India as bad as Trump on immigrants

The increasing viciousness of United States President Donald Trumprsquos war on illegal immigrants is reminiscent of what India has done in the name of prising out those suspected of having sneaked from Bangladesh into India For decades Indian Bengali Muslims have been hated hounded detained or disenfranchised and entangled in interminable court cases over their citizenship statusThis might become the fate of Indians in the US too for a crackdown on illegal immigrants invariably demonises the communities to which they belong As such Indians have little to fearmdashthere are after all only 20407 Indians in the US who are either in detention awaiting trial or summary banishment or have been served orders for removalPeriodic estimates have created the perception that illegal Indian immigrants are flooding the US A Pew Research Centre analysis for the 20192022 period pegged their population at 75 lakh the third largest by nationality This figure dipped to 22 lakh in the Department of Homeland Securityrsquos estimate of unauthorised Indians living there in 2022 In 20222023 some 90000 Indians were apprehended while trying to illegally enter the US from Canada or MexicoThese statistics created the backdrop for Trump to fan hatred against illegal immigrants During last yearrsquos presidential campaign he falsely claimed 21 million foreigners entered the US in the previous four years Among them he said there were 13000 convicted criminals and thousands of terrorists He accused them of ldquoeating the pets of the peoplerdquo and depriving Americans of jobs and straining community resources The illegal immigrant in other words was depicted as posing economic and security threats to white Americans who perceive themselves as natives of the landSince it is impossible for ordinary Americans to distinguish who among nonwhite immigrants are citizens or authorised residents their entire communities rather than individuals become targets of their hate evident from social media posts in recent weeks These portrayed Indians according to an analysis of the Centre for the Study of Organised Hate as ldquodirty invadersrdquo who pose a threat to the white nationhood and white women and as cheats who drink urine One popular post insinuated genocidal violence ldquoWe took this country from the indigenous Indians once and by God wecan do it againrdquoIndia turned the illegal immigrant into a pet peeve of its people long before Trump did The rise in Assamrsquos Muslim population over the decades was popularly ascribed to Bangladeshis illegally slipping into India triggering a powerful movement for their identification and deportation The fear of illegal immigrants has been fanned periodicallymdashfor instance in 1998 Assam Governor Lt Gen S K Sinha claimed they posed a grave threat to Indiarsquos security for ldquothey may swamp the Assamese people and may sever the North East land mass from the rest of IndiardquoIn 2004 Sriprakash Jaiswal who was the Union minister of state for home affairs in the Manmohan Singh government said there were 12 million illegal Bangladeshis in India This figure was revised in 2016 to 20 million by Kiren Rijiju who then held the same portfolio as Jaiswal The mythical nature of illegal immigration from Bangladesh was brought out by Prof Abdul Mannan who in his 2017 book Infiltration Genesis of Assam Movement statistically established that Assamrsquos Muslim population increased largely because of the communityrsquos higher growth rateEven the Central government admitted to the Supreme Court in December 2023 that it is not possible to collect data on illegal immigrants as their entry into India is clandestine Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma however gave a sense of their number to the Assam Assembly based on the records of the statersquos 100 Foreignersrsquo Tribunals which determine the veracity of the charge of being illegal foreigners levelled against individuals Until 2023 the tribunals disposed of 337 lakh cases of which 159 lakh were declared as foreignersThis means nearly every second alleged illegal immigrant in Assam was proved to be an Indian citizen I asked lawyer Aman Wadud about the needless misery to which Indian citizens were subjected Wadud said ldquoAfter working for more than a decade over hundreds of citizenship cases I have not come across even one person who is actually a lsquoforeignerrsquo lsquoDeclared foreignersrsquo are Indian citizens who have been stripped of their nationalityrdquo What Wadud is implying is that even ldquodeclared foreignersrdquo possess citizenship documents but these were arbitrarily rejectedEven 159 lakh declared foreigners constitute a negligible fraction of the numbers politicians regularly cite Yet Bangladeshis are supposed to have fanned out in droves to all parts of India The Bharatiya Janata Party in the Assembly elections of Jharkhand and Maharashtra promised to deport Bangladeshis on coming to power there as it has also now to Delhirsquos votersHome Minister Amit Shah in 2018 compared infiltrators a code for illegal immigrants to termites and Prime Minister Narendra Modi last year warned voters that a Congress government would distribute their wealth among infiltrators Their rhetoric has Trumprsquos shrillness and incites hatred against Illegal Bangladeshi immigrants whom the Hindus of India touted as authentic natives cannot distinguish from Bengali Muslims Indiarsquos politics over illegal immigrants matches AmericarsquosThe writer is a senior journalist and author of Bhima Koregaon Challenging CasteSend your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper