The Assam Accord is a Memorandum of Settlement (MoS) signed on August 15, 1985, between the Government of India, the Government of Assam, and the leaders of the six-year-long Assam Movement, primarily the All Assam Students' Union (AASU) and the All Assam Gana Sangram Parishad (AAGSP). It was created to resolve the problem of illegal immigration into Assam, which the protestors feared was overwhelming the native population and impacting their political, cultural, and land rights.
The Accord's core mechanism, detailed in Clause 5, established a three-part formula for dealing with "foreigners" based on specific cut-off dates. Persons who entered Assam before January 1, 1966, were to be regularized as Indian citizens. Those who entered between January 1, 1966, and midnight of March 24, 1971, were to be detected, removed from the electoral rolls for ten years, and then re-enfranchised. Foreigners who entered on or after March 25, 1971, were to be detected, deleted from the electoral rolls, and expelled in accordance with the law. This cut-off date of March 25, 1971, was later given statutory force through Section 6A of the Citizenship Act, 1955, inserted by the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 1985.
The Accord also includes Clause 6, which promises constitutional, legislative, and administrative safeguards to protect the cultural, social, and linguistic identity and heritage of the Assamese people. The Accord connects directly to the ongoing process of updating the National Register of Citizens (NRC), which used the March 24, 1971, cut-off date. Recently, the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 (CAA), which offers a path to citizenship for non-Muslim migrants from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan who entered India by December 31, 2014, has been a major point of contention, as many Assamese groups argue it violates the spirit of the Accord by effectively changing the 1971 cut-off date.