The exaggerated numbers of illegal Bangladeshi nationals bandied about by our politicians have been weaponised against Indian Bengali Muslims. This rhetoric is no less shrill than the US president’s
United States citizens take part in a rally and march in support of immigrants on February 1 in Waukegan, Illinois. Pic/AFP
The increasing viciousness of United States President Donald Trump’s war on illegal immigrants is reminiscent of what India has done in the name of prising out those suspected of having sneaked from Bangladesh into India. For decades, Indian Bengali Muslims have been hated, hounded, detained or disenfranchised, and entangled in interminable court cases over their citizenship status.
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This might become the fate of Indians in the US, too, for a crackdown on illegal immigrants invariably demonises the communities to which they belong. As such, Indians have little to fear—there are, after all, only 20,407 Indians in the US who are either in detention, awaiting trial or summary banishment, or have been served orders for removal.
Periodic estimates have created the perception that illegal Indian immigrants are flooding the US. A Pew Research Centre analysis, for the 2019-2022 period, pegged their population at 7.5 lakh, the third largest by nationality. This figure dipped to 2.2 lakh in the Department of Homeland Security’s estimate of unauthorised Indians living there in 2022. In 2022-2023, some 90,000 Indians were apprehended while trying to illegally enter the US from Canada or Mexico.
These statistics created the backdrop for Trump to fan hatred against illegal immigrants. During last year’s presidential campaign, he falsely claimed 21 million foreigners entered the US in the previous four years. Among them, he said there were 13,000 convicted criminals and thousands of terrorists. He accused them of “eating the pets of the people,” and depriving Americans of jobs and straining community resources. The illegal immigrant, in other words, was depicted as posing economic and security threats to white Americans, who perceive themselves as natives of the land.
Since it is impossible for ordinary Americans to distinguish who among non-white immigrants are citizens or authorised residents, their entire communities rather than individuals become targets of their hate, evident from social media posts in recent weeks. These portrayed Indians, according to an analysis of the Centre for the Study of Organised Hate, as “dirty invaders” who pose a threat to the white nationhood and white women, and as cheats who drink urine. One popular post insinuated genocidal violence: “We took this country from the [indigenous] Indians once and by God we
can do it again.”
India turned the illegal immigrant into a pet peeve of its people long before Trump did. The rise in Assam’s Muslim population over the decades was popularly ascribed to Bangladeshis illegally slipping into India, triggering a powerful movement for their identification and deportation. The fear of illegal immigrants has been fanned periodically—for instance, in 1998, Assam Governor Lt Gen S K Sinha claimed they posed a grave threat to India’s security, for “they may swamp the Assamese people and may sever the North East land mass from the rest of India.”
In 2004, Sriprakash Jaiswal, who was the Union minister of state for home affairs in the Manmohan Singh government, said there were 12 million illegal Bangladeshis in India. This figure was revised in 2016 to 20 million by Kiren Rijiju, who then held the same portfolio as Jaiswal. The mythical nature of illegal immigration from Bangladesh was brought out by Prof Abdul Mannan, who, in his 2017 book Infiltration: Genesis of Assam Movement, statistically established that Assam’s Muslim population increased largely because of the community’s higher growth rate.
Even the Central government admitted to the Supreme Court in December 2023 that it is not possible to collect data on illegal immigrants as their entry into India is clandestine. Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, however, gave a sense of their number to the Assam Assembly, based on the records of the state’s 100 Foreigners’ Tribunals, which determine the veracity of the charge of being illegal foreigners levelled against individuals. Until 2023, the tribunals disposed of 3.37 lakh cases, of which 1.59 lakh were declared as foreigners.
This means nearly every second alleged illegal immigrant in Assam was proved to be an Indian citizen. I asked lawyer Aman Wadud about the needless misery to which Indian citizens were subjected. Wadud said, “After working for more than a decade over hundreds of citizenship cases, I have not come across even one person who is actually a ‘foreigner’. ‘Declared foreigners’ are Indian citizens who have been stripped of their nationality.” What Wadud is implying is that even “declared foreigners” possess citizenship documents, but these were arbitrarily rejected.
Even 1.59 lakh declared foreigners constitute a negligible fraction of the numbers politicians regularly cite. Yet Bangladeshis are supposed to have fanned out in droves to all parts of India. The Bharatiya Janata Party, in the Assembly elections of Jharkhand and Maharashtra, promised to deport Bangladeshis on coming to power there, as it has also now to Delhi’s voters.
Home Minister Amit Shah, in 2018, compared infiltrators, a code for illegal immigrants, to termites, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, last year, warned voters that a Congress government would distribute their wealth among infiltrators. Their rhetoric has Trump’s shrillness, and incites hatred against Illegal Bangladeshi immigrants, whom the Hindus of India, touted as authentic natives, cannot distinguish from Bengali Muslims. India’s politics over illegal immigrants matches America’s.
The writer is a senior journalist and author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste
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