A retired officer of the Bangladesh Air Force has advised India, specifically Assam, to shift focus from the exercise to update the National Register of Citizens (NRC) to creating a climate of confidence and capitalising on connectivity through Bangladesh.
“Assam was one of the richest Indian states at the time of India's partition; today it is one of the poorest. The State is virtually cut-off from mainland India, and is thereby deprived of much needed investment. Assam could improve its investment climate by using Bangladesh's rivers, roads, rails and air links,” Ishfaq Ilahi Choudhury, a retired Air Commodore, wrote in the Dhaka-based Daily Star .
The only beneficiaries of the NRC issue, he said, are those who are against friendly relations between India and Bangladesh. Communal forces in India and Bangladesh are exploiting the situation, waiting for an opportune moment to strike, he felt, advising Dhaka to protest “this game of finger-pointing without substantive evidence”.
Mr .Choudhury suggested that the Sheikh Hasina government should increase vigilance along the 4,096 km border with India. “The aim should be to check for the possible illegal entry of Indian citizens into Bangladesh. Let us hope that good sense prevails in the BJP leadership and they do not dent a friendly Indo-Bangladesh relationship that has been constructed with due diligence over the last decade,” he said.
The opinion attains significance in view of a dip in ties with neighbours such as Maldives and Nepal besides Pakistan.
According to Mr. Choudhury, many in Bangladesh took as “empty rhetoric aimed at Hindu voters” the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 2014 election campaign against illegal trespassers from Bangladesh, as well as BJP president Amit Shah’s assertion in 2016 that his government would push out Muslims while allowing Hindu migrants from Bangaldesh to settle in India.
“However, when BJP came to power in Assam, they restarted the long-stalled NRC process. A part of the draft NRC was released on the midnight of December 31, 2017, and subsequently on July 30, 2018, the full draft of the NRC was released. It appeared that out of about 35 million who had submitted papers for citizenship registration in Assam, over 4 million were rejected,” he said.
It can be presumed that the bulk of these so-called “illegal trespassers from Bangladesh” who could not prove their Indian citizenship are poor Muslim farmers who had settled in the Brahmaputra valley in Assam many generations ago, Mr Choudhury said.
Although India has clarified there is a provision for the NRC-excluded to appeal all the way to the Supreme Court, seeking justice from the Indian apex court would remain a far cry for an ordinary individual who is likely to be herded to a deportation camp, he said.
“With BJP using the NRC process as an election trump card, we cannot ignore the worst-case scenario of a human onslaught on our border by evicted Muslims from Assam, he warned as Bangladesh can “no longer ignore the jingoistic threats coming out of mid and high-level BJP politicians, many of whom see the migrant population as having links to various Islamist terror organisations”.
Where do these people then go, except crowd along the Indo-Bangladesh border, he asked.
