A former BSF official recalls cases when he allowed people to come across the border, to watch popular Hindi movies at the local cinema across the border in Tripura because there were no cinema halls in that part of Bangladesh. ‘They would come and then melt away into the darkness as they went home. But that cannot be compared with the demand to allow Bangladeshis to vote,’ he added. What the politician had wanted to do was clearly illegal. Yet, it was, by no means, regarded as unusual as these kind of ‘requests’ are made often.

The decision to prevent any influx for the specific purpose of the vote was appropriate, but not the harsh measure that were sought by the militants in Assam. A good example of an alternative was the tough approach taken in Assam nearly three decades earlier by a man who later was to become a legendary, if controversial, Indian Police Service (IPS) officer. His name was Kanwar Pal Singh Gill, better known as K.P.S. Gill.

In the early 1960s, Gill, then a fresh entrant into the IPS, was assigned to Assam as his parent cadre. As anyone at that age, he was young and enthusiastic. There was no Bangladesh at the time but East Pakistan. One of the problems that was affecting even his district of Nowgong (now Nogaon), in the Assam heartland, was the surreptitious entry, and settlement of men and women from the neighbouring country. Public opinion, even at that time, rode high against the illegal immigrants, and the state police worked out an elaborate strategy or tackling them.

First, Gill recalled,2 the district police officers would go to Muslim village elders (‘the older settlers’) and explain to them that the new groups could turn against them and harm their interests. So the effort was to develop a process of voluntary disclosures. Police officers would take down the details of those who surrendered. These individuals were herded into the Jubilee Field at Nowgong before they were placed on trains headed to the East Pakistan border. At the time, the Pakistani border guards made no effort to resist this push-back policy. Gill feels that the ‘surrender’ scheme was ‘the best scheme, it actually worked and there were virtually no complaints against the police on grounds of harassment.’ Those who filed cases against the police challenging the legality of the decisions lost their appeals, strengthening the validity of the moves. As Nowgong’s superintendent of police, he supervised the organization of a system that pushed out more than 100,000 East Pakistanis in two years. Another 100,000 were sent out from other parts of Assam, he adds.

But the border guards did not distribute the returnees to other parts of Pakistan. Instead, they were settled on the India-East Pakistan border. From here, slowly, the East Pakistanis began pushing out the Hindus into Assam, Tripura and West Bengal.