In 1998, the West Bengal government refused to allow a train of ‘Bangladeshis’ detected by the right-wing Shiv Sena-BJP government in the western state of Maharashtra, to pass through its territory. It said that the move violated human rights and that the men, women and children who were being chased out were Bengali-speaking Indian Muslims, not Bangladeshis. They claimed the group was being targetted by the right wing in Bombay because of their religious affiliation. Human rights groups protested, the media wrote in anger and the effort fizzled out.

But a few months later, in January 1999, Chief Minister Jyoti Basu of West Bengal decried the influx into his state to visiting Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed.3 Basu said that his government had pushed back 20,000 infiltrators in the past few years. This is, to me, a pitifully small estimate of the real problem as his own government had already told the Supreme Court in Delhi that not less than 1.2 million Bangladeshis who had visited the state on valid visas between 1972 and 1996 had ‘vanished’ from records. In other words, they had merged with the larger Bengali-speaking population of the state.

The Chief Minister added, ‘I know that . . .Bangladeshis enter the border districts of Malda and Murshidabad every day to earn wages and go back. They come here due to economic reasons, so we do not generally object.’4

In the June 2000 exercise, Delhi police targetted Bangladeshis on the western side of the Jamuna, where resettlement colonies have sprung up since the 1970s. There was a significant difference: the state government in power was that of the Congress, a party which had cried itself hoarse about the anti-minority beliefs of the BJP.

This time, however, the target population hit back and a riot erupted. A police jeep was burned and an enraged mob surrounded the local thana and was preparing to set the place ablaze when reinforcements arrived and scattered the rioters. At least one person was killed and several injured in police firing.

Those who were mute and submissive until a few years ago are now sufficiently well-organized and in large enough numbers to fight an attempt by the State to dispossess them. This is a significant step forward in the radicalization and empowerment of such groups in India, and it sets an extremely troubling precedent—foreign nationals, who have settled in a region with the connivance of local authorities and political parties, are now prepared to engage in conflicts with law enforcement authorities because they feel that their ‘rights’ are threatened.