Dialogue October - December, 2001 , Volume 3 No. 2
Our Land, their
Living Space
Shri D.N. Bezboruah
The three-part article "Our Land, their Space" was published in The Sentinel on June 14, 15 and 16, 1992, when the late Hiteswar Saikia was the Chief Minister of Assam after the people of Assam had rejected the Asom Gana Parisad (AGP) Government that had come to power in 1985 in the election of 1991. This rejection can be attributed mainly to two reasons: first, a sense of betrayal among the people on the sole burning issue on which the AGP had been voted to power, namely, the foreign nationals issue; and second, because the AGP Government during its first innings had actively promoted the ULFA. A lot of water has flown down the Brahmaputra in these eight years or so. However, it may well be asked why it has been thought necessary to reprint this article. This has been done with two reasons in mind, first we wanted to present an updated version of an article that sought to analyse the problem of large-scale illegal immigration from Bangladesh in some detail and to record the thinking and perspective of the Bangladeshi intellectuals on the issue for those who missed it in 1992. This updated version of the articles also seeks to include the subsequent political happenings relating to this vital problem and the present stance of the AGP which is in power again. Second, there are many among us who need to be constantly reminded of the problems they face. The tendency of a large number of Assamese people has been to bury their heads in the sand like the proverbial ostrich and to refuse to look at the most vital problem facing all of us. This is a luxury we can indulge in only at great peril to ourselves. It would, therefore, do no harm to re-read something that was read earlier of
this can shake us back to the real world around us and steel our resolve neither to lose sight of the problem nor allow ourselves to be overtaken by what faces us. In fact, it is important that we never lose sight of the problem, for that is crucial to our very survival.They are everywhere peddaling cycle rickshaws in towns, pulling thelas, working on roads and other PWD projects all over Assam and in fields and as day labourers - generally for lower wages. Everyone sees them and recognizes them as not being the children of the soil. Their languages gives them away. So does their ability to slog for a pittance - a fact so untypical of the native dwellers of the land. They are clearly not of the land nor the descendent of those who immigrated even as late as the early part of this century when Assam could afford the luxury of some migration - or thought it could, as it does even today, going by the people’s attitude to the illegal infiltration of foreigners. So numerous are they in some districts of Assam along the international boundary, that one is even in doubt whether one is really in Assam. They are the Bangladeshis.
However, there is one man who did not see them: the Chief Minister, Mr. Hiteswar Saikia. it could not be because he moved about in a car with tinted glass windows, because he stopped seeing them only a few years before he passed away. Soon after taking over for a second term as Chief Minister on June, 1991, Mr. Saikia had occasion to pooh-pooh what he called the exaggerated claims made by the former AGP Government on the issue of Bangladeshi nationals illegally living in Assam. Then on April 10, 1992, on the concluding day of the Budget Session of the Assam Assembly, he spoke of two to three million Bangladeshis who had infiltrated into Assam in the year 1987. He even dwelt on the problem created by the illegal immigration of Bangladeshi citizens. He spoke of the ten out of 23 districts of Assam where the infiltration of Bangladeshi citizens had contributed to the significant increase in population. He must have based his remarks on the "Provisional Population Totals" of the Census of India 1991 (Paper 1 of 1991) which had been published well before April 10, 1992, since it would have been unfortunate for any chief minister to have spoken on the basis of any other document. He also spoke of about 4,500 Bangladeshis identified and deported under the terms of the Assam Accord. He
spoke of the 16,000 infiltrators of the 1965-71 (sic.) period who had been disfranchised. Quite obviously, there had to be illegal infiltrators from Bangladesh for all this to have happened and for Chief Minister Hiteswar Saikia to have taken note of it all.But thereafter in an interview to the Sentinel published on May 28 1992, Mr. Saikia claimed that his statement in the Assam Assembly on April 10 had been based on intelligence reports from the union Home Ministry, and that they were likely to have been inaccurate considering that unlike the census figures they had not been arrived at from head counts. He made this strange statement despite the fact that his statement of April 10 had quite obviously been based on the provisional census figures for 1991. And what no one had asked him (or the census enumerators for the matter) was whether the thousands of rickshawallahs, thela pushers and PWD labourers had at all come under the all-important head-count that the he was talking about.
Quite evidently, Hiteswar Saikia had chosen to backtrack on his earlier position on Bangladeshi infiltrators. As the Special Correspondent of the Hindu from Guwahati put it so aptly in the issue of June 9, 1992, "Saikia had apparently decided to backtrack. It is not merely the guerrillas who recognize the need to combine advance and retreat; the politicians too appear to have absorbed these lessons. But the problem for Hiteswar Saikia was that in trying to backtrack, he had again rubbed the Union Home Ministry the wrong way, thus inviting further trouble upon himself."
It was the reason for the backtracking that was of much greater concern for the people of Assam. And it could not be the tinted glass windows on his car that interfered with his seeing properly. He had had been them for quite some time. He had them even when he did see the Bangladeshis. Clearly then, he had had instructions to say that there are no Bangladeshi infiltrators in Assam, or else… And where could such outlandish instructions have come from? Certainly not from the Centre which had been at some pains to make Bangladesh Prime Minister Khaleda Zia admit for the first time during her visit to New Delhi in may-end, 1992 that there had indeed been some infiltration from Bangladesh into India. In fact this had even led to the setting-up of a high-level joint task force to go into the question of illegal migration, the
existence of ULFA training camps in Bangladesh and other matters. Obviously then, the instructions to make such an absurdly untrue statement did not come from the Centre.The spadework for the Government of India’s success in getting the Bangladesh Government to concede large-scale emigration from that country into India was done by the exhaustive three-day dialogue between some senior editors from Bangladesh and members of the Editors Guild of India at which this writer was present. The Bangladesh editors had been made to admit that large-scale infiltration from Bangladesh into India was taking place. And quite understandably, they had put the ball back in India’s court. "You have your laws governing illegal entry by foreigners. Why don’t you implement them and throw the illegal migrants out?" was their reaction. In any case, most of the documents presented before the Bangladesh editors had formed the basis of the dialogue between senior Indian journalists and Ms. Khaleda in May, and the documents had proved to be irrefutable even for the Bangladesh Prime Minister. But all this painstaking work on behalf of India and Assam seems to have been undone by no less a person than the then Chief Minister of Assam who, one would have expected to be charged with the responsibility of protecting Assam’s interests rather than sabotaging them.
So we were back again to the basic question: What or who had obliged the late Mr. Saikia to backtrack on such a vital issue concerning the very existence of Assam and its people? The ‘what’ part of the question can actually be answered in two words: electoral equations. Since 1961 or so, the Congress has not only connived at but actively encouraged from Bangladesh to build up its vote bank in Assam. Even then the migration was illegal. Even then the enfranchisement of these immigrants form across the international border was illegal. But it possibly did not hurt so much then as it does now. However, it opened floodgates and set a sinister trend. The Congress and its successor, the Congress(I), did not worry, because to the party, winning elections and remaining in power has always ranked higher priority than the so-called security and integrity of the country. The cliches were only for public consumption. These myopic leaders did not realize they were digging their own graves too and that they were about to be hoist by their own petards. Most
of these Congress leaders have now been rejected or are in the process of being rejected. And those are still around, must do their very best to make hay while the sun shines.And that brings us to the ‘who’ part of the question. Who had obliged Hiteswar Saikia to backtrack? The immigrants and their supporters who have expansionist ambitions and want a land that could be eventually annexed to Bangladesh. Entities and equations like "India" or "Assam" are of no consequence to these people. The agents within who have overweening political ambitions realize that they cannot be fulfilled if Assam remain part of India. But with Assam as part of another country, there is hope for their ambitions - at least as a quid pro quo for their help in the annexation. Had Bangladesh been an unfriendly country, such deeds would have weighed heavily as guilt. Such deeds would then have clearer definition as treason - a definition that becomes fuzzy in respect of a ‘friendly’ country. Very few people have pangs of conscience about committing sabotage, which seems a less despicable deed than treason. And for those agents who are still troubled by their conscience, there is the salve of religion. Anything that can be made to appear a deed done for the sake of one’s religion, sanctifies even treason, not to speak of sabotage. And so the process of claiming all Bangladeshi infiltrators to be Indian minorities goes on. Nor can this claim by Indian nationals be explained on any grounds other than on expansionist ambitions on behalf of another country and in the name of religion. It is always religion, language or ethnicity (never country) that is the factor determining take-overs and expansionist ambitions. Thus was Tripura taken over by Bangladeshis. Thus was Sikkam over-run by immigrants from Nepal. Therefore, it is these ambitions agents of Bangladesh in Assam who must have made Hiteswar Saikia see which side his bread was buttered and what he had to pretend in order to survive. It is obviously they who had coerced him into severing the umbilical cord that had bound him to the land of his birth.
Bangladeshi perception
The jubilation in Bangladesh over Hiteswar Saikia’s last statement - that
there were no Bangladeshis in Assam - could almost
Bangladesh knows that to the Congressman the party comes before country, patriotism, national security and all that clap-trap. Besides, the failure to get Assam included in East Pakistan during partition has remained a source of abiding resentment to both Pakistan and Bangladesh and the move to remedy this loss in the most insidious manner has gone on unabated ever since. And secularism has never quite appealed to the population or the governments of that region. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s brief honeymoon with secularism was terminated abruptly with his assassination. Since then, a theocratic state with burgeoning fundamentalist persuasions has got consolidated. It is a state with one language, one religion, one culture, with virtually no minority groups. This homogeneity gives it the kind of strength and unity of purpose that makes a pluralist society like ours so vulnerable against this purposeful onslaught. And the failure of New Delhi and Dispur to appreciate this simple fact of life compounds the tactical blunders and the effect, diffident diplomatic initiatives that have emboldened Bangladesh into a posture of defiance over two decades.
The all-consuming problem of Bangladesh is its monstrous population growth and the rapidly shrinking living space for its people. And yet, it will do nothing to reduce this abnormal population growth, beyond expecting neighbouring countries to absorb its overflow of population. And since Muslim personal law sanctions a plurality of wives, it has become virtually impossible for this theocratic state to enjoin on its people the need to limit
their families. So it rationalizes this burgeoning population pressure and the resultant poverty with the most species and outlandish arguments about colonial exploitation and the conspiracy of more affluent neighbouring countries to treat Bangladesh as a market for their goods without offering any quid pro quo. And all the while, all the problems of Bangladesh and its insidious expansionist designs are hung on the convenient peg of religion.A few articles in the Bangladesh
Press by some very responsible and eminent Bangladeshi thinkers should throw
light on the Bangladeshi perception on the question of the country’s
unbearable population growth and its large-scale illegal emigration to other
countries. In "The Question of Lebensraum" by Sadeq Khan in the weekly
Holiday of October 18, 1991, the writer, a former diplomat and intellectual,
puts forth a strong Defence of the large-scale Bangladeshi emigration.
(Incidentally, the name of the newspaper, Holiday, is most misleading. Far from
having to do anything much with holidays, the paper is about the most highly
political publication of Bangladesh. The innocuous-sounding name had to be
chosen because it commenced publication during the early years of martial law,
and a newspaper with a less innocuous-sounding name would not have had any
change of securing permission to publish. This was revealed to this writer by
the editor of the Holiday himself, who also owns the paper.) This is how Mr.
Sadeq Kahn’s article on Lebensraum (a German word meaning "living
space") begins:
"The question of
lebensraum or living space for the people of Bangladesh has not yet been
raised as a moot issue. All projections, however, clearly indicate that by
the next decade, that is to say the first decade of the 21st century,
Bangladesh will face a serious crisis of lebensraum. No possible performance
of population planning, actual, or hypothetical, significantly alters that
prediction."
Having had his say on the crisis
of living space that Bangladesh will face by the first decade of the 21st
century, he goes on to argue in the next paragraph how the "colonial
devastation of Bengal in the 18th and 19th centuries, left the region or
Bangladesh bereft of the traditional strength of technology and
productivity." And then come the two crucial paragraphs that leave no one
in any doubt about what Bangladesh’s intentions are.
"It is said that a
borderless world has become the prime requisite for economic growth under the
new world order. In fairness, if consumer benefit is considered to be better
served by borderless competitive trade of commodities, why not borderless
competitive trade of labour? There is no reason why Bangladesh should not insist
on a globalized manpower market as consumer markets of nation-states are being
progressively globalized under the dictates of monetarists. There is no reason
why regional and international cooperation could not be worked out to plane and
execute population movements and settlements to avoid critical demographic
pressures in pockets of high concentration. There is no reason why
under-populated regions in the developed world cannot make room for planned
colonies to relieve build-up of demographic disasters in countries like
Bangladesh.
We shall hope for all the best in international cooperation. We shall hope for the best in accommodation from the developed world. In reality, nevertheless, Bangladesh may expect little external relief in the short run on the issue of lebensraum. It is also doubtful that Bangladesh may develop sufficient sustainable urbanization or can engineer sufficient reclamation of habitable land from its own off-shore potential to settle its projected population growth in the next decade. A natural overflow of population pressure is therefore very much on the cards and will not be restrainable by barbed wire or border border patrol measures. The