SOUTH ASIA: Immigrant Issue Sours Indo-Bangladesh Relations

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Commentary - By Praful Bidwai

NEW DELHI, Feb 7 2003 (IPS) - Relations between India and Bangladesh have hit a new low over what New Delhi claims is a "huge influx" of "illegal immigrants" into its territory from across the porous 4,984 kms long border between the two neighbouring countries.

Although India managed to physically "push in" – forcibly repatriate – 213 "gypsy snake-charmers" into Bangladesh early Thursday after six days of wrangling between their border guards, the highly emotionalised row between the two states is unlikely to end soon.

India’s right-wing government, driven by domestic political considerations, is determined to extradite more and more people of claimed Bangladeshi origin.

Bangladesh’s conservative government, under pressure from its own fundamentalists, is equally bent upon resisting ‘Big Brother’ India’s coercive pressure. India’s Defence Minister George Fernandes has said the situation is ”fast spinning out of control".

The plight of the 213 "snake-charmers", who scrape a poverty-stricken living in both countries, was a horrific human tragedy. They were pushed back and forth more than 30 times and left without shelter, suffering rain, cold weather and pangs of hunger.

Ultimately, they crossed back over to Bangladesh as part of a deal reportedly brokered by cattle-smugglers between India’s Border Security Force (BSF) and its counterpart, the Bangladesh Rifles (BDR).

Less than two years ago, BSF and BDR had clashed violently, leading to the death of 18 people, over the ownership of some of the 200-plus "enclaves" in each other’s territory, which remains ambiguous despite a 1974 accord demarcating the 4,000 kilometre-long border.

Also at stake are conflicts over trade liberalisation, sharing of river waters and access to Bangladesh’s gas reserves. These have become the ingredients of a first-rate diplomatic-political crisis.

The immediate precipitating factor for this is a series of hardline statements by high Indian functionaries on "illegal migration" over the past five months.

Since early November, India’s Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister Lal Krishna Advani has made repeated claims that there are as many as 15 million Bangladeshi nationals, who illegally live in India (besides 11,500 Pakistanis); must be deported.

Advani says these migrants are "the biggest threat to national security." New Delhi claims that their "continuing influx" is instigated and encouraged by Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence which, along with the al-Qaeda network, has strengthened its base in Bangladesh.

The Indian government claims to have "irrefutable" evidence that Bangladesh has become a "hub" of the ISI’s anti-India activities. But it has not made the evidence public. Bangladesh denies this. Its foreign minister M Morshed Khan told ‘News Today’ on Wednesday: "There is not a single Bangladeshi migrant in India." There are few buyers for this.

The Bangladesh government, led by Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, is far less friendly to India than its predecessor Sheikh Hasina’s. But it too resents being depicted as a vassal regime of Pakistan, from which Bangladesh seceded in 1971.

Sober commentators like Muchkund Dubey, a former foreign secretary of India, has warned that India’s militant anti-immigrant rhetoric is widely seen as "a deliberate attempt" to "tarnish Bangladesh’s image”.

This, says Dubey, "has the effect of putting their country outside the international mainstream and undermining its economic prospects. This view is not only held by the government, but also widely shared."

Bangladeshis, says Dubey, "are particularly resentful of the allegation that their country has become the hotbed of ISI activities. They say that, after all, they did not make the great sacrifice for liberating their country in order to mortgage themselves back to Pakistan."

The Indian government has not conducted a systematic survey to detect illegal Bangladeshi migrants. But that has not deterred senior ministers and officials like Advani from asserting that their number is as high as 15 to 20 million.

Leaders of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party routinely describe the Muslim migrants as "infiltrators". They however term the Hindu migrants (with its 10 percent of Hindu population) "refugees".

Many of the migrants are people who were devastated by floods and cyclones or by agricultural depressions in parts of Bangladesh caused, ironically, by India’s unilateral withdrawal of water from the Ganges through a barrage it constructed near the border in 1975 without consulting Bangladesh, a co-riparian state.

An influx of the order of 15 million would have created a major demographic change in the bordering Indian states. But the official census figures and the autonomous Election Commission’s rolls bear no evidence of that. There is, doubtless, some illegal migration, but its precise extent remains unclear.

Micro-level surveys show that most Bangladeshi migrants, legal or otherwise, are economic or ecological refugees, who have moved from one of the world’s poorest countries to a slightly less poor country – to scrape a livelihood, often as casual workers.

No significant or large-scale illegal migration can possibly take place without corruption in India’s border police and bureaucracy. India’s civil service is notorious for corruption. But rather than clean it up, India’s right-wing leaders blame and demonise Bangladesh.

India’s approach, focused on pushing back suspected Bangladeshi nationals, is closely linked to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s hysterical campaign on "security", "terrorism" and "threats" from Islamic forces.

This is central to its strategy of capitalising on xenophobia to win votes in elections to a number of state legislatures due this year, and whose outcomes will determine the party’s future and its chances in the next parliamentary elections.

India’s hardliners are strengthened by the fact that Khaleda Zia has come to power in alliance with right-wing Islamic hardliners who have an anti-India, anti-Hindu agenda. In today’s context, both sets of hardliners feed on, and reinforce, each other.

In the past year or so, India-Bangladesh relations have further soured because of disputes over trade liberalisation, on which New Delhi accuses Dhaka to be dragging its feet. Bangladesh claims, as a least developed country, that it needs more time to open up to India imports.

Two other factors have complicated matters: Bangladesh’s discovery of large natural gas reserves, and India’s reported disapproval of its plans to build a special continental port at Chittagong.

These issues could have been peacefully negotiated and settled. But the "illegal migrants" crisis has made that extremely difficult.

Bangladesh’s foreign minister is likely to visit India in a bid to sort out some of these matters. But it is unclear if efforts at reconciliation, including a realistic system of work permits for migrants, will succeed in today’s vitiated atmosphere