even though her party has a negligible presence in the state. If you look at the recent by-election results in Bengal, the BJP has been considerably successful in expanding its voter base in the state, basically riding on the Hindu Bengali votes and projecting the TMC not only as the saviour of only the Bengali Muslims, but also often accusing it of protecting “illegal immigrants” among them. When Narendra Modi, then a prime ministerial candidate of the BJP, said in a famous public meeting in the Hindu-majority Bankura that Bangladeshis would have to leave India “bag and baggage” after the May 16, 2014 elections, he was addressing that sentiment among many Bengali Hindus, who were affected by the division of Bengal on religious lines during Partition.Lately, the BJP is also trying to take away the TMC’s Muslim base. In the recent panchayat polls, it gave tickets to over 850 Muslims, the highest number of tickets the party had ever given to candidates from the community in that state. In the 2016 assembly polls in Bengal, the BJP gave tickets to only six Muslims out of its 294 nominees.In that July 30 press meet, Banerjee tried to unite the Hindus and Muslims of her state on the basis of language, saying that the BJP was actually siding with the majority Assamese community to “discriminate” and “harass” the Bengali community of Assam across religious lines. The tussle between these two communities over language in Assam goes back a long time and it is a raw nerve for both sides.If Banerjee has done this to suit her politics, the BJP has no complaints either, as it is giving the party the handle it most wanted at the moment – regaining lost ground among the majority community in Assam prior to the 2019 polls by projecting itself as the champion of the undocumented Bangladeshi cause yet again. In the 2016 assembly polls, it had to evoke these very sentiments to elicit votes for itself in the Brahmaputra Valley, crucial to win the state.With just two Lok Sabha seats in Barak Valley, one of which has been traditionally going to the Congress (Silchar) and the other to AIUDF (Karimganj), the BJP can well afford to concentrate more on retaining the parliamentary seats it won in the other parts of Assam. A point to be noted here is that the term of the Joint Parliamentary Committee overseeing the possibility of bringing in the amendment to the Citizenship Act, 1955, was extended till the last week of the winter session of parliament just a day after the NRC final draft was published.Banerjee too knows it will be difficult for her to grab either of the seats in the Bengali majority Barak Valley of Assam. But hers is a clever ploy to retain most of the 34 of the 42 Lok Sabha seats in Bengal in 2019, as the BJP is inching closer.In this power tussle for the crucial 2019 general elections, what both are doing, though, is trying to stir a communal pot in Assam that has seen many bouts of bloodshed, mindless violence and ill-feeling across community lines since the pre-independence days.The Congress, meanwhile, is a mute spectator, not able to gauge as yet whether it should try and win Assam in the 2019 polls by asserting itself as the first force behind making the NRC process a reality for the majority community, or join an all-India narrative being woven around the NRC as only an anti-Muslim conspiracy of the BJP. This narrative is also being peddled by a section of New Delhi-based media rather simplistically, and is playing into the hands of the ruling party.