D. N. Bezboruah
On Sunday, Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram said things about Bangladeshi immigrants that must have shocked the dyed-in-the-wool Congressmen out of their wits. Giving indications of tough measures against the large-scale illegal infiltration from Bangladesh, Mr Chidambaram said that the Bangladeshi citizen had no right to be living illegally in India. Nor was there any need for issuing a large number of visas for Bangladeshis every month. Speaking of the abnormal demographic change wrought in Asom and West Bengal by illegal infiltrators from Bangladesh, the Home Minister said that he was not concerned with whether a Bangladeshi was a Muslim or not a Muslim. He was a Bangladeshi. A Bangladeshi had no right to come to India without a visa. Likewise, he had no right to work in India without a work permit. He is a Bangladeshi citizen, and in this context the issue of his religion does not arise at all. When asked what steps he would take to prevent the illegal immigration, Chidambaram said that he was examining what had been happening at the passport control points. He said that he would expect a very large number of visas being issued every month to Bangladeshis. He said he saw no reason for such a large number of visas being issued. But that apart, Chidambaram said he was greatly concerned about whether a Bangladeshi citizen returned home after the expiry of his visa.
One can well imagine the sense of shock among ‘secular’ Congressmen – especially the Congressmen of Asom who have been so assiduously building up the Congress vote-bank with the votes of Bangladeshis just as they had built up the vote-bank with the votes of East Pakistanis before India liberated East Pakistan and created Bangladesh. And here was this bull in the china shop that was threatening to upset all the well-laid plans of perpetuating Congress rule in the State. He was even leaking out all the secrets about the abnormally large number of visas being issued every month to Bangladeshis. What was this man up to? He was out to ruin the electoral prospects of his own party just to ensure the interests of the country! What a terrible betrayal of the party!
As for the people of Asom, there is bound to be considerable euphoria over the antics of this exceptional Congressman. And yet even they are astonished at how naïve the Home Minister of the country could be. Here is someone speculating on how things are being managed at passport check points when the majority of Bangladeshis coming to India prefer to come without passports. It is only those who come without passports who have a much brighter chance of ending up as Indian citizens. So why should Bangladeshis ruin their chances by carrying passports? The people of Asom are also bound to wonder what possessed a Congressman to be behaving in the manner Chidambaram has chosen to behave. After all, how can the Assamese forget how Congressmen since the time of Devkanta Barua have been conducting themselves in the matter of contesting elections? I know of a whole lot of Congressmen (there was a time just after Independence when other political parties did not count) of bygone days who were averse to exposing their tender skins to the sun just for elections campaigns. So they had bright ideas for painless election campaigns. They would summon the maatabbars (leaders and spokesmen) of immigrant miyaans from East Pakistan to their homes. The politician would ask them if they knew about the impending elections. Did they know he too was a candidate? “I don’t need to tell you what you have to do, right?” The replies would be unequivocal. It was their duty to vote for him. They would certainly do so, but a few hundred of their group had not managed to get their names into the voters list yet, and many more had not been able to find even a small patch of land to till. All this would be taken care of, the politician would tell him, provided he gets in all the votes. And the quid pro quo did not fail. This comfortable arrangement that did not entail going out in the sun for election campaigns and thus ruining their complexions held over the years. Who cared if this was a clear violation of Article 326 of the Constitution that restricted the vote only to citizens of India? Weren’t the violators of the Constitution the lawmakers or would-be lawmakers of the country? Being above the law was their prime self-determined status symbol. This is how things went on from the early sixties to 1979 when the death of Hiralal Patowari, MP from Mangaldoi, called for a bye-election. That was when the student leaders of Asom discovered that the electoral roll of Asom was full of names of people who had come from East Pakistan or Bangladesh. This led the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU) to make the detection, disfranchisement and deportation of foreigners illegally resident in Asom the foremost item on their agenda.
At that point of time the Congress possibly did not realize that the AASU would botch up the foreign nationals issue and the Assam Movement itself. The cause was a very justified one, and the discovery of the Congress misdeed in stuffing the electoral roll of the State with the names of foreign nationals illegally living in Asom shook up the party members no end. Obviously, they could not admit such a major constitutional violation. So the alternative was an orchestrated pretence. Suddenly all the illegal migrants from former East Pakistan and Bangladesh became Indian minority citizens, and concerted moves like having a separate immigration law for Asom alone because the ‘minorities’ of Asom were being oppressed on the pretext of detecting foreign nationals were put in place most expeditiously. The Congress had a special advantage when undertaking this exercise in 1983, because the people of Asom had boycotted the Lok Sabha elections that year giving the Congress that had a steamroller majority in the Lok Sabha the means to push through the black law called the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act, 1983. The draft for the black law was willingly provided by Barrister Abdul Muhib Mazumdar, in the forefront of the Bangladeshi lobby. And because hundreds of Congress lawmakers were unthinkingly voting for the party rather than for the law, a monstrosity of an immigration law stayed in place for 22 years before being struck down by the Supreme Court in 2005. In all these years, this black law made the deportation of foreigners illegally living in Asom virtually impossible.
My readers may wonder why this reiteration of very familiar facts has become necessary. They have become necessary because we need to see how the stance of the Congress and Chief Minster Tarun Gogoi has changed after 26/11 and more so after P. Chidambaram became Union Home Minister. My readers certainly remember Tarun Gogoi making statements to the effect that there were no Bangladeshis in Asom at all. They will also recall that when Arunachal Pradesh threw out a large number of Bangladeshis for being in the State without passports, they came to Asom en masse. In just two days, the Tarun Gogoi government was able to certify that they were all Indian nationals. However, he began to talk about the possibility of some Bangladeshi militants and extremists being in Asom as it was a State neighbouring Bangladesh that had a lot of fundamentalist activities after the serial blasts in the State of October 30. After the October 30 blasts and after the latest Supreme Court directive of Thursday there has been no one in the State government or the Congress making any statements to the effect that there are no Bangladeshis in Asom. In fact, after P.Chidambaram’s stirring statement that there would be no room for Bangladeshis living illegally in India, the very stance of the Congress seems to have undergone a change. In fact, as a sort of reaction to the Supreme Court’s directive of Thursday, Tarun Gogoi has said that because of pressure on land and lack of employment avenues, illegal migrants were not interested in staying in Asom. He also said that there were many States which had a larger illegal Bangladeshi population than Asom. What are the implications of these statements? They are: (a) that Bangladeshis have come to Asom and stayed here long enough to discover that the pressure on land was considerable; (b) that there was not enough employment to go around for all of them (which would indicate that some of them had secured employment) and (c) that there was an illegal Bangladeshi population in Asom, but that it was not as large a number as in some of the other States. Here indeed is a major shift from the position of ‘no Bangladeshis at all’ to an admission that there are some Bangladeshis living here illegally. What has caused this change of stance? Has the Congress decided that there are greater dangers in store for it (like some of the ones we have been harping on for years) in not admitting the Bangladeshi presence and in carrying on a pretence that needs far too many lies to sustain it? Has this change in the Congress attitude come about as a result of P. Chidambaram refusing to be a party to such a charade any more? Perhaps the answers will reveal themselves one by one like the pieces of a complex jig-saw puzzle in the days to come.
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