Why India Has Every Right To Say ‘No’ To Illegal Immigrants 

Last year, the festering Rohingya crisis caught international attention with the Rohingyas having earned the epithet of being “one of the most persecuted minorities in the world” by the United Nations (UN), even as the body never bothered to show even scant sympathy for the persecuted Hindus in Bangladesh who have fallen from being 33 per cent to merely eight per cent of the population in less than 50 years.

While Muslim majority nations, like Pakistan, Indonesia and Malaysia, including the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), have refused to provide permanent shelter or protection to the Rohingyas, it is the sheer hypocrisy of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) that is appalling.

In fact, The UNHRC watchdog chose to be an embarrassingly mute spectator — be it post-Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, or the genocide of Kashmiri Pandits in 1990, or the barbaric atrocities by Pakistan on Balochis and Hindus, including forced conversions of Hindu girls to Islam, or for that matter, the war crimes against Houthi rebels in Yemen and of course, the enslavement and human trafficking of minorities, such as Shiites, Alawites, Christians and above all, Yazidis from Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria.

The debate around illegal infiltrators from Bangladesh has gathered further momentum with the National Register of Citizens (NRC) on 30 July 2018 recognising only 2.89 crore Assamese as Indian citizens out of the 3.29 crore who had applied. While the 40.07 lakh people whose names that were not a part of the NRC for Assam,will get opportunities to appeal, and while it is true that there may be genuine cases of names which did not find a mention in the list, the moot point that matters the most is that the last NRC exercise was undertaken in 1951.

After the Assam accord was signed under the aegis of the then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, a fresh NRC updation was meant to be undertaken in 2005, but thanks to the appeasement politics of a Congress-led government that was in power at the Centre from 2004 to 2014, the NRC exercise, remained a mere paper tiger.

Pseudo secularists and left-liberals including intellectually bankrupt journalists, who never had the courage to question the morally bankrupt erstwhile Congress government on why it never implemented the 1985 Assam accord, have the audacity to accuse the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) dispensation of majoritarianism, fascism and bigotry, which is both laughable and ridiculous. Thanks to the BJP, the Supreme Court-monitored NRC exercise in Assam was carried out over three years, starting 2015 in 2,500 NRC centres with 55,000 people toiling day and night to ensure that only those who were there in Assam before 24 March 1971 became a part of the NRC.

By casting aspersions on the credibility of the NRC process, the opposition is trying to give legitimacy to illegal infiltrators from Bangladesh and deny bona fide Indian citizens of Assam, what is rightfully theirs! The BJP is neither fascist nor xenophobic and believes in "justice for all and appeasement of none". And it is only fair that India for Indians and not foreigners staying illegally, should be the guiding principle in ensuring that illegal migrants are deported back to where they came from.

It is no secret that we are a country of almost 1.3 billion people today and only bona fide Indian citizens should have the right to the country’s limited resources, infrastructure, subsidies, social apparatus, government and private sector jobs and more. Why should the Indian state look after the upkeep of illegal Bangladeshis, who sneaked into Assam and West Bengal by taking advantage of the 4,096-kilometreporous India-Bangladesh border?

The threat to national security from illegal Bangladeshis is as serious, if not more, as the threat from Rohingyas. For instance, International Crisis Group (ICG), a non-profit organisation, had warned of reported links between the Rohingyas and radical Islamist terror groups like Al Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Islamic State. The deadly attack in Myanmar on 25 August 2017 by the outlawed Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) that left 71 people dead, including many Burmese security personnel, bears out the threat the Rohingyas pose to national security if allowed to stay in India.

Also, the NRC exercise in Assam has nothing to do with pitting Hindus against Muslims, as it is simply about India's refusal to become a dumping ground for illegal foreigners. However, the "Muslim" argument cannot be overlooked and here is why; Between 1951 and 1971, the Muslim population in Assam remained between 24.56 per cent and 24.68 per cent.However, after 1971,the demographic colonisation of Assam by illegal Bangladeshi Muslims began in earnestness, changing forever the demographic landscape of Assam, and India too. The fact that between 1971 and 1991, while the Hindu population grew by 41.89 per cent,that of the Muslims grew by a whopping 77.42 per cent.Clearly, the massive growth in Muslim population in Assam has not been organic but driven by a huge illegal influx from Bangladesh.

From 28.43 per cent rise in the population in 1991 to 34.22 per cent in 2011, the demographic invasion of Assam by illegal Bangladeshi infiltrators is best amplified by the fact that in 2001 there were only six Muslim majority districts, which went up by 50 per cent to nine, by 2011, of the total 33 districts in Assam. It is worth noting here that Muslim population is more than 50 per cent in Hailakandi, Goalpara, Barpeta, Dhubri, Darrang, Karimganj, Morigaon, Nagaon and Bongaigaon districts of Assam and more than 30 per cent in districts like Cachar, Nalbari and Kamrup. Obviously, illegal influx from Bangladesh has played a dominant role in this unnatural demographic shift.

Political parties like the Congress, which ruled independent India for almost six of the seven decades,, milked these illegal Bangladeshi Muslim migrants for votes, doing precious little, however, for their well-being or economic progress.

Coming back to citizenship, India is a union of states and the Parliament is the supreme authority to frame laws pertaining to citizenship, naturalisation or aliens. Since there are no specific legislations that govern the entry and status of refugees in India, refugees fall under the ambit of ‘aliens’ as per Article 22, para three, entry 17, list one, schedule seven of the Indian Constitution, Section 83 of the Civil Procedure Code Section 3(2)(b) of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1955.

Enactments bestowing the Indian government with sweeping powers and governing entry, stay, departure of ‘aliens’ are present in the Registration of Foreigners Act, 1939, Foreigners Act 1946, Passport Acts of 1920 and 1967. Violation by ‘aliens’ under Section nine of the Foreigners Act, 1946, and Foreigners Order, 1948, can invite punitive action by the Indian government, including summary arrest, detention, prosecution, expulsion.

Interestingly, the Supreme Court has in the past, on a related matter stated, “The power of the Government to expel foreigners is absolute and unlimited and there is no provision in the Constitution fettering this discretion. The executive Government has unrestricted right to expel a foreigner”.

The interesting question, therefore, and that demands a response is, will the Indian government expel those from the 40.07 lakh people, who are unable to prove their Indian "citizenship" between 30 August and 28 September? Well, the BJP-led government has categorically stated that appeals to foreigners' tribunals can be made and, as far as voting rights are concerned, S KMendiratta, former legal advisor to the Election Commission has stated that till the status of these illegal migrants is resolved, they are likely to be clubbed as 'D or Doubtful voters', who will be disenfranchised.

It is also true that the BJP does not believe in an insular society or any form of exclusionism. However, national security is paramount. Most importantly, illegal cross border infiltration that has wreaked havoc in much of Europe and ghettoised large parts of Germany, should be a warning to every sane government in every corner of the world, that you do not solve your neighbours' problems by bringing them home.

There are some like the virulent and Hinduphobic Mamata Banerjee, who have threatened a civil war and bloodbath if illegal Bangladeshis are expelled or deported, clearly showcasing the extent to which divisive vote bank politics is being played by some opposition parties who are trying to whip up a paranoia, to polarise, under the garb of secularism. Will Banerjee care to respond, what has she done for Muslims in West Bengal, apart from persecuting Hindus, simply for good optics?

Does persecution of Hindus automatically translate into betterment of living conditions for Muslims? The answer is a vehement 'No'. Leaders like Banerjee have simply used Muslims for narrow political gains, but have never really empowered them either with good education, jobs or a respectable source of livelihood. The riots in West Bengal under an inept Banerjee in Malda, Dhulagarh, Basirhat and most recently in Aasansol, where Hindus faced violence and mass exodus, only because they were peacefully celebrating Ram Navami, is a warning to not just the people of West Bengal but to the rest in India that the likes of Mamata Banerjee can never graduate beyond street level sloganeering and cacophony.

Again, there are those who say that India should continue to house these 40 lakh undocumented immigrants, as they are refugees. Illegal immigrants are those who are legally not entitled to stay in a country and have either entered or overstayed by going incognito and, cannot be called refugees. Refugees are those who are forced to flee their original homeland due to violence, natural disaster or persecution. But since India is not a signatory to either the 1951 Refugee Convention or the 1967 Protocol relating to Refugees, the UNHRC and Amnesty International that have been trying in vain to meddle in India's internal affairs, are on a lame wicket on this one and the refugee argument here, in any case, holds no water, to start with.

In the final analysis, the "NRC Assam" issue has been best explained by Amit Shah, the national president of the BJP, the world's largest political organisation. Shah summed up the entire issue succinctly when he said that the Assam accord signed in 1985, is the fulcrum and the soul of the national registry issue. The Assam accord is based on "detection, deletion and deportation of non citizens", which effectively puts to rest any confusion on this issue. Of the 40 lakh odd people who fail to prove that they were staying in Assam before 24 March 1971, the only solution is to send them back to Bangladesh, which will require more than just good diplomacy or political will, in today's troubled times, what with global protectionism on the rise.

However, the Narendra Modi-led dispensation, which has abundance of both political conviction and diplomatic savvy, has dared to bring to its logical conclusion, the Assam accord, which lay forgotten on the statute books for 33 long years, thanks to politically decrepit, erstwhile Congress dispensations.

The NRC exercise in Assam has triggered a wider debate which is good news. What will be even better is once the NRC process is gradually extended to other states too, particularly states like West Bengal, which share a porous border with Bangladesh and have seen an unprecedented influx of illegal Bangladeshis in the last many years, an activity that gathered pace under Mamata Banerjee, ever since she took charge as Chief Minister in 2011. The fact that districts like Malda, Howrah, Murshidabad, Uttar Dinajpur, Birbhum, Nadia, Hooghly, large parts of North and South 24 Parganas in West Bengal, have become Muslim-dominated due to illegal infiltration and not organic reasons, is a reason as good as any other to ensure that illegal infiltration which is reaching dangerous proportions is curbed and curbed for good, now! India's finite resources are for Indians and not foreigners and, there is no reason to be apologetic about it.

Last but not the least, for all those human rights' activists and misguided lawyers who are supporting the Rohingyas and illegal Bangladeshi migrants on humanitarian grounds, they have clearly missed the plot here. No sovereign nation in today’s times can or should compromise its national security in a bid to appease on humanitarian grounds as the results can be disastrous. Between 2015 and 2016, hate crimes in Germany went up by 117 per cent, from 92,000 to 200,000. In the said period, the number of Albanian, Tunisian, Moroccan and Syrian refugees in Germany went up by 440 per cent. Clearly, this could not have been sheer coincidence.

Also, the likes of UNHCR who did not even pay lip service to condemn the brutal massacre in Sana’a, Yemen, in October 2016, when Saudi fighter jets gunned down a group of harmless mourners that left 104 dead and 550 grievously injured, have no business taking the high moral ground to advise India, which has in the past paid a heavy price for openly accepting refugees. Radicalised Islamist terror and jihadi violence are global problems and contemporary India, faced with a hostile neighbour like Pakistan, has many reasons to say a big ‘no’ to the Rohingyas and no reason, whatsoever to say a ‘yes’, to illegal Bangladeshi immigrants either.