Look who’s undoing Indira’s strategic gains

But have Indira’s strategic gains been largely undone by those in the Congress party who succeeded her? And is the undoing happening more rapidly than before at a time when her daughter-in-law is not only the Congress president but also India’s ‘Super Prime Minister’?

Consider what the government is doing in Assam. In a historic judgment in July 2005, the Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional the controversial Illegal Migrants Determination by Tribunals (IMDT) Act, for whose repeal the people of Assam have waged one of the most sustained and spirited democratic battles in the history of independent India. Every patriotic Indian should be grateful to the bench comprising former CJI R C Lahoti and justices G P Mathur and P K Balasubramanyan for having delivered a verdict which is quite simply the judicial equivalent of a sword guarding India’s unity and security in the North-East. Upholding a petition filed by Sarbananda Sonowal, an AGP MP, the apex court said: ‘‘A deep analysis of the IMDT Act and the rules made thereunder would reveal that they have been purposely so enacted or made so as to give shelter or protection to illegal migrants who came to Assam from Bangladesh on or after 25th March 1971, rather than to identify and deport them.’’

The UPA Government has been deliberately obfuscating the magnitude of the problem of Bangladeshi infiltration. Even Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has colluded in falsifying the alarming reality in Assam, a state which has elected him to the Rajya Sabha. In July 2004, he disowned a statement by his own minister, MoS (Home) Sri Prakash Jaiswal, in Parliament that Assam had 50 lakh illegal immigrants?

To set the record straight, the Supreme Court referred to an unimpeachable source: the late Indrajit Gupta, a widely respected CPI leader and former Union home minister. In a statement in Parliament on May 6, 1997, he put the figure of illegal migrants at ‘‘10.83 million’’, with Assam accounting for 40 lakh and West Bengal 54 lakh. Also, quoting approvingly from a report submitted to the President by former Assam governor Gen (retd) S K Sinha, the court observed: ‘‘The report of the Governor, the affidavits and other material on record show that millions of Bangladeshi nationals have illegally occupied vast tracts of land in Assam.’’

How effective was the IMDT in dealing with this problem? The court noted that only 3,10,759 inquiries were initiated under the Act. Of these, only 10,015 were declared as illegal migrants. And what was the number of those who were deported up to April 30, 2000? Hold your breath: 1,481! Where might all this lead to? The warning sounded by Samujjal Bhattacharya, a leader of the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU), should awaken every patriotic Indian out of their slumber. ‘‘Within ten years,’’ he has said, ‘‘a Bangladeshi chief minister will be in charge of Assam if infiltration continues at this rate. The Al Qaeda and ISI operating here will be protected then and the situation in Assam will be worse than in Jammu and Kashmir.’’

The Supreme Court’s conclusion was unambiguous: ‘‘There can be no manner of doubt that the state of Assam is facing ‘external aggression and internal disturbance’ on account of large-scale illegal migration of Bangladeshi nationals. It, therefore, becomes the duty of Union of India to take all measures for protection of the state of Assam from such external aggression and internal disturbance as enjoined in Article 355 of the Constitution.’’

So, what measures has the UPA Government taken to protect Assam from ‘‘external aggression and internal disturbances’’? Instead of adhering to the court’s directive to use provisions of the Foreigners’ Act to ‘‘effectively deal with’’ the infiltrators, the Government on February 10 amended the Foreigners (Tribunal) Order, 1964, and introduced into it the worst infirmities of the IMDT Act, thereby making it, for all practical purposes, another legal protection for Bangladeshi infiltrators. Sonia Gandhi has defended this with a disingenuous argument. During her visit to Assam last month, she said that genuine minorities are being harassed in the name of detection and deportation of Bangladeshis and hence ‘‘a new tribunal under the Foreigner’s Act would provide them the same protection they got under the repealed IMDT’’.

You might ask: ‘‘But isn’t this contempt of both the court and the Constitution?’’ Yes, of course. Why then did the Government do it? The answer lies in the Congress leadership’s desperate attempt to consolidate the illegal migrant votes in the Assembly elections in Assam next month. The Congress has deliberately made this into another ‘minority’ issue, so as to garner support from ‘secular forces’ in the rest of the country. But the consequences of this kind of perverse misuse of secularism for partisan political gains in the short term can be disastrous for India in the long term. Anyone who looks at the map of India knows that the North-East is, from a strategic point of view, the most vulnerable part of India. Only the purblind can ignore the growing dominance of Islamic extremists in Bangladesh, who are constantly stoking anti-India sentiments and also supporting militant groups in the North-East. Add sharp demographic changes in Assam to these vulnerabilities, and we could have a situation in the next 40-50 years that is too grim to imagine.

Demography’s effect on geo-politics is evident from how many parts of Bengal and Assam were awarded to East Pakistan at the time of Partition. Therefore, the native people of Assam can hardly be accused of harbouring unfounded fears when they say, ‘‘Assam will become a part of greater Bangladesh if illegal Bangladeshis continue to be protected.’’ If any part of the North-East does get dismembered from India on some dark day in the future, thanks to the government-aided demographic invasion from Bangladesh, historians will have no difficulty in knowing who was most responsible for undoing the strategic gains of Indira Gandhi.

write to sudheen.kulkarni@expressindia.com