August 10, 1998

One crore Bangladeshis live illegally in India. The Shiv Sena-BJP government launches an operation in Mumbai to push them back. The Left says they are Indians.

By Udayan Namboodiri, Sayantan Chakravarty and Avirook Sen

India's thriving democracy, political battles are a dime a dozen. But rarely has the country witnessed the curious spectacle of two state governments, without even a common border, slugging it out over another country. It happened in, of all places, Uluberia -- a nondescript town on the outskirts of Howrah in West Bengal.

As the 8029 Down Kurla Express rolled into Uluberia station on July 23, it was greeted by a 9,000-strong mob collected by the local MLA of the Forward Bloc, a junior partner in the ruling Left Front. The crowd, armed with sharp weapons, burst open a compartment carrying 34 prisoners, including seven women. The 14 policemen from Maharashtra who were accompanying the prisoners fired 11 rounds in self-defence until they were rescued by the Railway Police. According to the Home Ministry in Delhi, the prisoners were "snatched away". Their guards were handed over to the West Bengal Police.

The next day, it happened again. As the Kurla Express entered Kharagpur station, the West Bengal Police intervened. They asked their counterparts from Maharashtra to quietly hand over the 38 prisoners before another mob decided on direct action. The prisoners -- all zari workers -- were awaiting deportation to Bangladesh following various court orders in Mumbai.

The rescue drama in Uluberia and the pre-emptive strike in Kharagpur were not spontaneous expressions of indignation. They were carefully orchestrated by the Left in West Bengal to score a point over the BJP and its Shiv Sena ally and, at the same time, consolidate its own electoral base. On July 17, CPI(M) MP Hannan Mollah wrote to Union Home Minister L.K. Advani charging "the unscrupulous and biased" Mumbai Police of arresting "Bengali-speaking people" and branding them Bangladeshis. Five days later, he told a press conference in Delhi about reports that "Bengali Muslims from my area are being picked up as Bangladeshis". The next day, the rescue plan was set in motion, apparently with the blessings of the state Government. "All the weavers are Indian citizens," said Chief Minister Jyoti Basu, "The Shiv Sena-BJP Government is made up of barbarians."

Civilised or not, there was nothing particularly novel about the deportations. "For months this has been going on," says West Bengal Police chief Deepak Sanyal. "It was all routine." So routine that 8,113 illegal immigrants from Bangladesh have been deported from Mumbai since 1982 without the Left Front smelling an organised Bangali khadano abhijan (persecution of Bengalis) engineered by the Shiv Sena and BJP. Another 122 suspected Bangladeshis are in custody and their fate will be decided this week. "We follow procedures but things could go wrong," admits Mumbai's Additional Commissioner (Special Branch) Raj Khilnani. "We could have made some mistakes somewhere." Obviously the Mumbai Police seems to have erred in the case of six Bengalis from Mollah's constituency who were freed by the Calcutta High Court pending a thorough review. But the West Bengal Government seems strangely silent about the citizenship of the remaining.

Actually the Left Front can hardly pretend that the problem of illegal immigration from Bangladesh doesn't exist. During his tenure as home minister, veteran CPI leader Indrajit Gupta stumped everyone by casually telling the Lok Sabha on May 6 last year that the government estimated the number of illegal immigrants at nearly one crore. "Out of every 10 persons, one could be from among those who got in illegally," he said. Today, the Intelligence Bureau estimates the number of illegal Bangladeshi immigrants at 1.1 crore, with the greatest concentration in West Bengal and Assam (see map). In 1992, an internal note prepared by the Union Home Ministry suggested that illegal immigration has changed the "demographic landscape" of the eastern border states.

Census figures tell a grim story. In West Bengal, for example, border districts such as Nadia, North 24 Parganas, Murshidabad, Malda and Jalpaiguri witnessed a population growth of between 15 and 20 per cent during 1981-91, whereas the interior districts have experienced a 6 to 8 per cent growth over the same period. In Assam, the effects of immigration have been equally profound. From 1891 till Independence the state's population grew at around 20 per cent each decade. It shot up to 35 per cent between 1951 and 1971, and has now touched 53 per cent. "We used to say Assam is an integral part of India, but now we should be saying it is an integral part of Bangladesh," says All Assam Students' Union President Sarbanand Sonowal.

Bangladesh has steadfastly denied that its citizens cross over to India, but the country's census figures tell a different story of the missing millions. Sharifa Begum, a demographer at the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies in Dhaka, calculated that nearly 3.5 million people "disappeared" from East Pakistan between 1951 and 1961 -- probably as a result of Partition. She indicated that another 1.5 million may have entered India between 1961 and 1974. Another fact kept under wraps is that a quarter of the 10 million refugees who came to India during the 1971 liberation struggle probably stayed behind.

Part of the problem lies in the fact that the 4,096 km Indo-Bangladesh border is largely unnatural and, consequently, porous. The total border fencing is about 190 km in West Bengal, 20 km in Assam and almost non-existent in Tripura and Mizoram. Of the Rs 830 crore sanctioned for the project, Rs 700 crore has already been spent and there is every likelihood of a cost overrun.

Bongaon, a little subdivisional town 90 km east of Calcutta, can easily qualify as an international city. Sandwiched between Jessore in Bangladesh and the fertile hinterland of North 24 Parganas in West Bengal, its trade has been devoid of national concerns. Bangladeshi and Bengali traders haggle openly over the prevailing rupee-taka exchange rates. Morning sees Bangladeshis bypassing the BSF checkpost at Benapole with short-cuts through paddy fields. Cheap Bangladeshi garments compete for space in shop windows with Indian-made medicines and cosmetics. "Shopping here is cheap," says Mosharref Khan, a clerk from Jessore. "I am even thinking of renting a shop here."

If cross-border trade determines the pace of West Bengal's Bongaon and Tripura's capital Agartala, formal immigration is the norm in Assam. In Mankachar, on the south bank of the Brahmaputra in Dhubri district, a road on the Indian side actually runs along the border. The rules say that any road built along a border has to be 150 yards from the dividing line but this road cuts across a 1.5 km stretch inside Bangladesh. Of course, there are two gates, but these are invariably open.

On its part, West Bengal's Karimganj has nine ghats that are leased out. The contractor has an excellent source of additional income: he is paid on a regular basis by touts who ferry groups of potential immigrants. The charge ranges from Rs 50 to Rs 200 and the security forces get a cut. "The arrangement is very neat and nothing can be done to stop it," says Biswaroop Bhattacharya, BJP district secretary.

Bhattacharya insists that the influx can be checked by making life difficult for the immigrant. That, however, is not borne out by reality. Sitting inside his dimly-lit hut in Delhi's Seemapuri, home to an estimated 50,000 Bangladeshi immigrants, 50-year-old Altaf Hussain still remembers the time his sons Milon and Haroon were caught by the authorities in the wake of an anti-Bangladeshi drive by the local BJP Government in 1994. They were paraded on donkeys, had their heads shaved, put on a train to Calcutta and, finally, forced back to Bangladesh at gun-point. For nine days, starving and without any familiar address to call on, the two brothers wandered around, until a Good Samaritan smuggled them back to Seemapuri. "We would have died in Bangladesh. Here we live in comfort," says Hussain, a migrant from Khulna.

A similar yearning for good life prompted 27-year-old Multan Ahmed to cross the border and make his way to Ajmer last week. A matriculate whose parents still live in the Motijheel area of Dhaka, Ahmed speaks fluent Hindi, having learnt it by watching Bollywood films at home. On a pilgrimage to Dargah Sharief in the belief that it would cure him of a physical disability, he was caught by the police. He now faces imminent deportation. "I don't want to go," he says. "What is there for me in Bangladesh? This place is far better."

It is all relative. The Bangladeshi immigrants may not be success stories in a get-rich way but they certainly fulfil a role. In Calcutta and Delhi, they appear to have carved out a niche for themselves as domestic helps, construction labourers and ragpickers. In Mumbai, they are crucial as weavers and zari workers. These are jobs that are not in very high demand but central to the economy. "It's difficult to figure out their economic contribution but their work definitely fills some gaps in the city's economy," says economist Shama Dalwai, who co-authored a study on Bangladeshi immigrants in Mumbai. Of course, some end up frustrated and take to drugs and crime. Like 18-year-old Nur Aslam who claims to be the spoilt son of a rich Bangladeshi businessman. Now on the brink of deportation from Ajmer, he plans to return "but this time on a passport".

Shiv Sena-controlled Mumbai does not appear that fearful to even 62-year-old Abor Ali Shaikh, who may have been a victim of injustice. Tracing his origins to Sadal in the Murshidabad district of West Bengal, Shaikh came to Mumbai four years ago with his wife Janema after he lost his property in a family dispute. His son and son-in-law are daily-wage labourers in Mumbai. On the night of July 7, policemen barged into his hut and dragged everyone out. He pleaded with them to look at his papers -- old certificates, ration cards and a letter from the Sadal MLA. "They didn't look at anything ... just took him and my daughter away," says Janema. "She is pregnant but they didn't care." Shaikh and his daughter were deported to Bangladesh. They made their way to Sadal, where he left his daughter behind with relatives, and made his way back to Mumbai last week.

A possible reason why the police refused to believe Shaikh's claim to Indian nationality is that there is no sanctity to official documents. While immigration from Bangladesh may be prompted by economic factors, it is nevertheless a well-organised racket. Take for instance the number of Bangladeshis who visit India on perfectly valid visas and then simply disappear. In 1991, 13,424 visited India but only 9,645 returned; in 1992, only 12,160 out of 21,574 went back; and in 1994, only21,436 of the 29,757 visitors left India. A large number of them disappear only to re-emerge with new identities.

It is difficult to physically distinguish a Bengali from a Bangladeshi at the best of times -- dialect is the only give-away. Identification become doubly difficult with dubious papers. In Calcutta's Metiabruz and Garden Reach localities certificates, allegedly issued by block development officers, are easy to come by. These, in turn, are used to secure ration cards -- the state Government is excessively generous in issuing these -- a place in the electoral rolls and even Indian passports. In 1996, Regional Passport Officer A.K. Bhattacharya personally supervised the screening of 16,000 "suspicious" passport applications. He sent out letters to the permanent and present addresses given by the applicants and received almost all of them back with the "addressee not found" stamp.

Such a system cannot be conceived without political patronage. As their numbers have grown, Bangladeshi immigrants have become important vote banks. The way was shown by former President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed and Congress leader Moinul Haq Choudhury in Assam. Under the guise of the "Ali-Coolie-Bengali" combination, they encouraged large-scale immigration to the state and set the stage for the fierce backlash of the '80s. So profound is the immigrant vote bank -- said to be the decisive factor in 60 assembly constituencies -- that former chief minister Hiteswar Saikia had to withdraw his remark in 1992 that there were 30 lakh illegal immigrants in Assam. He ended up making a ridiculous statement that there wasn't "a single illegal immigrant" in the state. Ironically, the AGP is singing a similar tune today. Similar imperatives now guide the electoral strategies of the CPI(M) in West Bengal and the Samajwadi Party in Mumbai.

The tragedy is that pretending the problem doesn't exist only complicates matters and communalises the problem. If the BJP performed well in West Bengal this year and showed spectacular gains in Assam, its opposition to "infiltration" is at the core. "The standard argument that Bengali Muslims are being harassed will not work for ever," says West Bengal BJP Secretary Paras Dutta. "The Marxists have to convince the nation that they are not anti-national because infiltration hits at the base of the economy." Giving an economic twist to the immigration issue is also appealing and calculated to win votes. Earlier this month, when waterlogging persisted in parts of Mumbai for three days, Shiv Sena Mayor Nandu Satam blamed the illegal Bangladeshi population for the mess. "Their filth blocked the gutters," he said. In Delhi too, the BJP has added to its following by generating antipathy towards Bangladeshi immigrants. "They cannot walk into India. This is not a dharamsala," BJP MP K.R. Malkani told the Rajya Sabha last week.

As civic amenities come under strain, the hapless Bangladeshi immigrant becomes a convenient whipping boy. In the ghettoes of Delhi and Mumbai, water and power pilferage is rampant. The losers are obviously the paying middle classes. At least, part of the problem can be explained by illegal migration. There have also been reports of clashes between Indian labourers and Bangladeshis who seek to undercut them in the job market. It has been calculated that even if half the illegal migrants are in possession of ration cards, the cost to the public distribution system will be in excess of Rs 500 crore annually.

In the short term using the Bangladeshi migrant as either vote bank or cannon fodder may work, but the problem will assume an unmanageable dimension. "It would be ridiculous to drive 10 million people back to a land which they don't want to return to," says a top Home Ministry official. In any case, formal deportation is out of the question since Bangladesh has refused to acknowledge the presence of its citizens in India. Even the existing provisions of the law seem inadequate. The Illegal Migrants (Detection By) Tribunal Act in Assam has proved largely ineffective, though political tensions have reduced with the disenfranchisement of 3.7 lakh voters in the previous election. Perhaps the answer lies in disentangling politics from what is fundamentally an economics and human rights issue.

Advani sang a different tune last week in Parliament. Even as he defended the Maharashtra Government's actions in the face of CPI(M) attacks, the home minister conceded that the term "infiltration" was a misnomer. "There is a design in infiltration. There is no design in immigration. The bulk of those who come here do so for jobs,for a livelihood," he said. The Government's task is to satisfy this legitimate urge without compromising the sanctity of citizenship. The proposed scheme of work permits without voting rights is a possible way out. Unfortunately, good intentions have an uncanny knack of being misused, perverted and politicised.

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