The Boom on GS road-multiplex,mall,bowling alley.
Thanks to our neighbours.
Chittaranjan
COVER STORY
Invisible immigrant
SUSHANTA TALUKDAR
in Guwahati
People who entered India from Bangladesh after 1971
are liable to be deported, but there are no reliable
data on them.
ON May 29, the police in lower Assam's Dhubri district
arrested Mohammad Katan Biswas, 22, from a roadside
dhaba on the charge of being an illegal immigrant. He
had entered India sometime in April through the
Indo-Bangladesh border in Tripura and reached
Bilasipara town in Dhubri district. He made the
passage from Kashiani in Gopalganj district of
Bangladesh for 1,500 taka, along with Riajuddin of the
same place, chasing his dream of a better life.
Riajuddin apparently enticed Katan Biswas into making
the journey and smuggled him across the border. The
Dhubri police said that during his interrogation Katan
Biswas told them that Riajuddin and Zafar, another
Bangladeshi national, abandoned him at Bilasipara
after an altercation. According to the police, Katan
told them that though he wanted to return to
Bangladesh he did not know the route.
They recovered from him two birth certificates, one in
the name of Kalinur and another in the name of
Kohinur, both bearing the seal of the office of the
Sub-Divisional Magistrate, Bilasipara, Dhubri. He
apparently told the police that Riajuddin had arranged
for the birth certificates to help establish his
Indian citizenship in case he was caught.
The police produced Katan before the Chief Judicial
Magistrate, Dhubri, the next day and in all likelihood
he will be sent back to Bangladesh after he serves a
jail term. Meanwhile, the police are hoping that the
genuineness or otherwise of the birth certificates can
throw more light on the method used to smuggle people
from Bangladesh into India.
There are no reliable data on the number of people who
have crossed over from Bangladesh into India after
1971. Under the law, these illegal immigrants are
liable to be detected and deported back to Bangladesh.
However, the deportation process is not so easy.
An official of the Dhubri police said the illegal
immigrant had to be taken to the passport checkpost at
Mancachar on the Indo-Bangladesh border, about 80
kilometres from Dhubri police station as the crow
flies. Said the official: "Ideally, the migrant has to
be taken in a police vehicle. However, since no money
is allotted for this, we take the person in a
passenger bus under escort. At the checkpost, we
inform the Border Security Force (BSF) authorities,
who in turn inform the Bangladesh Rifles (BDR). The
BDR receives the person only after it confirms, after
an inquiry, that the person indeed hails from the
address the BSF provided them. The process takes a
couple of days and until then the escorts have to meet
their expenses for stay and food, as also those of the
illegal immigrant, from their own pockets."
As a result, the police are reluctant to be pro-active
in detecting and deporting illegal immigrants. During
2006-07 the BSF intercepted 950 illegal immigrants in
the Assam-Meghalaya sector. As many as 923 of them
were handed over to the police of the two States and
27 were handed back to Bangladesh after it was
established that they had crossed the border
inadvertently. The two States handed over the 923
persons to the BSF again for "push back" and most of
them were sent back after flag meetings between the
troops of the two countries.
"Push" and "pull" factors
Of the total length of the border that the
northeastern region shares with Bangladesh, Assam
accounts for 262 km, Tripura 856 km, Meghalaya 443 km
and Mizoram 318 km. The continuing influx of migrants
from Bangladesh can be attributed to a combination of
factors on both sides of the border. The "push
factors" on the Bangladesh side include the increase
in the population, the decline in the land-human ratio
and the low rate of economic growth. The "pull
factors" on the Indian side include better
opportunities, a porous border and ethnic proximity
and kinship.
A boom in the construction industry in Guwahati and
other State capitals of the region has increased the
demand for construction workers. Contractors looking
for cheap labour entice the immigrant Bengali-speaking
Muslim settlers of the chars (sand islands on the
Brahmaputra river) with the promise of a better
livelihood.
Identification problems
These settlers are ready to migrate, unlike ethnic
indigenous people, who do not find construction work
attractive. Taking advantage of the ethnic proximity
of Bengali-speaking Muslims of Bangladesh and India,
traffickers like Riajuddin lure scores of
poverty-stricken Bangladeshi nationals illegally to
the northeastern States.
The closeness of the people, in terms of physical
features and the fact that they speak the same
language make it difficult for the administration and
organisations spearheading the anti-foreigners'
agitation to distinguish between a pre-1971 immigrant
settler, who is to be treated as Indian under the
Indira-Mujib pact, and a post-1971 illegal immigrant.
Hence, often even pre-1971 Bengali-speaking Muslims
are served quit notices by the organisations and
allegedly harassed by the police in Assam. This is
despite the fact that these settlers are fluent in
Assamese, having had their education in the Assamese
language, and have, in successive censuses, mentioned
Assamese as their mother tongue.
The perception among the indigenous people about the
migration of immigrant settlers, the detection of
illegal migrants such as Katan Biswas and the
unearthing of the human trafficking racket fuelled
xenophobia in the region. It set the stage for the
Federation of Khasi, Jaintia and Garo People (FKJGP)
to serve quit notices on all "Bangladeshi labours" in
the coal mines and other places in Meghalaya, with May
1, 2007, as the deadline. In upper Assam, an SMS
(short messaging service) campaign with slogans such
as "Save the nation, save identity. Let's take an
oath... no food, no job, no shelter to Bangladeshis"
led to the exodus of thousands of immigrant settlers
to lower Assam last year.
Most of the Bengali-speaking Muslim immigrant workers
engaged in Guwahati and other urban centres are
popularly perceived as new migrants. Many of these
workers are residents of the chars and settled there
before 1971. But with the erosion of vast tracts of
cultivable land on the chars on the Brahmaputra and
its tributaries, these people come to the capital in
search of livelihood and contractors also bring them
as cheap construction labour. The contractors advise
them to keep copies of the voters' list and the
certificate issued by the village panchayat to show if
the police pick them up on suspicion.
Some contractors said that until about six years ago
some of their labourers used to come from across the
border in the Dhubri sector. They added that the
numbers of such illegal migrants had declined because
of the stepped up vigil on the border and because
people were now locally available, in the Indian char
villages, for construction work following the erosion
of farmlands.
After decades of political turmoil on the "foreigners
issue", there is now consensus among political
parties, governments and student bodies, including the
All Assam Students' Union (AASU) which signed the
Assam Accord in 1985 after a six-year-long
anti-foreigners agitation, on the following: the
National Register of Citizens (NRC) should be updated
to include all pre-1971 migrants, photo identity cards
should be issued, all post-1971 migrants should be
deported to Bangladesh, and the entire border with
Bangladesh should be sealed with a barbed-wire fence.
The Meghalaya government, too, has urged the Centre to
introduce multi-purpose identity cards to check the
influx of foreign nationals into the State. In a
memorandum submitted to Union Home Minister Shivraj
Patil in Shillong on September 5, 2006, the Meghalaya
government drew the Minister's attention to the influx
of "outsiders and foreign nationals" and stated that
this had affected the State's demography.
Work permits
It also pointed out that the conference of Chief
Ministers on internal security on November 17, 2001,
had endorsed the issuance of work permits to
foreigners and decided that the citizens' identity
card system should be introduced to check illegal
migration.
While the updating of the NRC and the issuance of
photo identity cards is expected to make detection of
illegal migrants easier in Assam, the deportation of
those identified is likely to be difficult as
Bangladesh has not acknowledged officially the massive
migration of its nationals to India.
Many observers of the migration of Bangladeshi
nationals to India feel that the creation of a legal
regime by India, including work permits to facilitate
the movement of temporary migrant workers from its
neighbour, could help end the illegal crossing over by
temporary migrants. This step, coupled with
constitutional safeguards to protect the identity of
indigenous people, they believe, can go a long way in
removing apprehensions that Bangladeshi migrants are
changing the demography of the region.
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