On May 19, India’s Union Home Ministry issued a directive to all states and union territories to verify the credentials of people suspected to be illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar within 30 days. Those whose documents are found to be fake would be deported. State and union territories were also instructed to set up detention centers, pending deportation.
The announcement does not come as a surprise, given the backdrop against which the operation has been intensified and the chain of events preceding the decision.
Infiltration from Bangladesh and erstwhile East Pakistan has been a continuous phenomenon since the Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, with some states such as Assam in India’s Northeast being among the worst affected by the influx.
Illegal immigration from Bangladesh to India appears to have increased over the past year, especially after the fall of the Awami League regime in August last year. It has raised concern in the Indian government and prompted a desperate search in official circles for measures to halt the illicit movement.
Discussions with a section of government officials revealed the factors that triggered the government’s drive against infiltration, and the decision to intensify their identification and to push them back across the India-Bangladesh border, bypassing legal processes.
Security agencies of India’s Home Ministry and the Special Branch of some border states have compiled several reports over the past few months. These underscore a surge in infiltration from Bangladesh through multiple porous corridors spanning the states of Tripura, Assam, Meghalaya, and West Bengal.
While many infiltration attempts were foiled—in several cases, immigrants were apprehended and instantly pushed back across the border—officials believe that these are only a fraction. An overwhelming majority, they say, succeeded in their mission to cross into India to settle in safe places across the country.
Infiltration from Bangladesh is extremely well-organized. A network of touts from both countries facilitate the crossing of people through the border to cities and towns in India. Sonamura in Tripura and Karimganj in Assam are among the infiltration hotspots where security forces thwarted several attempts to cross into India in recent months.
According to an Indian government official who spoke to The Diplomat, a tout charges each person wishing to cross into India at Sonamura, anywhere between Rs 30,000 and Rs 50,000 ($350-$585). This amount includes train tickets from Agartala, the capital of the Indian state of Tripura, to a destination in the Indian mainland, where another tout makes arrangements for further travel and settlement. Immigrants have to pay more for fake documents, such as Aadhar, birth certificates, and driving licenses. Several touts from Assam and Tripura have been nabbed by the police.
Two months ago, a huge racket in providing fake birth certificates was busted at Rae Bareli in Uttar Pradesh. The government decided to cancel over 52,000 such documents. Fake documents were also recovered from some Bangladeshi nationals in several other Indian states.
Officials allege that many infiltrators have taken on Hindu names in the documents for reasons of safety, with residential addresses from states bordering Bangladesh. “This makes the task of identifying them extremely difficult, as we have scant resources at our disposal. The possibility of terrorists infiltrating and settling down in disguise in distant places cannot be ruled out,” said a senior police official in Assam.
In May, the West Bengal Special Task Force arrested two functionaries of the banned terrorist group, the Jamatul Mujahideen Bangladesh, following raids at Nalhati and Murarai in Birbhum district. Earlier, police in Assam launched Operation Praghat, and arrested at least ten functionaries of the al-Qaida-affiliated Ansarullah Bangla Team from across three states in the country. Several such terror modules were busted in the past as well.
The government is also concerned about the possibility of a large number of Rohingya refugees settling in India with fake documents. Evicted from their homes in Myanmar’s Rakhine State by the military in different phases beginning in the late 1970s, Rohingyas have made their way into Bangladesh and India, among other countries. There are over a million Rohingyas in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh—the largest concentration of refugees in the world. Terrible conditions in these camps have forced a large section among them to emigrate to other countries including India.
Three years ago, India’s National Investigation Agency unearthed a five-layered network that facilitated the infiltration of Rohingya and Bangladeshi nationals into India.
The dire economic situation and political uncertainty in Bangladesh are of concern to India. The ongoing power and gas crisis has compelled business units to shut down, sparking mass layoffs that have forced millions into unemployment. Without effective intervention, Bangladesh is staring at a “famine-like situation”, heads of business corporations warn. As Bangladesh’s economy spirals downwards, the number of unemployed Bangladeshis seeking to cross over to India illicitly will only surge.
Added to the dismal domestic conditions in Bangladesh is the growing bonhomie of Bangladesh’s interim government with Pakistan and China. The possibility of Pakistan using Bangladeshi nationals as proxies to carry out attacks in India cannot be ruled out. It could activate extremist and anti-India separatist networks in Bangladesh and Myanmar and infiltrate proxies, in the guise of migrants, into India.
Officials say that it is difficult to identify illegal immigrants within 30 days. Sometimes, it takes months to confirm the authenticity of documents submitted by suspected immigrants since they have to be sent to other states for verification. Some states are known to deliberately delay the process. The Assam government ran into this problem when the register of the National Register of Citizens Secretariat in the state was being updated.
Several states governed by India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party swung into action to meet the home ministry’s deadline. They hurriedly assembled suspected illegal immigrants. An estimated 2,500 suspected Bangladeshi nationals were deported between May 7 and June 11. The Assam government decided to take recourse to a law enacted in 1950 to continue the deportation.
Responding strongly to the Indian government’s deportation drive, Bangladesh called on the latter to stop the exercise. Some Indian citizens were identified as illegal immigrants and pushed across the border.
In one incident, India was compelled to take back 65 people from the border when Bangladesh refused to accept them as its citizens. In another incident, 13 persons were reportedly stranded at the zero line at Lalmonirghat as they were unable to cross over to Bangladesh and denied re-entry to India.
Officials disclosed that the home ministry is aware of the existing loopholes that facilitate the entry of immigrants and their procurement of fake documents as well as the difficulties officials face in identifying them. Besides, the fencing of the border is still incomplete, including a vast stretch in West Bengal.
“The primary objective of the pushback exercise was to deliver a stern message to wannabe infiltrators from Bangladesh to desist from entering India. And it was also meant to serve as a warning to Bangladeshi authorities not to encourage illegal immigration into India,” said an official who had earlier served in Bangladesh.
India adopted the pushback of suspected illegal migrants since the legal procedure of deportation is excessively time-consuming and uncertain. An immigrant has to be produced before a court or tribunal after he is arrested. If the verdict favors deportation, the evidence gathered by the government against the accused would have to be submitted to Bangladesh for verification. An infiltrator can be deported only after the green signal has been received from Bangladesh, which usually takes several months. Moreover, thousands of people have gone missing after they were declared foreigners.
The Indian government seems to believe that the caretaker government in Bangladesh would be reluctant to cooperate in deportation, even if genuine cases are submitted. In such circumstances, the option before the government would be to intern the immigrant in detention centers. In 2020, the Gauhati High Court had directed the government to release on bail those detainees who had spent more than two years in these centers.
In sum, an interplay of many factors prompted the government to embark on pushing back suspected Bangladeshi infiltrators, bypassing the legal procedure. Illegal immigration in India has proved to be multilayered and complex, posing a serious challenge to government authorities.
However, without a long-term plan that does not victimize genuine citizens, piecemeal approaches will not produce satisfactory results.