Using demography to change the vote bank

Neighbouring nation-states and their inhabitants come alive as proxies for domestic issues and fissures during elections in South Asian nations. ‘India’ is an important axis around which politics in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal expresses itself. The Indian Union has ‘closet Pakistanis’ and ‘illegal Bangladeshis’.

Narendra Modi, speaking at a rally in West Bengal on April 27, declared his resolve to deport Bangladeshis from India. It’s an old BJP charge that most political forces in West Bengal have tried to get Muslim votes by nurturing illegal Muslim migrants from Bangladesh, by getting them government documents to ‘regularise’ their status. The unsubstantiated underside of this charge is that the West Bengali Muslims look favourably at this development and do not mind this increase in the number of their co-religionists. At the alarmist end of this claim is that West Bengal is staring at an inevitable demographic reversal where Bengali Hindus will soon lose their majority, thus losing their only safe haven (1979 Marichjhapi massacre notwithstanding).

Mamata Banerjee, West Bengal’s chief minister and the chief beneficiary of Muslim Bengali votes, is aware that between a third and a fourth of West Bengal’s electorate are Muslims and are crucial to her dream post-May 16 scenario of calling shots at Delhi. She thundered that the ‘butcher of Gujarat’ doesn’t have a clean record of ensuring peaceful coexistence between religious communities. Modi’s ‘Bangladeshi’ is a codeword that Banerjee can decode. Modi’s ‘illegal Bangladeshi’ is a Muslim migrant. He did not cross over or bribe India’s Border Security Force in order to wage a demographic war against West Bengal’s Hindu majority. He did that because he is pitifully poor in a low wage country. East Bengali Hindus have additional reasons to cross over, given the rampant violence, insecurity and discrimination they face in their homeland.

A very large number of people from East Bengal have been migrating to the Indian Union since 1947. While this traffic has seen ups and downs, there are specific high-points. The early migrations are etched in public memory due to their immediate ties to the Partition. The widespread anti-Hindu rioting in East Bengal in 1950 caused the large second wave. The anti-Hindu riots of 1964 and the 1965 Indo-Pakistan war saw a huge number of people move out. The events of 1971 took this to another scale altogether, where mass killings, directed towards East Bengalis in general and East Bengali Hindus in particular, produced 10 million refugees of which nearly 1.5 million (mostly East Bengali Hindus) never went back. 1971 marks the peculiar end of the ‘legitimate’ refugee. This partly stems from the false idea that religious minorities are ‘safe’ in ‘secular’ Bangladesh. In 1974, the percentage of Hindus in the People’s Republic of Bangladesh was 12.1 per cent. The 2011 figure was 8.5 per cent, a staggering 33 per cent decrease in proportional terms. The downward trend continued through every decade since 1971. The Babri Masjid demolition of 1992, the 2001 and 2014 anti-Hindu violence were big spurts in this continuous trickle.

Lower caste communities form a significant part of the post-1971 refugees, many settling in 24 Parganas district. The Muslim migration follows similar routes. The shifting demographic reality of some border districts in West Bengal and the consequent insecurity that it evokes among people who recently fled East Bengal to find security in a different demographic reality across the border has resulted in a series of riots in that area.

For all practical purposes, the Indian Union denies citizenship to those who crossed over from East Bengal after March 25, 1971, the day when Pakistan Army’s major atrocities started in Dhaka. The 2003 Citizenship (Amendment) Act took away the possibility of birthright citizenship from the children of many of those who fled persecution in East Bengal, creating millions of state-less young people who are children of refugees (infiltrators in government-speak) who have lived all their life in the Indian Union. Post amendment, many Dalit migrants were identified as ‘infiltrators’ and deportation proceedings were started. The Matuas, one of the largest low caste groups of primarily East Bengali origin namasudras settled in West Bengal, have been protesting this act, passed by Vajpayee’s BJP-led government. ‘Secular’ parties want to duck the issue of distinguishing between the varying motives of those who crossed over. To the Hindutva brigade, this is an opportunity — a ‘secular’ way of effectively distinguishing between Muslim and Hindu illegal migrants. They are silent on why Vajpayee’s government passed legislation that took away the possibility of citizenship from the children of hundreds of thousands of low-caste Hindu refugees from East Bengal.

Persecuted Hindus of East Bengal are mere pawns. When Subramaniam Swamy outrageously claims a third of Bangladesh territory to settle illegal Bangladeshis, he doesn’t care about the ramifications of such statements on the situation of Hindu Bengalis presently living in Dhaka and Comilla, where they are branded Indian fifth-columnists by dint of faith. The 1992 Babri Masjid demolition saw anti-Hindu rioting and temple-burning in Dhaka. The Hindutva brigade couldn’t care less about this type of ‘collateral damage’.

For six decades, the Indian Union has systematically discriminated against Eastern frontier refugees on questions of compensation, entitlement, relief, citizenship — it owes reparation to these people. The prime beneficiaries of the Partition crafted the Nehru-Liaquat pact of 1950. Many East Bengali Hindus didn’t move due to the false sense of assurance (including the assurance of the door being permanently open) that came with this gesture. By this, the Indian Union effectively washed off its hands from Pakistan’s ‘minority problem’. It didn’t want those whose refugee status resulted directly from the political agreement and power-hungry moves that created the Indian Union. ‘Shutting the door’ has been the Indian Union policy post-1971 (similar to what Pakistan did to stranded Pakistanis in Dhaka).

The ‘illegal Bangladeshi’ is a problem created by a partition that failed as a solution. If division has failed, integration is necessary. This can take various forms, including the possibility of dual or tiered citizenship for all Bangladeshi migrants. The government at Dhaka has to be a party to any solution. Whatever certain private fantasies may be, that a Muslim-free Indian Union or a Hindu-free Bangladesh cannot be a solution is evident on a daily basis in almost minority-free Pakistan.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 16^th, 2014.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.