Many are in fact citizens
India’s home minister, calls them “termites” and “infiltrators”. The government will hunt them down and throw them into the sea, he thunders. Unfortunately, it is not just the standard bluster from a nativist politician railing against illegal immigration. Last year bureaucrats in the Indian state of Assam, which has a population of about 33m people, produced a list of more than 4m of its residents whom they consider foreigners, without any right to live there.
Mr Shah insists that all these people will be deported. In practice, neighbouring Bangladesh, from which they are said to have migrated, will not accept them, since in most cases there is no evidence that they are anything other than Indians too poor and uneducated to navigate the complex bureaucracy of citizenship.
Muslims make up a third of Assam’s population. The state’s shifting demography is mainly the result of a higher birth rate among Bengalis already in Assam, not migration. But that has not stopped the Bharatiya Janata Party , which dominates both the state and national governments, from vowing to collar lots of illegal immigrants. And since so few of them exist, more had to be invented.
The law the government is eagerly enforcing requires all residents to prove that they or their forebears were in the state by March 24th 1971. That is a big hurdle for poor farmers and itinerant workers, especially women, many of them illiterate. Suspects can be denounced as non-citizens by anonymous tips, an invitation to abuse. There have been lots of mistakes, such as a decorated war hero who was declared not to be Indian.
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