Hosts don’t turn against migrants until they begin feeling politically and socially threatened. Or put more simply, until the settlers begin to assume numbers which make the ‘native’ community feel that they are being undercut, both culturally and physically.

The Lothsampas of southern Bhutan also fall into this listing: they went as migrants and were thrown out once their usefulness was perceived as over by the ruling Bhutanese elite. Migrants became refugees in another land.

But the most enduring example of Unwanted Migrants are the Bangladeshis of North East India. But even they are ‘unwanted’ only up to a point, as our travel to Bangladesh in search of these people will show. One needn’t go even as far as Bangladesh—a look around eastern India should suffice. Immigrants Bangladeshis form a substantial chunk of the cooks and maids, servants and rickshaw pullers, fishermen and construction labourers there.

It needs to be stressed here that urban economies have greater capacity to accomodate migrants more easily than a sustenance-based land economy. Competition over fixed land resources can explode into violence as we have seen in Assam, or it can lead to a longer and more arduous trek for migrants, as I personally discovered in 1988, in the Punjab.

On the Move

In May of that year, I, and a number of fellow journalists from the international and national media, found ourselves reporting on the siege of Sikh militants holed up in the *Golden Temple at Amritsar. In dispatches filed for the New York Times, I likened the Temple to the Vatican for the Sikhs.

This was sacred land for them.

On a blistering summer day, the imposing, glittering domes of the Temple were silent and deserted. The sprawling complex, comprising of a sacred artificial lake, the Akal Takht, the spiritual seat of the faith, the clock tower and the offices, dormitories and the langar or dining area for the pilgrims was being cleaned up. The militants holed up inside had surrendered to security forces led by K.P.S. Gill, Punjab’s imposing Director-General of Police, who began his career in the plains of Assam, driving out migrants as we have seen in an earlier chapter.

Nearly ten days of fighting between the militants on one side and Indian army troops and Gill’s forces on the other had ended. The songs of the ragi or religious singer rang out in the morning, bouncing off the walls of the empty sanctuary for the first time in several days. The place had been ceremonially washed and cleansed of dirt and death during the night by local Sikhs.