Even as elections to the Delhi Assembly draw near, the incumbent Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the right-wing BJP are on overdrive to show which of them is more anti-immigrant.
The ruling AAP’s anti-immigrant rhetoric was exemplified last month when the Delhi Municipal Corporation directed all government-run schools to stop the enrolment of “illegal Bangladeshi migrant” children, besides informing the police in the event there were “doubts” on such students’ citizenship status.
Earlier the same month, Delhi Lieutenant Governor V K Saxena, an appointee of the BJP-led central government, ordered the heads of the civil bureaucracy and the police to conduct a sustained drive to “identify and take action” against illegal Bangladeshi immigrants living in the sprawling national capital.
To drive home the point that he meant business, the lieutenant governor sought not just “strict adherence to existing laws” but also “timely execution”. Consequently, 14 alleged Bangladeshi illegal immigrants were “deported” to their home country in December 2024 after the police used “data analytics” and “ground intelligence” techniques.
Not to be left behind, the BJP-Shiv Sena government in Maharashtra also rushed to hold out threats of deportation against Bangladeshi immigrants living illegally in Mumbai.
Clearly, just ahead of the elections, both political parties in Delhi have sought to “outbid” each other in their anti-immigrant posturings and rhetoric, which in the past – and in other socio-political and socio-economic settings – have helped political parties, especially those adhering to right-wing ideologies, to consolidate their electoral objectives.
Anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric, especially those directed specifically at undocumented Bangladeshi settlers, are not new in Delhi. In the late 1980s, some political parties “decided to politicize the issue to polarize Hindu votes” at the national level by projecting and describing Bangladeshi undocumented immigration as a “demographic invasion”.
Detecting and deporting
This was followed in the early 1990s with ‘Operation Pushback’, an exclusionary drive to “detect and deport” Bangladeshi illegal immigrants from Delhi. At the heart of such “xenophobic discourses” was the identification of Bangladeshi settlers not so much as unauthorized or undocumented migrants but as “Muslim infiltrators” who posed a threat to India’s security and stability.
The issue remained a fraught one in other parts of India, especially Assam, where an entire political movement was built around the “us and them” dichotomy with the “sons of the soil” (nativists) seeking the identification and deportation of “outsiders” or Bangladeshi settlers.
More recently in 2014, in its high-octane campaign at the national level, the BJP leadership promised to throw out Bangladeshi immigrants in the event of the party’s victory in the general elections. Once in power, the party sought to implement a controversial anti-immigrant exercise – the National Register of Citizens -- aimed at weeding out alleged Bangladeshi settlers in Assam. It also brought in the Citizenship Amendment Act to grant citizenship to religious minorities from some of India’s neighboring countries, including Bangladesh and Pakistan.
The AAP government’s exclusionary measure in Delhi resonates with a similar move in the US in 2018 when border control authorities were empowered to take into custody children of immigrants trying to cross the US-Mexico border. At that time, the issue prompted media scrutiny of the impact on immigrant children when their parents seek to illegally cross borders.
In Canada, USA, the UK and Australia, recent moves to restrict the entry of international students, particularly those from India, is also based on the specious arguments of adverse impact on housing and other civic facilities.
In India, restrictive measures aimed at “preventing illegal Bangladeshi migrants’ enrolment” in schools raise questions on immigrant rights and the much more vexed and contested issue of belonging and citizenship.
While illegal migrants are excluded from acquiring citizenship through birth, registration or naturalization in India, some categories of migrants were granted citizenship rights under the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act, sparking angry debates about the patently “communal” character of the legislation which aimed to include minorities of other countries as members of the Indian nation.
Inclusion and exclusion
The avowed aim was to expand the notion of the nation – the “larger the group, the stronger the power play”. The Citizenship Amendment Act sought to equate the concepts of nationality and citizenship with identity and bring them in line with the “image of the dominant elite” that disregarded the more liberal-secular concept of pluralism.
On its part, the Indian government of the day, which unilaterally facilitated the operationalization of the legislation, sought to offer little or no explanation for its decision, especially when discourses on nation confer exclusive and sovereign rights on the state to grant citizenship to any individual or group of its choice.
In India, the cross-border movement of foreign nationals is governed by a troika of laws – the 1920 Passport Act, the 1946 Foreigners Act and the 1939 Registration of Foreigners Act. Over the years, and certainly since 1971, lax border controls have ensured the entry of millions of Bangladeshi nationals who, over time, ‘obtained’ documents – by fair and unfair means – of citizenship.
The government’s position on undocumented Bangladeshi immigrants relies on a statist discourse that equates “infiltrators” only with Muslims even as those belonging to other minority religious denominations are deemed as “migrants” faced with “persecution in their countries”.
At the same time, “eligible legal migrants” can acquire citizenship through naturalization or registration. This position was adopted to circumvent legalities related to refugees, especially when the Indian state is not a signatory to any international instrument or covenant on refugees.
This is particularly problematic in the context of about 40,000 Rohingya who remain interned in camps in Delhi and Jammu, with little or no rights, especially for their children. They lead precarious lives with threats of deportation, majoritarian hostility and other forms of discrimination which only serve to exacerbate existing xenophobia.
The competition between the BJP and the AAP to outdo each other on the issue of Bangladeshi immigrants settled in Delhi comes at a time when India-Bangladesh relations are at their lowest. The anti-immigrant measures in Delhi, coupled with tensions between the border guarding forces of the two countries, have served to deepen anti-India sentiments in Bangladesh.
Political parties that seek to project themselves as anti-immigrant essentially seek to galvanize support among those who view the controversial and debatable issue of influx of foreign migrants – largely unauthorized or undocumented – as causing a strain on public services, housing and employment opportunities.
While political-electoral motivations are not uncommon during electoral campaigns, the human rights implications are grave. In the past, political parties stigmatized an entire community, faced with significant vulnerabilities, by branding its members as Bangladeshi illegal immigrants. Deepening this stigmatization now by disproportionate targeting, driven by political expediency, could sow the seeds of social unrest elsewhere in the country.
(The author is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Jindal School of Art and Architecture, O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana, and is affiliated with the Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group, Kolkata. This article was originally published under Creative Commons by 360info)
