The matter of migrants

Assam’s future — and, indeed, India’s — looks even more troubled now that the first list of “citizens” has come out in that state and millions of people who expected to be on it are not. I do not intend to rehearse the long and winding history of the “foreigner” crisis in Assam, which has led to years of insurgency and some truly awful massacres, such as Nellie. I will merely point out two things. First, that for many in Assam, this is an ethno-nationalist question: All Bengalis are suspect. And second that, for many in the rest of India, it is a religious question: All Muslims are suspect. 

Bangladeshi “infiltration” is a common bugbear among right-wing politicians in what the Northeast refers to as the “mainland”. I still remember, even if others may have forgotten, that the then Gujarat chief minister devoted much of his 2012 Independence Day speech to ranting about infiltration in the wake of violence at Kokrajhar — even though the primary victims there were Muslims and in any case, it was hardly a policy issue on which Gujarat’s leader need express an opinion. For many others, the NRC list is a necessary cleansing. The myth of future Muslim demographic dominance in India is central to the WhatsApp school of politics; and the fact of Bangladeshi migration, however much it may be slowing, is one component of that myth. Entertainingly, there are many who will bemoan the illiberalism of Donald Trump and his attitude to refugees, or his separating of families at the border, and ignore that this is precisely what India is doing and planning to do on a larger scale in Assam.

Let us be clear: The Bangladeshi issue is, for mainland fans of Hindutva, merely another occasion to declare that all Muslims are suspect. How, indeed, will the large Muslim population of West Bengal — sorry, Bangla — be treated when they travel outside the state to work? Will it not be assumed that they are migrants, and will they not be subject to intimidation? In fact, is this not already happening? Does anyone suppose that those doing the intimidation have sought to find out in advance whether whoever they’re bullying is in fact from, say, Malda, or from across the border? Of course not. The purpose, as with so many other positions of this sort, is merely to have an excuse to bully Muslims and declare them non-Indian. From their point of view, it does not really matter if they are Bangladeshi-born or not. This is the mindset that has always called Muslim-majority areas in our town “little Pakistans”. 

As for Assam’s politics, it has long had an anti-Bengali element to it, one that has been enabled by all major political forces in the state but particularly in recent years by the All Assam Students’ Union or AASU and its successor, the local Bharatiya Janata Party. A good number of those left out in the NRC list are Bengali Hindus but that is not the problem in Assam that it would be in the rest of the country. Here stands revealed the BJP’s essential problem in trying to localise its divisive ideology: Many states are divided along very different lines than the party’s preferred division (Hindu/non-Hindu). I’m not sure how long it can speak in two tongues, even if both are forked.

Bangla Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has copped a bit of flak for warning that behaviour like the NRC can lead to “civil war”. But the truth is that isolating and shaming either Bengalis or Muslims in the garb of attacking Bangladeshis will not stand in the modern era. Bangla will not stand for it, certainly. And what precisely do we intend to do to follow up on the NRC? Are we going to put millions of people who cannot prove their Indian descent in camps? How easy is it actually to prove descent? Can you imagine descending on a village in, say, Bihar, and asking everyone there to produce paperwork that proves their forefathers lived there in 1960? You would get laughed out of town. The whole point of Aadhaar, remember, was that practically nobody in India has paperwork proving anything. 

Only a mildly better scenario is that no giant concentration camps full of millions of paperless people is set up, but they are nevertheless treated as illegal residents without any rights. No liberal state should be allowed to do that. All those who live under the India state’s jurisdiction should have the rights enshrined in the Constitution. And don’t worry about the future of Bangladeshi infiltration: In the next few years, it will be doing so much better than India anyway that migration might start going the other way. 

Email: m.s.sharma@gmail.com; Twitter: @mihirssharma