| Dear Express Reader, In recent months, a disturbing pattern has emerged across several states: The conflation of language, religion, and citizenship into a mechanism of exclusion. In the aftermath of the Pahalgam terror attack in May, in a counter-terror sweep, the Union Home Ministry had directed states to identify and deport illegal migrants, especially those from Bangladesh and Myanmar. In the drive that has followed, across several states such as Haryana, Odisha, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh and Delhi, the security imperative has often disquietingly bypassed due process and led to the targeting of vulnerable communities -- often Bengali-speaking Muslims, who are Indian citizens. In Gurgaon, blue-collar workers were rounded up last week, many allegedly despite official identity documents, and detained. In Delhi’s Jai Hind Camp, essential services were cut off to facilitate evictions. In Odisha, over 400 Bengali migrants were detained on suspicion of being illegal Bangladeshis.
While the imperative of national security is beyond dispute, the response to immigration needs necessarily to be grounded in justice, transparency, and compassion. Yet, from the former AAP-led Delhi government’s campaign to identify “illegal Bangladeshi” students in schools to Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma’s routine targeting of “outsiders” and inflammatory references to land, flood and love "jihad”, the narrative around immigration has been deeply polarising. The repeated vilification and arbitrary detention of Bengali-speaking citizens undermines the Constitution’s promise of equality, dignity, and due process. More concerning still, it reflects a rising impulse toward majoritarian governance.
This weaponisation of identity is not entirely new. In the early 1990s, when the Sangh Parivar had first raised the pitch against undocumented Bangladeshis in India, the then Congress-led Union Home Ministry had responded with Operation Pushback, a campaign to round up and deport alleged Bangladeshi migrants. The attempt was haphazard and short-lived, but not before many were detained and forcibly sent across the border bypassing due process and, in some cases, overlooking valid identity proof.
Assam’s own history of exclusion is steeped in post-colonial anxieties. The anti-Bengali sentiment in the state has roots in the mass migrations following Partition and the formation of Bangladesh in 1971. The Bongal Kheda movement of the 1960s solidified in the Assam Agitation (1979–1985) and the subsequent Assam Accord sought to protect indigenous identity — but it came often at the expense of long-settled Bengali-speaking communities. The 2019 National Register of Citizens (NRC) exercise stoked old fears. Over 19 lakh people were excluded from the final list, a majority of them Bengali-speaking, and Muslim. The process -- opaque, inconsistent, and marred by bureaucratic hurdles -- devolved into a Kafkaesque ordeal marked by detention centres, exclusion from welfare schemes, and a constant threat of statelessness. Under Sarma, the state government’s recent move to invoke the Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act, 1950 — allowing district collectors to deport individuals labelled as “foreigners” without the oversight of Foreigners Tribunals — raises pressing concerns about the erosion of institutional safeguards and the risk of communal profiling that could wrongfully implicate lawful residents alongside the undocumented.
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has described the current spate of detentions in various parts of the country as targeted assault against vulnerable Bengali speakers. Referring to the Election Commission’s plan to implement the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) nationwide, she has accused the BJP-led Centre and the EC of attempting to introduce the NRC “through the backdoor”; of linguistic profiling and discrimination against minorities from the state. As a mark of protest, Banerjee launched a Bhasha Andolan (language movement) campaign -- an emotive issue among the community -- from Bolpur, the site of Rabindranath Tagore’s Visva Bharati university, this week. With critical Assembly elections due in both Bengal and Assam next year, the thickening of identity politics can turn into a flashpoint. In 2021, the TMC’s campaign slogan — Bangla nijer meyekei chay (Bengal wants its own daughter) — channeled regional pride in response to the BJP’s aggressive Hindutva push. Now, amid corruption scandals and a spate of incidents of sexual violence raising questions over governance, the migrant issue has evidently given TMC a new platform. It has reoriented its campaign to focus on the rights of Bengali-speaking migrants — an estimated 22.5 lakh Bengalis work outside West Bengal. And yet, Banerjee herself has played into this narrative earlier. In January this year, she accused the BSF guarding Bengal's border with Bangladesh of letting in illegal Bangladeshi migrants into the state to pin the blame of infiltration on the state government. This reflects how identity once politicised becomes both a shield and a battleground. The rhetoric of "infiltrators" and "outsiders" may reap electoral dividends in the short term, but in the long run, it foments division, distrust and a breakdown of order. In Pune this week, for instance, a mob of around 60-odd people, several of them allegedly belonging to the Bajrang Dal, barged into the home of a Kargil War veteran’s relative in Pune, and demanded identity proofs from the family, calling them Bangladeshis. The police on site apparently acceded to the demands of the mob, carting the family off to the police station in the dead of the night.
Migration is a natural and necessary phenomenon in a country as diverse and dynamic as India. Article 19 of the Constitution guarantees all citizens the right to move and reside freely within the country. For many, migration is not a choice but a compulsion — driven by economic hardship, displacement, or historical patterns of mobility. To reduce individuals to narrow markers of language, faith, or ethnicity is to chip away at the pluralistic foundations of Indian democracy.
The warning bells are loud and clear: If identity continues to be weaponised, India risks further shrinking its civic space into something narrow, brittle, and unjust. When a system focuses on binaries — citizen vs infiltrator, us vs them — it erodes the nuanced, layered understanding of what it means to be Indian.
Till next week, Paromita |
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