In every election in North India, the issue of illegal Bangladeshi immigrants features prominently in campaigns, particularly those of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Delhi is not an exception.
The liberation war of Bangladesh had forced millions of refugees from East Pakistan to take shelter in India. After Bangladesh was created in 1971 most of these refugees returned home. But many continued to stay in India. They lived in the bordering regions in the beginning but in due course many moved to areas which offered better opportunities. Delhi was one such destination.
The Congress party which was well entrenched in power in the seventies realised the potential of these migrants as its prospective voters. It planned a strategy to give them voting rights as ‘paper citizens’ (a phrase popularised by Kamal Sadiq in his book by the same name to explain the massive fraudulent process through which Afghan refugees in Pakistan became naturalised) and then garner their votes for the party. H.K.L. Bhagat, the Congress MP from East Delhi, was one of the masterminds to put this political engineering into effect.
With the rise of Hindutva in the eighties the Bangladeshi question started assuming communal overtones as most of these Bangladeshis were Muslim. In the aftermath of the demolition of the Babri mosque in December 1992, when the Hindutva militancy was at its peak, Delhi’s BJP MP Madan Lal Khurana took a vow to evict all ‘illegal Bangladeshis’ from Delhi.
To dramatise his pledge Khurana marched to the banks of Yamuna near Okhla to physically oust the Bangladeshis who lived there in clusters. His bravado, however, proved to be a damp squib because of resistance from locals and social activists. But Khurana’s exploit did not go in vain. In the assembly election held in November 1993, BJP won and he became the chief minister of Delhi.
In the meantime, much polluted water and froth have flown in the Yamuna. But the question of illegal Bangladeshis has remained where it was. There is, however, a difference now. The rise of the newly formed Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has become a political force to reckon with. By virtually replacing the Congress, the AAP has emerged as the BJP’s principal challenger in the politics of Delhi.
The threat for BJP is that AAP, unlike the Congress, is using the same political tricks which BJP considers its USP at the core of which is how to give the Bangladeshi question a communal tinge, if not colour. With its cleverly crafted ‘soft Hindutva’ strategy AAP wants to outsmart the BJP in its own game. In one of my earlier essays, I have expanded this argument.
It may be underlined that the ten years of the Narendra Modi rule at the centre has at least confirmed one truth that no political party worth its salt can anymore afford to summarily reject the electoral expediency of Hindutva. The Rahul Gandhi brand of politics is the only exception which has worried even many within his own party. The endless tension between the Congress and the AAP can be attributed partly to this variable. It also explains why the BJP is obsessed with Rahul, and by extension Jawaharlal Nehru.
Also read: Muslims Migrant Workers Branded as ‘Bangladeshi’, ‘Revenge Attacks’ in Delhi, UP, Odisha
The soft Hindutva trappings of AAP includes the bogey of a ‘sudden spurt’ in the number of illegal Bangladeshis in Delhi presumably pointing to the disturbed situation in Bangladesh. But there is little evidence from the India-Bangladesh border to suggest any such trend. Six months have passed since the fall of the Sheikh Hasina government on August 5, 2024 yet there is no change in the pattern of Bangladeshis (including Hindu Bangladeshis) entering into India.
Yet AAP is all set to play its Bangladeshi card. On December 18, the AAP-dominated Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), instructed the concerned departments of the Delhi government to prevent school admissions of illegal Bangladeshis and to launch appropriate drives against illegal encroachments. It further notified that the health department should undertake a drive to prevent the issuance of birth certificates to illegal Bangladeshis. To underline the gravity of the situation the orders insisted that all action taken reports must be submitted on a weekly basis.
But such stringent instructions notwithstanding the actual number of nabbed Bangladeshis did not match the angst. A maximum of about a 1,000 people were reportedly identified. In a city having a population of 33 million the number was microscopic. Even otherwise, these figures must be taken with a pinch of salt. From our experience with similar enumerations elsewhere, for example, in the Assam’s NRC exercise, we know how these data do not pass the legal scrutiny.
Besides, given that most so-called illegal Bangladeshis are illiterate, live in jhuggis (hutments), and are destitute, it’s unrealistic to expect them to properly maintain their documents and present them to authorities as needed. The online enumeration, if any, would further complicate the process.
All said, in keeping with the texture of the AAP-BJP contestation for power in Delhi, it is clear that the AAP is trying to steal the wind from the BJP’s sail in so far as the Bangladeshi question is concerned. The AAP has gone to the extent of even accusing the BJP for harbouring the Rohingyas. It has targeted Hardeep Singh Puri, the Union urban development minister, for allotting them government flats. The BJP has been made to defend their position by arguing that those Rohingyas were ‘legal refugees,’ which is true.
Also read: Academics Condemn ‘Anti-Muslim’ JNU Seminar on Illegal Migration, Denounce Study
Whatever ultimately happens to the identification drive one thing is clear that those Muslims who live on the margins and who hail from outside of Delhi, whether Bengali-speaking or otherwise, are unnerved by the spectre of knocks on their doors for questioning, if not arrest. No wonder that some prominent Ulema have approached the Lt Governor of Delhi, V.K. Saxena, to sensitise him about this pervasive fear. The latter also has positively responded by ordering a very careful ‘special drive’ so as to spot only the ‘illegal immigrants’.
To conclude, it is ironical that in modern times when on the one hand we boast so much about globalisation which has ensured an unfettered flow of capital, goods and professional leadership across international boundaries there would be so much display of resistance against movements of the ordinary people, that too when those movements are often distress driven.
It was as recent as in the nineteenth and early twentieth century that 50 million Europeans had emigrated to the Americas, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. But the offspring of the same immigrants are now talking about building barriers against migrating Asians and Africans.
Delhi’s illegal Bangladeshis are a minuscule minority. Atishi’s AAP government will stand taller if it did not waste its time and resources on this evidently hopeless exercise. Even if her scheme has a limited success, it would simply mean that she would have to ultimately send some identified illegal Bangladeshis to the detention camps. In no way Bangladesh would take them back. In the best of time when India-Bangladesh relations were boisterous it did not; now ruled out summarily. Sooner the AAP shelved the scheme better it is for the party.
Partha S. Ghosh is a retired professor of South Asian Studies, JNU.
