In September, Salman Fazlur Rahman, advisor to Bangladesh Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, said in an interview with India Today that “illegal” immigrants from Bangladesh are economic refugees who will return to their country of origin once their economic situation improves. The statement went by surprisingly unnoticed.
But it was the first time that the Bangladeshi state recognized the issue of “unauthorized” immigration from Bangladesh to India, and more importantly, demonstrated a sense of concern by designating the migrants as “economic refugees.” Bangladesh has historically kept silent on the issue while India has increasingly framed it as a national security problem.
The migrants in question are poor working-class people, mostly Muslim, looking for livelihoods that will help them survive. Their activities contribute immensely to the local economies of the cities in India where they work. The political response to migrants from Bangladesh has negated this and instead unduly presented them as “infiltrators.”
Religious affiliation has become politicized as a marker of national belonging, due to which poor Muslim Indian citizens have also been stigmatized and marginalized as “infiltrators.”
The political discourse
The Bangladeshi Muslim migrant has gradually become a referent for the undesirable outsider in India.
“The Bangladeshi infiltrator” has even loomed large over the Indian national citizenship regime, influencing it since the early 1980s. The latest example of this is the amendment of the Citizenship Act in 2019 that changed the definition of an “illegal” immigrant; excluding non-Muslims from neighbouring countries from the definition and cementing the Muslim immigrant (typified by the “infiltrator” figure) as the sole carrier of the tag of illegality.
The discourse of “infiltration” -- economic migrants becoming characterized as “illegal” and then as “infiltrators” or national enemies -- has steadily securitized migration by placing it as an issue of “national security.”
This understanding has garnered visibility and acceptance through political rhetoric that accuses the migrants of encroaching on “scarce” resources meant for bona fide citizens -- even marked as “termites” eating the country's future from the inside out -- and presents them as a “danger” to the safety and identity of Indian citizens.
The resulting public anger towards this character has reached a crescendo over the past few years, especially in the eastern territorial frontiers of India, buoyed and maintained through multi-level nationalist politics and sentiments.
Long-standing concerns over the “threat” to economic well-being as well as socio-cultural and political security of the border states due to the perceived adverse impact of “the continuing influx of foreign nationals” from Bangladesh have managed to keep latitudes of anxieties bubbling in these contexts -- meaning that identity and population politics based on ethnic, religious, and linguistic markers have fashioned a general culture of haunting fear and pervasive angst.
This has resulted in several horrible displays of violence, both by the state and the citizenry, as well as highly contentious mega-state bureaucratic exercises such as the National Register of Citizens.
The politics of insecurity supplied especially (but not only) by ethnic and religious nationalists have articulated the presence of the migrants as an “assault,” “intrusion,” “invasion,” or “a ticking bomb” -- all framed in the language of war.
They have also been described as an “infestation,” a “plague,” or the “most fatal malady” -- linguistically characterizing them as infectious pathogens. But by far the most entrenched narrative weaved around these migrants has been that of demographic aggression -- which, in its most straightforward sense, refers to the majoritarian anxiety around a minority's “threat by numbers.” Even the Indian Supreme Court has chimed in in the characterization of migration as aggression.
Migrants and their rights
Most significantly though, the steady characterization of migration from a security lens has never fully allowed a discussion of the issue as economic labour movement and the rights it ought to entail.
The purported presence of “illegal” Bangladeshi migrants in the country draining all its resources, which forms the basis of the proposed nation-wide National Register of Citizens, is not just hugely exaggerated -- based on unsubstantiated numbers -- but the migrants so present are extremely vulnerable themselves.
For instance, around 60 “illegal” Bangladeshis were detained and deported from Bengaluru late in 2019 in the fervour gripping the state machinery after Assam released a draft National Register of Citizens.
The deported workers were contractual labourers forming an essential backbone of the waste management industry in the city. They existed as “slave labour” within the interstices of the cities, caught in the webs of local municipal workers, political actors, labour contractors, cross-border agents, and police officials who use their precarious status to extract labour at minimal wages.
In the West, the issue of irregular migration -- a less dehumanizing and criminalizing term than “illegal” migration -- has been equally politicized and securitized. But there is also a rich discussion about the rights of the non-citizens or the need to fashion society in a way that allows basic rights to those who are present within the polity but not granted full membership in it.
In India, however, the discourse of “infiltration” has marked the limit for such discussions from even being uttered. Nationalist passions at all levels have foreclosed any discussion of labour rights, responsibility, or exploitation. Migrants are treated as politicized numbers with no regard for their human rights, working conditions, or future. Very rarely do trade unions and non-profits work explicitly for such migrants, fearing state reprisal. It has made the issue ever more taboo -- driving migrants into more clandestine dual lives and making productive engagement with them almost impossible.
Returning to the Bangladeshi official, Rehman's statement is noteworthy in this context because it is one of the rare moments when a state official (albeit informal) has acknowledged migrants from the prism of care, recognizing their contribution and belonging to both India and Bangladesh.
It can serve as a starting point to wrest the issue from homogenous religio-ethnic ideas of Indian and Bangladeshi nationalisms and de-securitize people who essentially are labouring bodies, deserving of decent lives, in line with the contributions they make to two different national communities.
Maggie Paul is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Adelaide, Australia. This article first appeared in Scroll.in and has been reprinted under special arrangement.