A front-page newspaper report last month put some numbers on the worst kept secret among demographers in the country. It revealed that “intelligence agencies” had pegged the inward flow of illegal migrants from Bangladesh to India at “anywhere between 1.5 crore and 2 crore”. The survey, conducted discreetly in 1992, was “kept secret in view of the sensitive findings”. But when leaked later, it did not cause any ripples even in West Bengal, Bihar and Assam, the three states most affected by the influx.
It now appears that since madrasas and mosques were coming up in increasing numbers along the border, the government felt the need to revisit the illegal migrants issue specifically to determine if a correlation exists between the influx and the increase in terrorist attacks in India. The new survey, using the 2001 census as the base, reveals a dramatic increase in Muslim population in every district bordering Bangladesh in these three states since then. West Bengal with 11 such districts was the worst affected.
The history of illegal migration from Bangladesh is worth recounting. When large numbers were spilling over into Assam in the Sixties and in the Seventies, the then Congress government, which had an overwhelming majority in the parliament, passed the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act. This, in essence, took away the onus of proving nationality from the migrant and transferred it to the citizen who had to lodge a complaint before a tribunal and pay a fee to engage its services. Moreover, whereas the rest of India had July 19, 1948, as the cut-off date for Indian citizenship of migrants, the date for Assam was March 25, 1971. Not surprisingly, even though the Supreme Court struck down the act in July 2005, people living in the border districts of Bangladesh have always felt that if they were to cross over to India, they would somehow be accommodated.
Fight for space
With a population density of 2,638 persons per square mile, many righteous Bangladeshis feel that they have a just cause for conquering their neighbours’ lebensraum, or ‘living space’. If migration, legal or otherwise, was the answer, so be it. Writing in the October 18 issue of the weekly, Holiday, 17 years ago, prominent journalist, Sadeq Khan argued that “by the first decade of the 21st century, Bangladesh will face a serious crisis of lebensraum. No possible performance of population planning, actual or hypothetical, significantly alters that prediction”.
He further argues that the “colonial devastation of Bengal in the 18th and 19th centuries left the region of Bangladesh bereft of traditional strength of technology and productivity”, and that a “natural overflow of population pressure is therefore very much on the cards and will not be restrainable by barbed wire or border patrol measures”. This explains why Bangladesh vehemently opposes fencing of the border and why it is reluctant to accept repatriated nationals. The motto clearly is that the greater the number of people leaving the country, the better it is for its larger interest.
The obvious reason why the state governments affected do not act effectively to deter the influx is that the greater the Muslim influx, the bigger the vote bank. Moreover, a crackdown would undoubtedly result in not only losing the migrant vote, but also that of the indigenous Muslim population. In the last elections, of the 294 seats in the West Bengal legislature, the Muslim vote proved to be crucial in 114 seats.
The Rajinder Sachar Committee observed that “the Muslim population is expected to rise — to a (replacement) level of around 320-340 million, which may reach 19 per cent of the population at that time, up from 13.4 per cent according to the 2001 census”. Clearly, the committee had not factored in the bit about infiltration.
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080409/jsp/opinion/story_9110517.jsp#
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