New Delhi, Feb 12: Nobody quite knows what became of those 213 people, with their dented aluminum utensils, plastic buckets, babies wrapped up in rags, wailing women — nomadic snake charmers from Porabari village, some said, of uncertain religious extraction.
For a while their tribulations spluttered incandescently on national TV screens as they stood between two sets of guns, one belonging to the Bangladesh Rifles, the other to our Border Security Force. Then thankfully, for our nerves that were beginning to fray, they disappeared, almost as abruptly as they had appeared. So where are they now? Not in our territory, said Bangladesh. Ditto, said India. If this scenario seemed straight out of Saadat Hasan Manto’s short story “Toba Tek Singh”, that is no coincidence. The fate of Toba Tek Singh alias Bishan Singh has been the fate of the innumerable Nowhere People of the subcontinent, since the days Sir Cyril Radcliffe drew his straight lines on paper maps.
Nobody, also, quite knows how many of these border-crossers live amidst us today. The home minister, in January, spoke of “nearly 20 million illegal migrants”. The Intelligence Bureau puts the number from Bangladesh at 16 million. A task force on Border Management reported in August 2000 that the number stood at 15 million. The fact is that not only are these attempts at enumeration largely guesswork, they make little distinction between the status of various groups of people who go by the collective term “Bangladeshis”, and which point of time they came in.
Indeed, the public discourse on Bangladeshis has been characterised by abysmal ignorance, crass prejudice and the most cynical politics aimed at engineering mass anxiety over an apparent flood of humanity threatening our existence. The tendency is to either “invisibilise” them as people who do not matter and therefore have no entitlements, or visibilise them as aliens, Muslims, bearers of trouble, disease, insecurity, who are out to ruin our economy, inundate our neighbourhoods and plant grenades in our cities. To the purveyors of vituperative politics, if Bangladeshis did not exist as the perpetual incendiary in the backyard, they would have had to be invented. Every now and then features on how “Bangladesh will destroy India” by swamping it with its people appear in the media, fears that ironically mirror those voiced by the British National Party over how the unending flow of Asians into Britain is ringing its death-knell.
But feeding mass frenzy, as the Shiv Sena and BJP attempt to do, especially when elections come around, is no way to tackle a complex human crisis like the migration of vast numbers of people across national borders. Before we evolve a cogent domestic policy for Bangladeshis in India, we need to know just who these people are. Refugees? Migrant workers? Displaced people? Infiltrators? Nothing, in fact, marks the ugly nature of the discourse than the loose fashion in which the military term “infiltrator” — meaning intruder with hostile intent — is routinely used to describe those who are motivated to enter this country in a desperate search for a livelihood. The great majority of Bangladeshis are also not refugees for the simple reason that they have not been recognised as such. The more accurate description for them then is “migrant workers”, many of whom have lived in India for decades and got integrated into its local economy, either as agricultural labour, petty traders or unorganised workers.
International law recognises such a category. According to Article 2 of the 1990 International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, the term “migrant worker” refers to a person who is engaged in a remunerated activity in a state of which he or she is not a national. The Convention also provides for various categories, such as seasonal worker, self-employed worker, frontier worker and so on. Why then cannot the Indian government come up with a simple, streamlined system of registration and work permits for these people?
Certainly the present approach of unilateral deportation by India of those it regards as “illegal migrants” — a category decided primarily on the basis of religion — is not just inhuman, it is wholly impractical. International law does not provide for such action should the country of origin choose not to respond. Begum Khaleda Zia’s government is quite aware of this. Dhaka has, in fact, opted for the flat bat approach to New Delhi’s concerns, describing as “baseless and absurd” reports that there were 20 million Bangladeshi illegal migrants in India. Its foreign secretary, Samsher Mobin Chowdhury, went as far as to deny that any Bangladeshi lives in India illegally.
How, then, does New Delhi hope to convince not just its eastern neighbour but the world that the Bangladeshis it wishes to deport are indeed people from across the border? The problem is made more intractable by the complexities of Partition, which had left enclaves of Indian land on the Bangladesh side of the border, and vice versa. Some of “Bangladeshis” who’ve migrated to India from these regions, or been driven to migrate, have every right to an Indian citizenship. Therefore, even if the ambitious plan to fence off the entire border with Bangladesh in some of the most geographically challenging regions of the word is completed by 2007, as projected, it is unlikely to stem this movement of people into India.
There is no obvious alternative to a process of negotiation between the two countries. If the Union government is looking for a permanent settlement, and not just a handy issue to pump up the votes, border scuffles cannot be a substitute for substantive dialogue conducted in a spirit of compromise. The only time some forward movement took place on this issue was when New Delhi and Dhaka sat across the table in 1991 and thrashed things out, and for a brief spell when the Gujral Doctrine of good neighbourliness was given an airing. Unfortunately, in the testosterone-laced diplomacy of today, such an option appears exceedingly unlikely.
We are left then with the Nowhere Policy of periodically demonising a Nowhere People, men, women and children, with plastic buckets and dented utensils, ensnarled in the barbed wire of history. For them the last line of Manto’s short story continues to be the perfect epitaph: In the middle, on a stretch of land which had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh.
Bureau Report
