The Modi Legacy To Assam's Refugee vs. Infiltrator Binary

♈February 22, 2014, was just another usual late winter afternoon in Silchar town of Assam’s Barak Valley. Narendra Modi, the Gujarat chief minister and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s prime ministerial candidate, visited the Bengali-speaking Hindu-dominated town to address a rally titled Barak Vikas Samavesh. He made a proposition from the dais that few politicians holding top government offices may have publicly said. 

🃏Modi said that two kinds of people came from Bangladesh to Assam. One section was “brought” by Assam’s Congress-led government as a part of a “political conspiracy” for “vote-bank politics”. The other is made up of people who were harassed in Bangladesh. He said that those brought for vote-bank politics and smugglers from Bangladesh will be pushed back, while the second category must find a place in the country.

🐷This was a new proposition also in Assam, where migration from Bangladesh has remained a heated political issue since the late 1970s. The Assamese organisations’ opposition to illegal migrants from Bangladesh made no religious division. Hindu or Muslim, Assamese organisations wanted all suspected Bangladeshi migrants deported.

🐟But Modi gave Assam’s citizenship politics a new twist, one for which the ground was long being prepared by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological-organisational parent of the BJP. Modi alleged that the Assam government had violated the human rights of Hindus of Bangladeshi origin by sending them to detention camps. He demanded the removal of the ‘doubtful voter’ tag from Hindus accused of being Bangladeshis. 

🅠“We have a responsibility toward Hindus who are harassed and suffer in other countries. Where will they go? India is the only place for them. Our government cannot continue to harass them. We will have to accommodate them here,” he said, adding, “As soon as we come to power at the Centre, detention camps housing Hindu migrants from Bangladesh will be done away with.” 

💝He, however, assured Assamese people that the state alone would not have to take the burden of accommodating the Hindu Bangladeshis; these people would be settled in different states. 

ꦫIt was from this speech that the foundation of the BJP’s pet twin policy on citizenship—a screening exercise to weed out infiltrators (National Register of Citizens, or NRC) and protection to non-Muslim migrants from Muslim-majority neighbouring countries in the form of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA)—was established.

🦩The argument was in black and white–Hindus who have come from Bangladesh must have migrated due to religious persecution, but the Muslims who have come must have come in search of economic fortunes. 

ᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚWhile citizenship has been integral to Assam’s politics since the late 1970s, Modi in 2014 introduced it to the political mainstream of West Bengal, another Bangladesh-bordering state with a long history of migration from Bangladesh. In West Bengal, though, the migrations created much less conflict.

If one reason for minimal conflict was both the Left and the Congress’ friendly attitude towards migrants, another was that the language of the migrants and the natives is the same. Trinamool Congress (TMC) chief Mamata Banerjee had raised the infiltration issue during her party’s alliance with the BJP ♔between 1998 and 2006, but her politics became overtly sympathetic towards the cause of the Muslims from 2008-09, and more so after coming to power in 2011.

꧙On April 27, 2014, while addressing a rally in Serampore town in Kolkata’s northern suburbs, Modi targeted Chief Minister Banerjee for encouraging infiltration from Bangladesh for ‘vote bank politics’. 

💯“You (Mamata) find the people from Bihar and Odisha as alien, but your face glows when the Bangladeshis come. [It is] as if your relatives from some seven generations have arrived!” he said, paused, and added, “Brothers and sisters, note it down; the Bangladeshis will have to pack their bags after May 16.” The date referred to the day of the 2014 election results. 

💫As Modi’s Serampore speech triggered panic among both Hindus and Muslims with an eastern Bengal background, TMC leaders condemned Modi’s speech as a part of a ‘divisive plan,’ claiming that they were ‘aimed at destabilising Bengal’s socio-cultural ethos’. 

𝓡Banerjee responded five days later. At a rally at Nandigram in East Midnapore district, an angry Mamata thundered, ‘Touch a single person and you will see.’ She referred to Modi as a ‘paper tiger’ and warned him of the existence of ‘a Royal Bengal tiger’. 

♏The next day, May 4, Modi distinguished between ‘refugees’ and ‘infiltrators’ the way he had done in Assam. There were two types of migrants from Bangladesh—one is the “refugees who have been forced out, and they were thrown out in the name of religion.” The others are “the infiltrators who are pouring in due to vote-bank politics.”

🐼“Tell me, now, if someone carrying true Indian blood lands in trouble in any part of the world, shouldn’t the person be coming to India, irrespective of the colour of their passport? If people of Indian origin who are living in Fiji for centuries are persecuted there, where else other than India will they come to? Should Bharat Mata refuse her children?” Modi asked. 

🥂He argued that those who are “driven out of Bangladesh—the ones who were the children of Bharat Mata—those who love Bharat Mata and celebrate Durgashtami and speak Bengali till date,” were his brothers. Their security, honour, and pride will be equal to that of any Indian, he asserted.

🤡However, the ‘infiltrators’ must go back. “Those who are eating into the earnings of our youth will have to leave. Our priority is to provide income-generation opportunities for the country’s young workforce. We cannot deprive our youth of their rights for mere vote-bank politics.”

While Modi’s propositions heated up West Bengal’s political temperature, with Banerjee and leaders of the Left parties accusing him of playing divisive politics, the BJP made significant electoral gains. Not only they managed to win a Lok Sabha ܫseat on its own for the first time in the state, but their vote share also increased to 17 per cent—quite a significant rise compared to 6.1 per cent in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections (including votes of its ally in Darjeeling) and 4.1 per cent in the 2011 assembly election.

🀅Assam saw an even greater impact—a tectonic shift in voting pattern, with the BJP emerging as the biggest force with 36.9 per cent vote share, its highest-ever in Assam. 

𓆏Since then, the twin policy linking citizenship with religion has been at the core of the saffron camp’s campaign in Assam and West Bengal. They wrested Assam from the Congress in 2016. After the publication of the first draft of the NRC for Assam in 2018—which saw 40 lakh names removed from the citizenship list—the issue became a polariser beyond the Bangladesh-bordering states. 

𓆉Citizenship became one of the BJP’s major poll planks in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Amidst heightened tension in West Bengal, Amit Shah, then the BJP president, famously clarified the chronology on April 12, 2019—‘First, the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) will be brought, and all refugees will be given citizenship. Then the NRC will be implemented. So the refugees need not worry, but the infiltrators must worry.’

🌼The passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) six months after returning to power in 2019 led to widespread protests in northern, eastern, and northeastern India, with protesters sometimes turning violent. The protesters included those objecting to the exclusion of Muslims from the law and those (from the northeast) protesting granting citizenship to any person of Bangladeshi origin, irrespective of religion. 

ꦗThe implementation of the CAA finally started in March 2024 with the notification of the rules just ahead of the parliamentary elections. By that time, the BJP’s poll pitch against ‘Bangladeshi infiltrators’ had made its way into other eastern states—Jharkhand, Odisha, and Bihar. 

ꦛWhile the BJP’s opponents and critics allege the BJP’s campaign against ‘Bangladeshi infiltrators’ had endangered all Bengali-speaking Muslims of India—landing them in frequent harassment in other Indian states on suspicion of being Bangladeshis—the citizenship binary is only likely to intensify in the coming months, especially with Assam and West Bengal assembly elections due in 2026.