Bangladeshis in India – aliens or Muslims?

The North-Easterners are fleeing cities once considered safe. It has to be said that they are escaping what they feel is a menacing situation where the enemy threatening their security is a SMS, doctored MMS, or a rumour. There is lack of faith or confidence in their neighbours and more importantly, in the authorities. Before anyone gets into any discussion on it — and there is no dearth of it — a few things need to be noted to decode this ‘Bangladeshis’ who figure now in public discourse. One, the present situation is explosive, no doubt, and in Kokrajhar, it is native Bodos and illegal immigrants from Bangladesh in conflict. To them, it would appear that they happen mostly to be of Bangladeshi origin, and only incidentally, Muslim. [caption id=“attachment_421536” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  AP[/caption] Two, in places like Mumbai, given the recent flare-up when Muslim organisations organised it with singing effect, it is clearly Bodos vs Muslims. That the persons at the receiving end in Kokrajar are illegal migrants is incidental. Three, to the politicians it seems that the populations which have shifted from Bangladesh to the Eastern states, changing the demography, even upturning the sanctity of the electoral lists, are preferred differently. The Right parties see them as Muslims, and their being illegal has significance because they are both – illegal and Muslim. Four, to the government, and the Left or Left-leaning parties, including Congress, if one can call it that, is that they are just a wave of people who came in and settled. After all, they are a mix of Muslims and Hindus, but the proportions of the share of communities already in is not known though there are concerns about minority persecution in Bangladesh. They are less spectacularly reported compared to the persecutions in Pakistan. Ninety percent of Bangladeshis are Muslim in that neighbouring country’s population. Having allowed them to arrive prior to and during and just immediately after the 1972 war, they happen to be just another issue. If they have bloated both the population sizes and enrolled themselves in the lists, well, it is just one of the several problems the country is beset with. No one, just no one, so far has looked at the mass of population crossing the international border as comprising only illegal migrants who continue to arrive uninterruptedly. These illegals comprise those who traversed to India without any documents, just stepped over the line, and stayed put. It also includes those who arrived with valid travel papers and overstayed. No sovereign country can and should allow such influx where people can move in at will as if there was no border. Curious is the case that the government which, as per a recent contention in the Supreme Court, has said that ‘due process of law’ was expected of it before deporting them. The due process is cumbersome, time-consuming and therefore virtually ineffective. Take the official data: 58,000 Bangladeshis overstayed, and ‘became traceless’, and 82,585 of that nationality did not voluntarily return between 2009 and 2011. Parliament was told that of all nationalities overstaying or do not return 30 per cent are from Bangladesh, the largest proportion in that category. No wonder, given the various approaches to the same migrants, they lend themselves to political misuse. A single example would suffice to illustrate how everyone tries to use them to their political advantage. It relates to how Maharashtra deals with them. If locations in the North-East are easily reached, and sees swarms of them flock there, as they did in Kokrajhar, the scope to easily mingle in the slums and remain undetected when they come in search of livelihoods draws them to Mumbai. No estimate is available of how many streamed in but the accounts available are of how they paid agents to navigate to the metropolis. In 1995, when the Shiv Sena-BJP government came to be in Maharashtra, the first target was the Bangladeshis in the city. Bal Thackeray had ranted against them and expected his party, a major partner in the alliance, to deport them. Rhetoric and reality being far apart, Manohar Joshi, the chief minister, had to look to the ‘due process of law’. Thackeray roared that if the government did not, then his partymen would weed them out and send them back. That caused quite a furore. It was seen as a Rightist political party working on its pet target, the minorities. Not illegal immigrants. The Sena looked at them as Muslims. The areas where large Bengalis-speaking Muslims slummed in the eastern suburbs were referred to as “Bangladesh” by the BJP cadre, just as Muslim ghettos were called Pakistan by Ahmedabadi Hindus even prior to the 1985 communal riots. The hunt-and-weed threat brought the then Union Home Minister, Indrajit Gupta, scurrying to Mumbai to confer with the state government. The consensus was that though Mumbai Police had been regularly been deporting the Bangladeshis, there were some flaws, leave alone step it up. There were migrants from West Bengal as well just as there were people flocking from other parts of the country. However, the West Bengali was being mistaken, in the absence of the ability to determine if the Bengali was from West of the border or the East. There were language nuances which were a give away, the preferred species of fish and the way they were cooked. It was therefore best that West Bengal was involved once the suspects were herded. Strangely, soon after, in a petition being heard in the Supreme Court, West Bengal filed an affidavit that it was neither possible nor did it have the expertise or capacity to determine who was a Bangladeshi. It was hardly a coincidence that a train carrying Bangladeshis for being pushed across the border was attacked and spirited away by Communist Party of India (Marxists) workers; West Bengal was then ruled by the CPM. Nothing illustrates better how both sides use the issue as a political platform. One retains the electoral advantage by retaining them and the other finds their presence a political issue to flog. The government – seen more as machinery and less as a political establishment – is disinterested, never mind their size, building up over decades. Or else, the border would not remain as porous as it is today. Bangladeshi, illegally residing in the country, arriving with or without valid papers, is everyone’s pet need. Nothing is alien to politics, not even aliens. That is why we don’t even have a proper, realistic headcount.