'There Are No Bangladeshis In India'!

Tensions between India and Bangladesh have mounted over attempts by India's Border Security Force (BSF) to deport a number of Bangladeshis who have been staying illegally in India. The Bangladesh government maintains that the alleged illegal migrants are Indian citizens, and has consistently maintained that 'there are no Bangladeshis in India'. 

Dhaka now insists that India is just trying to throw out Bengali-speaking Muslims by branding them Bangladeshi migrants. At a weekly press briefing in Dhaka on January 30, Bangladesh Foreign Secretary Shamsher Mobin Choudhary said that, since January 22, 2003, the BSF has made 30 'push-in attempts' through several border points into Bangladeshi territory. The Bangladesh government also issued an aide memoire regarding repeated 'push-in attempts' to the Indian Deputy High Commissioner in Dhaka.

The Indian government, on the other hand, has rejected as 'baseless and absurd' the allegation that India was trying to push in Bengali-speaking Indian Muslims into Bangladesh. Speaking to media persons in Delhi on February 1, 2003, the Director General of the BSF, Ajai Raj Sharma, rejected the charges and asserted that it was 'established practice' that, whenever police took action against them, the migrants were taken to the borders, and the BSF 'handed them over' to Bangladesh. 

The Indian Government has asked Bangladesh to recognize the gravity of the problem of illegal immigration and to cooperate in tackling the issue. On January 30, 2003, the Indian Government summoned Bangladesh's Acting Deputy High Commissioner to New Delhi, Shahadat Hussain, and conveyed to him Indian concerns over "illegal immigration of Bangladeshi nationals into India".

Amidst these allegations and counter allegations, tension continues to mount at several border points, particularly in the State of West Bengal. On January 31, 2003, for instance, the BSF intercepted 213 Bangladeshis forcibly pushed in by the Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) into India at Satgachi outpost in West Bengal's Coochbehar district. 

Since then these Bangladeshis are squatting on the zero line at the Indian side, exposed to rain and the exceptional chill of this year's winter. A BSF spokesperson at Kolkata disclosed on February 1, 2003, that the BDR had conspired to infiltrate Bangladeshi nationals into India, and that such movements had been occurring along both the southern and northern frontiers over the preceding 10 days.

The current crisis is the manifestation of fundamental differences between the two countries over critical issues such as illegal migration and the use of Bangladeshi territory for terrorist and subversive activities against India. In the recent past, there has been a growing realization within the Indian establishment that the threat posed by illegal migration and terrorist and extremist Islamist groups operating from or within Bangladesh had serious security implications for India. 

At the end of the two-day meeting of the India-Bangladesh Joint Working Group in Dhaka on January 23, 2003, India had conveyed its concerns over the presence in Bangladesh of training camps of terrorist groups operating in India's Northeast (and had earlier identified 99 such camps and their location). India also asked Bangladesh to hand over 88 prominent insurgent leaders currently living in Bangladesh. 

Earlier on January 7, 2003, Deputy Prime Minister, L.K. Advani, during a conference of Chief Secretaries and Directors General of Police in Delhi, observed that there were approximately 15 million Bangladeshis staying illegally in India, and that they posed a serious threat to the country's internal security. It was during this meeting that it was decided that the identification and deportation of foreigners staying in India illegally was to be assigned the highest priority. To facilitate the process, the meeting agreed that the Government would launch the Multi-purpose Identity Cards scheme as a pilot project in 13 States from April 1, 2003.

India's porous 4,095-kilometre border with Bangladesh is prone to large-scale illegal immigration, smuggling, drug trafficking, gun running and cross-filtration by terrorists. Unofficial estimates put the number of illegal Bangladeshi immigrants even higher than the official figure, and there is clear evidence of the demographic destabilization of a large swathe of territory all along the Indo-Bangladesh border. One estimate assesses the illegal influx at about 300,000 persons per year. 

Demographic transformations have been brought about in the border belts of West Bengal, Bihar, Assam, Tripura and Meghalaya as a result of largescale migration, and according to one estimate, illegal immigrants are in a position to influence the electoral outcome in 25 Parliamentary and 125 Assembly constituencies in the country. Apart from illegal immigration, the porous India-Bangladesh border also fuels smuggling, the drug trade and proliferation of small arms. 

Available evidence suggests a collusive network between smugglers, a section of illegal migrants and terrorist groups operating in India's Northeast. However, the most serious threat to India's security is the increasing use of the Indo-Bangladesh border by Pakistan's external intelligence agency, the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), for its larger design to destabilize India through a range of subversive movements.

The Indian Government has, on a number of occasions, stated that the ISI makes direct use of Bangladeshi territory to infiltrate its agents and saboteurs across the border into India, and that it is assisted in this task by the Directorate General of Field Intelligence (DGFI) and other state agencies of Bangladesh. 

Speaking in the Lok Sabha (the Lower House of Parliament), on November 27, 2002, India's External Affairs Minister, Yashwant Sinha, had explicitly stated that the Pakistani High Commission in Dhaka had become the nerve center of ISI activities in promoting terrorism and insurgency in India. He also asserted that "Some Al Qaeda elements have taken shelter in Bangladesh… the foreign media has… reported several such instances, our own sources have also confirmed many of these reports."

A number of transnational Islamist terrorist groups, includingthe Al Qaeda, are now known to have established a presence in Bangladesh in alliance with various militantfundamentalist organisations there. The Harkat-ul-Jehadi-e-Islami, Bangladesh (HuJI-BD) was created withdirect aid from Osama bin Laden in 1992. The group has linkages with Pakistan-based terrorist groups such asthe Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) and the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT). It also maintains very close links with the ISI.

Reports also suggest that the ISI, in collaboration with the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI)and extremist Islamist groups, has networked and coordinates activities with insurgent groups in India'sNortheast and Islamist extremist elements in Bangladesh. India's list of 99 terrorist training camps inBangladesh includes the facilities provided to groups such as the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA),National Liberation Front of Tripura (NLFT), All Tripura Tiger Force (ATTF) and the National Democratic Frontof Bodoland (NDFB).

The current Bangladesh National Party (BNP) government, led by Begum Khaleda Zia has been insisting that her government would not allow anti-India activities from its soil. However, the internal political situation in the country provides a favourable context for Islamist groups to operate. Since the elections of October 2001, and the installation of the new right wing regime, backed by the fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI), Islamist extremist mobilisation has also risen dramatically. 

The militant and pro-Pakistan Jamaat-e-Islami has 17 elected members in the Bangladesh Parliament and two Ministers in the new Government. The JeI also receives support from the ISI, which includes funding arms flows, and technical and training support. The current regime in Bangladesh, moreover, is regarded as being much 'closer' to Pakistan than its predecessor, and the linkages between the Bangladesh Army and intelligence apparatus, on the one hand, and their Pakistani counterparts, on the other, are known to be strong, and growing stronger.

It is, consequently, not surprising that Bangladesh refuses to acknowledge the presence of very large numbers of its citizens staying illegally in India, or to accept the covert subversive activities directed against India from Bangladeshi soil. In the past, successive Indian governments have been slow to act decisively on these issues due to the electoral compulsions of political parties at the helm of affairs at the Centre and in the affected States. 

Although it would be premature to say that the current engagement with Bangladesh is part of a comprehensive strategy to deal with the issue of illegal migration and use of Bangladeshi territory for anti-India activities, the preliminary steps in this direction appear now to have been taken. Policy reversal, however, can never entirely be ruled out in the habitual vacillation of the Indian political leadership, and an unconfirmed media report, citing intelligence sources, indicated on February 1 that a truckload of illegal migrants, who were being transported to West Bengal for deportation to Bangladesh, were already on their way back to Delhi.

The author is Research Associate, Institute for Conflict Management. Courtesy: South Asia IntelligenceReview of the South Asia Terrorism Portal