POLITICS-SOUTH ASIA: Snake Charmers Snared in Indo-Bangladesh Row

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Feb 4 2003 (IPS) - The immediate fate of a group of 213 stranded snake charmers may determine the future of India’s new policy of deporting illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, who cross the border in large numbers to seek jobs in this relatively more prosperous country.

Bangladesh, which has accused India of pushing Bengali-speaking Indian Muslims across the border, has refused to accept the group of snake charmers stranded on a piece of ‘no-man’s-land’ at the Satgachi border outpost in India’s Cooch Behar district, West Bengal state.

For days now, they have had no food or shelter from the elements.

As the diplomatic crisis deepened Monday and border troops were reported exchanging fire, India’s foreign ministry spokesman Navtej Sarna described the ”detention” of the group on the border as a ”humanitarian issue”.

Sarna said it has been ”pointed out (to the Bangladeshi authorities) that agreed modalities for border crossing should be implemented.”

Commenting on the crisis, the minister of state for the interior, I D Swami, insisted that the snake charmers intercepted on the border by Indian border guards had nothing to do with India’s new policy of expelling some 20 million Bangladeshis staying illegally in India.

Television footage from the area showed the snake-charmers, who make a living catching poisonous snakes, and have among them women and children, in deep distress. Heavily-armed, grim-faced bother guards watched over them.

Amina Begum and Basana Begum told television reporters that they were residents of Savar near Dhaka in Bangladesh and were snake charmers. They had with them about 150 snakes which, they said, needed to be fed.

Sarna said India faced serious problems as a result of large-scale migration across the border and was determined to continue with its deportation drive.

He described charges that India was deporting Bangla-speaking Indians as ”baseless and absurd”. In Dhaka, Bangladesh Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Riaz Rahman had said that India was deporting its own people.

”How do you call them Bangladeshis? Are they carrying Bangladeshi passports or any other identification? There is no question of accepting them,” Anwarool Haque, minister in the Bangladesh Embassy, said in response.

As the two countries wrangled over the status of the snake charmers, leading demographer Ashis Bose said the best way to describe the trapped snake charmers was to go by the U.N. classification of ”undocumented migrants”.

”The two countries should sit together and defuse the situation quickly because it is in the interest of neither to allow the situation to deteriorate and fall prey to politics,” Bose, a Hindu whose family has its roots in what became Bangladesh, said.

”This is an economic rather than a political problem and should be treated as such,” said Bose adding that one way out would be to provide work permits for Bangladeshis coming to India to find work.

Bose described Bangladesh as a human reservoir of poverty which like water had to find its own level. Thus, he said, it would be futile to attempt to physically prevent the movement of economic refugees across a porous border with fences as India plans to do.

”India is no land of milk and honey but it is impossible to fence off the 4,000-kilometre long border and keep out people who share the same language and culture on either side,” he said.

But the ultra-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government has other ideas. Last month, at a conference of top state administrative and police officials, India’s Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani called for steps to deport all Bangladeshi nationals who are in the country illegally.

”We shall identify, locate and throw out the 20 million Bangladeshis and 11,500 Pakistanis who have overstayed,” Advani vowed at the meeting.

Considered a pro-Hindu hawk, Advani, who was born in the Sindh province of Pakistan, became a refugee in 1947 when British India was granted independence and carved up into Islamic Pakistan – including what is now Bangladesh – and Hindu-majority but officially secular India.

There are no reliable figures of the exact numbers of Bangladeshis in India illegally but they tend to cluster in the large metropolises of Mumbai, New Delhi and Kolkata, and merge fairly easily with slum populations.

Following Advani’s exhortations, a special deportation cell was created with Delhi’s police, which rounded up a few hundred alleged Bangladeshis and packed them into trains headed for the border.

But many of them returned, because the Bangladesh border guards refused to allow them back in.

Large-scale deportations attempted in 1998 by western Maharashtra state’s government – one that was pro-Hindu and comprised the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and its ally Shiv Sena – failed after the communist government in West Bengal called it a communal exercise and refused to cooperate.

As India’s para-military Border Security Force and its counterpart, the Bangladesh Rifles, continue to beef up their forces at Satgachi, there were fears that the exchange of fire could erupt into serious hostilities. News reports said efforts were being made to evacuate the area of residents for their safety.

According to Hiranmay Karlekar, a senior political analyst with the pro-BJP newspaper ‘Pioneer’, illegal immigration from Bangladesh into India has been a continuing process since independence but has been complicated since the nineties by the entry of Islamic extremists who posed a serious security risk to India.

Karlekar said there was no escaping the fact that the Bangladesh National Party (BNP) government led by Prime Minister Khaleda Zia has a pronouncedly anti-India stance and was supported by Islamic fundamentalist groups that sympathised with the Taliban in Afghanistan. These charges are disputed by Dhaka.

India has officially accused Zia’s regime of cooperating with Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) and of hosting anti-India insurgent camps within its territory, but Dhaka has denied these accusations.