Myth of Bangladeshis in India

Trinamool Congress leaders stage a protest against the branding of migrants as Bangladeshis, among other things, in Kolkata on Saturday. Pic/PTI

The hunt for Bangladeshi Muslims staying illegally in India is based on the perception that their population is large enough to pose demographic and security threats to it. This perception, in turn, has been built on the estimates of their population that State functionaries have periodically provided. They were 20 million in 2016, Union Minister Kiren Rijiju said in the Rajya Sabha, apparently having doubled from 10 million in 1997, the year in which then Home Minister Indrajit Gupta divulged this figure to Parliament.

Such claims regarding illegal Bangladeshi immigrants appear grossly exaggerated, a reading of historian Arupjyoti Saikia's The Quest for Modern Assam: A History (1942-2000) shows. Weaving together diverse sources and data into a compelling narrative, Saikia identifies distinct phases of population "flow" from East Pakistan/Bangladesh into India. The first of these was triggered by the Partition violence, prompting Hindus there to seek refuge in India. They spread across West Bengal, Assam, and Tripura.

With the Hindus also came some Muslims, who had earlier left Assam in anticipation of Pakistan being born, before belatedly realising they would enjoy better land rights in India. These Muslim returnees could have only marginally offset the lakhs of their community members who went over from India to Pakistan.

The anxieties of East Pakistan's Hindus continued to mount as Pakistan persecuted them. Their migration to India continued. Saikia writes, "… Approximately 5 million people had moved from East Bengal to India between 1946 and 1964 - mostly Hindu Bengalis - of which an estimated 13 per cent moved to Assam."

Even then, India distinguished between refugees and illegal migrants. The former comprised Hindus; the latter supposedly were Pakistani Muslims. Suspecting their loyalty, the Indian government began to push them out under the Prevention of infiltration into India of Pakistani Nationals (PIP) project. Saikia cites government records to say that an "estimated 1.92 lakh" people were sent to East Pakistan. India denied Pakistan's claims that 95 per cent of them were Indian nationals.

Between 1961 and 1971, Saikia writes, around 9.67 lakh people came from East Pakistan to India, and "the majority of whom were Hindus." The outflow from East Pakistan in the months before the 1971 India-Pakistan war saw 9.8 million refugees enter India. Of them, Home Ministry officials estimated, only five to 10 per cent were Muslim. Most of these refugees didn't leave India. This was as true for thousands of Bengali Hindus and Muslims who came to India in order to escape the devastating 1974-75 famine in Bangladesh. Thereafter, the gigantic flows of Bangladeshis into India ceased.

Three conclusions can be drawn from Saikia's narrative. One, the bulk of the Bangladeshi immigrant population in India is Hindu. Two, West Bengal has the largest share of the Bangladeshi immigrant population. Three, Bangladeshi Muslims did come into India, but their population would, at best, have been between five and 15 lakh.

Yet it were the Muslims who became the principal target of the 1979-1985 movement against foreigners in Assam. It was believed that illegal Muslim immigrants had ballooned the community's share in Assam's population from 24.68 per cent in 1951 to 34.22 per cent in 2011. In 1985, the Citizenship Act, 1955, was amended, granting citizenship to those in Assam who could prove they or their ancestors were its residents before March 25, 1971. Those who couldn't do so, whether Hindu or Muslim, were to be declared illegal immigrants - and deported. Nevertheless, a substantial proportion of the immigrant population qualified for citizenship.

Three decades later, in 2019, an amendment to the Citizenship Act protected non-Muslims from Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan from being deported as illegal immigrants. This singles out illegal Muslim immigrants for expulsion. What would be their population today? In 2017, Professor Abdul Mannan published Infiltration: Genesis of Assam Movement, which showed that the increase in the Muslim population in Assam was largely because of the community's high fertility rate. Illegal immigration would account for only a negligible fraction of the increase, he contented.

Mannan was, in a way, proved right after the National Register of Citizens of Assam was made public in August 2019. Of the 19 lakh people excluded from the NRC, only seven lakh were Muslim. Even this figure of seven lakh was expected to dip sharply because of factors such as the mismatch between the spelling of the applicant's name and the documents furnished as proof of citizenship. The NRC results disappointed all those weaned on the dark fantasies about illegal immigrants.

Outside Assam, under the Citizenship Act, those born in India before July 1, 1987, acquired citizenship. Thereafter, all those born in India until December 2, 2004, too, became citizens as long as one of their parents was an Indian citizen. Children would have been born to illegal immigrants in India. Many of them would have also married Indians. Over the decades, therefore, a high percentage of the descendants of illegal Muslim immigrants legally became Indian citizens. With "flows" into India having ceased in the 1970s, as Saikia points out, the claim regarding the substantial presence of illegal Bangladeshi immigrants is more a myth than fact. That's why the police find few Bangladeshis in their sweep countrywide.

The writer is a senior journalist and author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste.
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