Illegal migrants are alibi for electoral gains

THE term 'Bangladeshis' in India has infiltrated our lexicon as "illegal" human beings. They have also become the most acceptable alibis for the political class to extract political mileage and distract unfavourable attention.

The recent case in point is Delhi's Lieutenant-Governor VK Saxena, who announced a two-month special drive to identify and act against illegal Bangladeshi immigrants residing in the national capital. The Delhi police has started raids in slums across Kalindi Kunj, Shaheen Bagh and Jamia Nagar, where Rohingya refugees were provided land to set up camps.

Many in India like to believe that Rohingya are Bangladeshis despite sufficient knowledge that the ethnicity is among the most persecuted groups of Myanmar.

It may not be a coincidence that this development came hours after the BJP demanded a CBI investigation into the alleged illegal settlement of Rohingya in Jammu and Kashmir. Chief Minister of the state Omar Abdullah has said the refugees should be deported, if at all, but they could not be made to starve and he would not let them die in the cold.

Yet, I will not be surprised if this campaign to identify Bangladeshi "infiltrators" picks steam across other states. Let us not forget that we are upon another season of elections and, this time, for the national capital.

Many would have forgotten that in mid-1992, Delhi had launched Operation Pushback to deport Bangladeshis. That was under the Congress government, which was responding to a belligerent Sangh Parivar dramatically heightening its pitch around unauthorised immigration. Assam had already scripted the threat of a silent demographic invasion by these impoverished, desperate, pitiable neighbours who were being pushed into India to seize Hindu territory.

The template of Bangladeshi-phobia was a well-established eastern propaganda that the Sangh appropriated in its entirety. It was, however, willing to exclude the Hindu Bangladeshis as refugees who were escaping persecution. The same lens wouldn't apply to Rohingya at a later stage.

Around the same time, the Sangh launched the slogan, 'Infiltrators Quit India', and forced the Congress to act against whom it considered infiltrators, setting the stage for an event that would change the political landscape of the country forever. By December, the crescendo had reached Ayodhya, resulting in the demolition of the Babri Masjid.

The presence of illegal migrants from the neighbouring countries is not an unfamiliar piece of data. It is also well known that during the Congress regime, politicians have reportedly used these settlers as "vote banks". But there is no evidence yet or corroboration of the claim that millions of infiltrators have arrived to take over parts of this country.

Instigated by the Sangh's growing voice against the infiltrators, the then Prime Minister Narasimha Rao rolled out an action plan against the Bangladeshis to counter the jingoism. It only added fuel to the propaganda. In September 1992, a group of 132 persons was identified as infiltrators and removed from the Seemapuri area of east Delhi.

It is well known that all efforts by the government to arrest infiltration through the porous borders have proven ineffective. However, the build-up of such a campaign has been highly beneficial politically. The 1992 campaign, finally, provided the Sangh political legitimacy and made xenophobia and anti-Muslim rhetoric acceptable in public life.

The current campaign launched by the bureaucratic arm of the BJP in Delhi has raises the suspicion of the beginning of a nationwide 'identification' drive that could serve as a precursor of another round of the National Register of Citizens (NRC).

Though Assam provides the case study that the NRC is a wasteful exercise in detection, it has proven to be a worthwhile weapon to intimidate and harass Muslims. Manipulated by political parties, the acute fear of being rendered into a non-citizen has repeatedly triggered ethnonational projects across decades.

In the politics of the Hindu right, the framing of migrants threatening the security of Hindu-India has become synonymous with Muslims in general.

The ongoing exercise is already on the lines of the NRC verification, something that Uttar Pradesh had initiated in 2019. The chorus then had gained momentum, with other states chiming in and Karnataka even constructing a detention centre.

Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, known for his anti-Muslim vocabulary, has floated the idea of a nationwide NRC in his recent election campaign in Jharkhand.

Given India's poor neighbourhood policy that stood exposed after the fall of Dhaka this year, such rhetoric is bound to further deteriorate relations between the two countries, which are always on the edge with the NRC.

It will be interesting to see how this is going to play out with another Islamophobic campaign gaining ground: the claim of temples under mosques.

The Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, 1991 mandates that the nature of all places of worship, except the one in Ayodhya that was then under litigation, shall be maintained as it was on August 15, 1947.

While one hoped the Ayodhya judgement would have closed this matter, more such suits have been filed in Varanasi and, more recently in Sambhal, where trial courts hastily ordered surveys of the mosques, resulting in a clash that killed four people.

This could well be a convergence of two distinctive sets of xenophobic projects that will set off a chain of low-intensity anti-Muslim campaigns working simultaneously, while stepping up the ante wherever political machinations are due.

While the detection and detention mechanism fits the concept of "the process is the punishment", the mosque surveys claiming buried temples aim to set right "historical wrongs", thus perpetrating the narrative of revenge against invaders who have looted the glorious past.