Shapan Adnan, a Bangladeshi scholar, remarked in 1998 that while there is ‘virtually no reliable data on the number and characteristics of all international migrants from (and to) Bangladesh,’ there was also enough material at the micro-level to indicate ‘a periodic exodus of the Hindu community to India in the past 40 years . . . Furthermore, cross-border out-migration of both Hindus and Muslims to India or Pakistan are reported to have taken place in recent decades from areas where poverty and landlessness have increased.’37

Adnan sketched this out further in his essay. Speaking of the hypothesis of extensive out-migration from Bangladesh, he describes this as ‘not implausible’ and that these are consistent with media reports of the ‘existence of men, women and children from Bangladesh in the slums, jails, brothels and other settlements of major cities of South Asia like Calcutta, Bombay and Karachi.’

Adnan postulates that this outflow is unlikely to affect Bangladesh’s population growth to any significant level. That of course, is questionable for it has created such pressures outside of Bangladesh as we have noted and remains an explosive issue in India’s East. But he makes a significant point about why people leave Bangladesh when he remarks that their movement out of the country ‘provides an indicator of the desperation they must have faced before their departure. Unlike those who are sufficiently well off to be able to migrate abroad through formal channels for salaried jobs and education, these are very poor people who have, so to speak, walked across the porous international borders of the region.’

What has made people move is ‘the desperate search for a means of livelihood . . . In principle, the socio-economic pressures generating this kind of international out-migration are unlikely to have been very different from those propelling internal out-migration by the poor, particularly to the cities.’

These views are backed up by international specialists.

The World Watch Institute remarked in a major study in 1999 that ‘population-induced land scarcity in Bangladesh led to conflicts that drove more than 10 million refugees into adjacent Indian states. These land-hungry Bengalis in turn exacerbated land shortages in the Indian states—leading to ongoing violent conflict.’38

Readers could be forgiven for believing that this passage could have come from the sharp-tongued Mullen of the 1931 Assam census fame. These words have been penned by Messrs. Lester R. Brown, Gary Gardener and Brian Halweil, three distinguished American environmental and social scientists.

If we follow the thumb rule of illegal migration through religious composition, we should look at the Muslim data.