Last week, I was having an intense argument with an old friend, who is a hardcore RSS-BJP supporter, on the issue of violence in Assam on Facebook. Like most of the right wing and perhaps, many in India, he blamed the reason for the riots on illegal Bangladeshi immigrants. I agreed with him that illegal immigration is indeed a problem for India. You have people from neighbouring countries coming to India taking our jobs, benefiting from India’s social programmes, imposing their language and even religion. I argued, “I completely agree with you. To begin with, we should scrap the India-Nepal friendship treaty and stop the Nepalese from entering India at free will”. He, a Nepalese himself, immediately said, “No. Not the Nepalese but only the Bangladeshis”. I asked, “Why? Why not you and your entire breed who come to India from Nepal?” His reply was simple: “Because we are Hindus. Hindustan is for Hindus”.  Ideally, I would have been shocked at this statement but that day I saluted him. I felt for the first time someone who is sympathetic to the RSS-BJP did not put up the garb of nationalism and truly spoke his communal mind out.

My argument with this friend perhaps, represents the dilemma that many Indians are undergoing on the issue of illegal Bangladeshi migrants. At one hand, intrusion of illegal migrants in states like Assam and Tripura is creating huge demographic and cultural changes; on the other hand, protests against these migrants are often dubbed as communal because most of them are Muslims. When the violence between Bodo tribes and Bengali Muslims in Assam’s Kokrajhar district broke, media in mainland India could not understand what exactly to call the conflict. Is it a communal issue or an ethnic one?

We, Indians, have a tricky relationship with religion. Some of us will try everything possible to shift the focus from religion, while others will try to do everything to bring religion into everything. When news of Kokrajhar violence reached New Delhi, the BJP was quick to call it a communal issue. It called it the “communal experiment” of Assam’s Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi. Assamese and Assam watchers like me watched in horror. In the last election, the BJP had tried hard to use this angle to make some dent into the Congress vote bank but failed. As clearer news reports finally arrived, it was clear that the whole thing seemed to have been planned by extremist elements of Bodo tribes. They have been demanding a separate state for years now. Most of the 50 dead were Bengali Muslims or alleged ‘Bangladeshis’.

As former chief minister of Assam and leader of opposition Prafulla Kumar Mahanta explained to me, the Bodos have become a minority in their own region and that’s why they are retaliating. “I don’t think it is a communal issue but an ethnic and immigration issue,” he says. Even his bete noire in state government, Power Minister Pradyut Bordoloi, agrees it is not about religion but he feels that the people of Assam have to get used to the fact that there are people in the state who do not speak their language or follow their culture. “These are people who came from the other side (Bangladesh) before 1971 and have been settled here. We have to accept them as one of us,” he says. But that is a very simplistic argument. Since 1971, there has been a huge jump in the Muslim population of Assam — by some accounts, nearly a 77 per cent increase. Four districts neighbouring Bangladesh became Muslim majority in 1991, followed by three in 1998 and one as of late. Many blame this on intrusion of Bangladeshis. The Assam government claims that there are no illegal Bangladeshis in the state. Bordoloi gives a funny reason for such a huge jump in Bengali Muslim population in Assam: “Due to lower education and awareness level among them, they have more children,” he says. In 1997, then home minister Indrajit Gupta accepted in the Indian parliament that around 10 million illegal migrants from Bangladesh live in India. Most of them live in bordering districts of Assam, West Bengal and Tripura. A lot of them migrate to cities like Mumbai, New Delhi and Kolkata. Because India already has a Bengali Muslim population in West Bengal, it is difficult to detect them.

There is also a flip side to the whole debate. Genuine Indian Bengali Muslims (and I know many and am friends with a few) face the brunt. Recently, a Bengali Muslim wrote to me how ashamed he is to be a citizen of Assam. “My family has been living on this land for generations. If the government is unable to detect illegal immigrants, why are we being targeted for that,” he asked me. I really didn’t have an answer. As a Bengali myself, I have a special emotional connect to the issue. I don’t know what the solution to this problem is. Right wing friends tell me that it is a conspiracy to Islamise Assam. They claim that illegal Bangladeshis are used to smuggle fake currency and weapons inside India. Many such theories sound just too far-fetched.

In April last year, when I visited Dhubri on the India-Bangladesh border, the thing that struck me most was the poverty of the area. As someone in Guwahati told me then, the best solution to stop illegal immigration from Bangladesh is to ensure that India’s eastern neighbour grows as fast as India does. The day poverty is wiped out, perhaps, we shall see a reverse migration.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 8^th, 2012.

A slew of articles have appeared recently in foreign press, including Time Magazine, Foreign Affairs and The Economist, on the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s leadership abilities. After the departure of Pranab Mukherjee from the finance ministry, the PM has taken over his original job. He is credited for having fathered the economic liberalisation process in India as finance minister in the 1990s. However, somewhere between the criticism and counter-criticism and the rhetoric on good and bad economics, people seem to have missed the original reason for the mess in the Singh government. One of the first agencies to criticise the government was Standard and Poor’s (S&P), which pointed out 10 reasons for a possible downgrading of India’s credit ratings. Five of these reasons were clearly political: divided leadership, Sonia Gandhi holding no cabinet position, an unelected PM who has no political base, his limited influence over the cabinet, and the Congress party being divided on economic policies.

The problem started in 2004 when Congress President Sonia Gandhi did not accept the popular mandate of the general election. She claimed that her inner voice told her to stay away from heading the largest democracy of the world. What followed was the biggest travesty of democracy in India. Singh, a technocrat who has never won a direct election, was appointed PM by Gandhi. Many in the Congress grudgingly accepted her decision. Gandhi didn’t face any threat from Singh, an apolitical creature. An informal system was put in place under which Singh was supposed to run the government and Gandhi was supposed to look after the politics of governance. But that was not to be an easy affair.

The first strike against Singh’s leadership came from the National Advisory Council. A body headed by Gandhi was formed, which advised the PM about key social initiatives. Key legislations like the Right to Information and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act were pushed through parliament by Gandhi. It is well known within government circles that neither Singh nor his economic team are keen on such expensive social programmes.

Meanwhile, Singh, father of India’s liberalisation, struggled with key economic reforms. During his first tenure, Singh had numerous face-offs with his biggest allies: the leftist parties. Almost always he backed off to save his government. The only time he showed guts and leadership was over the nuclear deal with the US. The party members were reportedly not too keen about the deal but Gandhi stood by him. The Left abandoned him but he survived with the help of regional parties. He returned to power with greater numbers in 2009. Middle-class India argued that he won because he showed leadership during the nuclear deal debate. Rural India claimed that his government got more votes because Gandhi pushed through the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act.

The second tenure has turned out to be even more unstable. Gandhi, who is reportedly unwell, has been involved less and less in party affairs. She has tried to promote her son and scion of the Nehru-Gandhi family, Rahul Gandhi, to lead the party. Rahul has repeatedly failed to prove himself, including his failure in the Uttar Pradesh elections. Such is the obsession of Congress with the Family that despite the shameful loss in UP, the clamour for Rahul to take over the government has only increased. Even PM Singh has been requesting him to either take over or at least become a cabinet minister. Sycophancy is not a new disease among Congressmen but in this case, it has reached new heights.

Within the government, senior leaders — most of whom have been indirectly elected and do not have a mass political base — are now eyeing the top spot. In terms of numbers, the government is more stable than it was during its first term but when it comes to leadership, it has absolutely none. The crisis in the Singh government is not about Manmohan Singh but about the leadership struggle within the Congress party. Singh was never the man for the office. The mandate accorded to Congress was a mandate for Sonia Gandhi.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 21^st, 2012.

Every time there is a Maoist orchestrated kidnap or a killing in India, we hear the same old arguments in the streets of Delhi and Mumbai. The rightwingers speak about getting rid of the menace through armed action. The leftwingers and the liberals speak about the state-sponsored violence and the state of development in the Maoist-infected areas of the states of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. Of course, there will also be some who openly speak in favour of the Maoists. But it surprises and even shocks me that people of all ideological hues refuse to understand the true nature of this ‘movement’. People speak about the poverty, the deprivation, the state-led violence or even the corporate-led “stealing” of resources in these mineral-rich areas. But they fail to see that these are mere causes. The actual threat is from the ideology.

Finally, there is now a shift in the discourse of mainstream media on Maoism. Liberals often make the mistake of mixing up the Maoist movement with the tribal developmental cause. Popular middle class understanding fails to look at history. The Maoist movement in West Bengal in the 1960s had almost nothing to do with that of the tribals. It was a fight for land rights. In Bihar, the Maoist struggle came about because of caste conflict. In Andhra Pradesh again, it was land. It is in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh that the movement has taken up the tribal cause. However, if one looks at Jharkhand Maoists, at the moment there is a presence of a strong caste factor which is leading to factionalism.

The Maoist movement, wherever it has spread across India, has picked up the issues that are troubling the local population. We have even seen Maoist statements supporting separatism in Jammu and Kashmir and northeast India. Maoist ideologue Varavara Rao speaks about the “common enemy” of the Maoist and the separatist, i.e., the Indian state. Though there is still no evidence to show a direct link between Maoists and the terrorist groups operating in these regions, such statements only help create the image of bonhomie between forces who are fighting the Indian state.

The biggest setback to the idea of India came 65 years ago when the country was divided on communal lines. Over the next six decades, the leadership and the intelligentsia tried their best to keep this original idea intact — a secular free society where caste, creed, religion and region didn’t matter. It faced numerous challenges in the form of separatism, communalism and even regionalism. Yet the broader consensus about this Idea of India managed to survive. But in the last few years, the biggest threat to this idea of India has come from another idea — rather an ideology — Maoism.

Both the Left and Right and the Indian state fail to understand that you cannot treat an ideological movement as a law and order issue, nor can you deal with it just as a developmental problem. Violence — Maoist sponsored or state sponsored — and kidnapping are just methods used in an ideological game the two sides are playing. The tribals, ordinary policemen and paramilitary soldiers are mere pawns. Ideological games cannot be won by a military victory or by merely developing a region physically.

One must not confuse between an ideology and a fight against injustice, though often ideology takes up the fight to justify its survival. The conflicts in Jammu and Kashmir and in India’s northeast have weakened primarily because it’s been a fight without an ideology. The challenge for India in both these regions will be to ensure that any ideological group — such as the Taliban or the Maoists — stays far away from the fight on the ground.

Ideologies are creatures which know various survival tactics. That’s how Maoism spread across one-third of India. Look at al Qaeda’s ideology and how it is spreading in India’s immediate neighbourhood. For them, America is the enemy today, tomorrow it will be someone else. Ten years down the line, the Americans have failed to contain this idea. Why? Because it made the same mistakes as the Indian state is making at the moment.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 14^th, 2012.