India to offer gun licences in volatile Bangladesh border areas

India's Assam state, bordering Muslim-majority Bangladesh, is to issue gun licences to "indigenous" residents, its Hindu nationalist leader has announced, a move raising concerns among the state's Muslims.

Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has previously warned that the Assamese-speaking population "face the threat of attacks from the Bangladesh side, and even in their own villages".

The northeastern state of around 31 million people is riven by multiple ethnic, linguistic and religious fault-lines, and was troubled by several bloody clashes in past decades.

Muslims make up roughly 35 percent of the population, most of them Bengali speaking, according to the most recent national census in 2011, with the rest largely Hindus.

Sarma announced on Wednesday the introduction of a website "where indigenous people, who perceive a threat to their lives and reside in sensitive areas, can apply for arms licenses".

India has otherwise strict gun control laws, and critics and opposition leaders condemned the move.

"This will lead to gang violence and crimes based on personal vendettas," said opposition Congress lawmaker Gaurav Gogoi on social media platform X.

"This is not governance, this is a dangerous step backwards towards lawlessness."

Sarma is from Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The move is part of a wider populist campaign by Sarma's BJP government backing the majority Assamese-speaking people, including large-scale eviction drives against what he has called "illegal foreigners or doubtful citizens".

It is widely seen as targeting Muslims speaking Bengali -- the main language in neighbouring Bangladesh.

But many ethnic Bengalis are Indian citizens, with roots in Assam long before the region that is now Bangladesh was carved out at the bloody end of British imperial rule in 1947.

Assam was the first state to implement a controversial citizenship verification exercise in 2019, which excluded nearly two million people -- many of them Muslims.

Tensions in Assam have grown in the past year since the overthrow of Bangladesh's autocratic government, once a close ally of Modi's BJP.

Sarma has warned that "the indigenous people" in border districts "live in an atmosphere of insecurity due to the recent developments in Bangladesh".

Agence France-Presse