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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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