Plastic Identity: Dividing line between
Chosen People and Illegal AliensBy John Dayal
In the second week of New Year 2003 was marked by a series of
apparently unconnected events:- Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee told a 1,500 strong
gathering of top international leaders of the estimated 2 crore
Indian ethnic origin that Pravasi Bharatiyas, or NRIs, from select
countries such as the US and the UK could get double citizenship on a reciprocal basis- Deputy prime minister Lal Krishna Advani, announcing a
scheme for a proposed multi-purpose national identity card, said
about 12,000 Pakistanis staying illegally in India after the expiry
of their visas an estimated 1.5 crore Bangladeshis would be expelled, a programme enthusiastically echoed by the Lt Governor of Delhi which arguably has the second largest such population after Assam- India `tested' one more version of its Agni mid range ballistic missile which puts all of Pakistan, and Bangladesh, within
strike range -- the missile can, of course, carry the much wonted
nuclear war head for which a new command system has now been put in
place.- A growth rate of over 8 per cent has been envisaged, some
of it expectedly from large scale Foreign direct investment- In all innocence, Vajpayee asks Indians, including NRIs, to
help un tarnish India's image abroad, even as the government cancels passports of top Kashmiri leaders it holds guilty of tarnishing the Indian image by telling the world what is happening in Kashmir and in Gujarat for that matter.The men who wrote the Prime Minister's Musings from Goa, and the men who interlocute for him in talks with the US government, among the elite band of thinkers in the NDA government and the Bharatiya Janata party, have unanimously reached the decision that this is the right time for India to launch a major Public relations Exercise abroad, harnessing whatever energies it can from resident and no resident Indians, from the emerging Hindutva in the expatriate populations in the US and the UK, and above all, when the western governments are still on the cusp of the anti-Islamic hate wave following the World Trade Centre terror and before it calms down to an oil dictated détente with the Gulf region once again.
Top of the mind also is the need to clear up the public relations
disaster that Gujarat was, as government thinkers put it in mild
terms, and yet retain some steam for the `Secularism versus Security" debate on which the BJP hopes to ride the election campaign later this year for half a dozen state assemblies, hoping to repeat in Rajasthan and elsewhere the black miracle it did in Gujarat.So what is wrong with either the grant of citizen status to people of Indian origin, or with kicking out people who definitely are aliens and are living - for good or for bad - as any other citizen in the metropolitan towns and qasbas of most of north India? Is there any breach of international protocols in chucking out Bangladeshis?
The problem with both issues is not the law, but the morality. The
NDA government - and perhaps it is time to call it the BJP government on these issues - is pandering to lobbies whose intention is to subserve the agenda of the Sangh parivar, and not the nation at large.Prof Amartya Sen and several prominent NRIs from the United Kingdom in fact pointed out directly to Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee that the nation has to make up its mind as to what sort of an image it wants to project. It will not do, they said, for India to account for itself as an exclusive land, fit in the sciences and first in culture, without acknowledging that its civilisation has gained
tremendously in millennia of give and take with other peoples and
other civilisations, including the now hated western civilisation.
Indian claims in mathematics ring true only in acknowledging the
contribution of Arabian sciences and western thought, as much as even its Sanskrit language cannot be kept exclusive as something born in India and not brought from Outside.These savants among the NRIs want an image of India that obeys the rules of civilisation, the rules of law, of plurality of culture, of
the fact that for over 2,000 years, various religions and ethnic
groups , hundreds of language segments and social mores have co existed and interacted, each strengthening the other, even if
occasional syncretism gave way to temporary absorption. An India where man had, and has, dignity.It is in this context that thinkers reject both the Israeli model of
Diaspora and the Chinese emotionalism and loyalty as universally
valid for the type of Diaspora that Indians are.The Israeli Diaspora, and the Israeli pattern of dual citizenship
accord between Washington and Tel Aviv - a great favourite of Home minister Lal Krishna Advani - is fed on centuries of history of paranoia and persecution in Europe, culminating in the Holocaust in which Nazis, another favourite of Advani, sent over 6 million Jews to the gas chambers or forced labour camps. The birth of Zionism, the forced birth of an Israeli state and the Law of return, weave a complicated web of loyalty, compassion and attraction that binds conservative Jews and modern New Yorkers with first generation refugees from Eastern Europe still speaking the Yiddish of the Polish Ghetto. Israel and New York, if not Washington, merge seamlessly as it were where the interests of Israel and the self interest of the ruling regime in Wall Street and Washington is concerned. The flow of money, the flow of arms, and the diplomatic turning of the blind eye to Israeli nuclear ambitions or its terrible human rights record, are all part of the package which modern day Israel has been able to wrest out of a west which wants a foothold on the shores of the oil rich Western Asian region, and also suffers from a colossal guilt complex for the anti Semitism of two thousand years, which still breaks through every so often in real life to send law makers rushing
into another sop for Tel Aviv.The Chinese Diaspora is more complex - generations of movements that colonised South east Asia to emerge as the main ethnic group as in Singapore, and generations of migrants to the west who emerged from their ghettos as an industrious people with strong emotional ethnic identity and ties which a monolithic cultural commonality and a unique and exclusive language -- despite its variations such as Cantonese and the classical Mandarin - which allowed them to live in powerful cultural cocoons which outlasted the initial reasons for which they had left the home land - for work, or fleeing communist action or whatever. The Chinese of the first regeneration have send money home, and during the long cold years of the Maoist and Cultural
Revolution days, they patronised the many democratic and market movements in the main land. It needs to be remembered that despite he strong political animosity that Hong Kong and mainland once had, and which Taiwan still has towards Beijing, there are strong ethnic and cultural ties that bind the one common Chinese people. But even in the Chinese model of Diaspora, it is the first generation that has an economic interest in the Mainland, even if it has no desire to settle down there. The astute Chinese mind - which invented the bureaucracy five thousand years ago -sees the homeland as a good investment because their understanding of its potential and their faith in the industry of their own people, who like themselves, want to reach out for the sky. The Chinese have a time conception which spans centuries, and the pace of events is never forced. The Chinese, as India knows to it cost have inordinate patience and a cohesiveness which India cannot match.The Indian Diaspora share a little with the Chinese in as far as the
forced movement of citizens during the British regime is concerned. The Indian Diaspora is multi layered, and each layer responds in its own unique way, with little in common with other NRIs conglomerations.The first possibly is the natural migrants from South India whose
boats took them all the way to South east and perhaps even to the
Pacific Rim. The Tamil and Indian heritage in these areas exists,
but the people have little interest in India other than that of a
cultural curiosity. It is too far back in time. Even closer in time,
the Tamils of Sri Lanka, whether they are indigenous, or plantation labour or even more recent migrants of the twentieth century, maintain a close relationship of culture with Tamil Nadu, which for them is all that is India, but neither the government nor social movements have ever thought of them ad part of the Diaspora that is to be wooed. Among other things, they are non sanskritised, anti Brahmanical, and poor. And the Tamil Tigers, at present, are militant and remember not the Indian help to them but the hurt and injury that the Indian army incited on them during the days of Rajiv Gandhi and the Indian peace Keeping Force. Tamils in Sri Lanka also do not forget that India helps the Military whenever the chips are down though its diplomacy I apparently geared towards the Tamils. India loses out either way for the ham handed ness of its relationship with this large volume of men and women so patently of Indian origin.The next group is of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh residents and men from
Andhra and Tamil Nadu who were shipped to the Caribbean, the pacific islands and the large islands of the Indian Ocean between India and the continent of Africa. Fijians, Jamaicans, Mauritian or what have you maintain their Hinduism in the midst of a Christian sea, still speak versions of their other tongue, pidgin Hindi or Telegu, together with Creole, English and French. This group, half volunteer and half commandeered by English tradesmen and railway officials has no roots in India, no close relatives as they were often shipped in the village-load. But yet they retain a close community feeling. This is mainly because they were taken in such large numbers as to form organic communities on whatever piece of land they were settled, and for the community to be self contained for marriages and growth, so that no interaction was required with the neighbouring original inhabitants, or with the European masters. This block of people form the bulk of those with a cultural nostalgia and desire for reopening
links with India. It is a moot question if they are also keen to
invest in India. So distant is the financial relationship, and so
urgent their immediate need o invest their money in their countries of livelihood, or in the markets of the west which are more lucrative. The BJP is working hard to creep into these communities through the Hindu pantheon and the temple route, so to speak. The RSS has sought to open new Gangotris and other replicas of Indian pilgrimage centres in the Caribbean and other countries.From an economic point of view, the one sector of NRIs that the
government of India and the political apparatus is wooing with full
vigour is the emigrants of the post Independent era. These include second generation Gujaratis who were forced out of Uganda and other African countries - where they were traders despised for their usury, or for their aloofness - by the likes of dictator Idi Amin, and have made it good in the UK, rising from the neighbourhood shopkeeper to the small industrialist and the middle level businessman with money to spare. Other groups include farmers and artisans from the Punjab, who were a loyal Diaspora till the government crushed the Sikh psyche
in the many complex tragedies of the Nineteen Seventies and Eighties, culminating in the massacres of the Sikhs in Delhi and other places in 1984. Now this community has little if any trust in India, and particularly in Hindu governments.The final phase of the Diaspora is of the technocrat and the
academic, the medico and the technician, the labourer and the nurse, to West Asia, and particularly to the United States.The Diaspora in the Gulf is considered only a transitory one. The non Muslims are there for the duration of a job and will return home to Kerala and Punjab, Andhra and Bihar. The Muslims may stay a little loner, but they have little in common with the Arab, and will return, almost each one of them, back to Hyderabad and Patna and Kerala unless they migrate to the West, now a near impossible thing.
This really leaves the Indian Diaspora in the US. The American India, so to say. This is the Real McCoy. This is the group that the BJP targets, that the RSS woos, and that the Indian business pursues with such vigour.And this is an expanding group -in numbers and in economic and political clout.
The India Aboard centre for Political Awareness, based in Washington, DC after the last Census noted a 106% growth in the Indian community's population. As a community, the Indian American population in the United States has dramatically increased by almost 10 percent from 1990 to 2000, comprising 1.678 million of the U.S. population, rising by more than twofold from 815,447 in 1990, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. This is the highest increase in the Asian American community, which is the fastest growing community as a whole in the United States; the Indian American community is now the third largest Asian American group in the country behind Chinese and Filipino Americans. Ten years ago Indian Americans ranked fourth
in the group, behind Japanese Americans. Doubling to nearly 1.7
million people, the Census results show that the Indian American
community has grown at a rate of 7.6 percent a year in the last ten
years.IACPA says a key factor that accounts for the rising numbers in the Indian American community is the influx of H-1B visa holders and their families (spouses and children) who have helped stimulate economic growth at unprecedented rates in the last several years. The number of H-1B visas issued to those from India jumped from 2,697 in 1990 to 15,228 in 1995 to 55,047 in 2000, according to figures from the State Department. When the silicon bubble burst, many frustrated youth returned, but most stayed on. IACPA sees that this sharp rise in the number of H-1B visa holders has fuelled the growth in the Indian American community. This has particularly occurred from 1997 to 2000, when considering the Indian American population was 1.215
million in 1997, according to an estimate given by Professor Sharon Lee of Portland State University. The Indian American community now stands at 1.678 million in population.Some growth in the Indian American community can also be attributed to immigrants being admitted between 1990-2000 with numbers varying between 30,000 and 45,000 from India annually achieving permanent residence, as noted in materials from the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS). According to IACPA's analysis, on a more general level, the numbers show that Indians have a population roughly equivalent to the state of Nebraska, ""which indicates that if all of our community lived in one state, we would have three Indian American members of Congress." Also according to Census figures, Indian Americans represent .6 percent of the U.S. population; this would entail that the Indian American community should have at least 45 State legislators of Indian origin, according to IACPA analysis, as opposed to the two who currently hold office, when considering there are 7,424 State legislators nationwide, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures
"The realization that we need to take an active role in the political
process is one we must make as a community, soon," say Prem
Shunmugavelu, Political Associate at IACPA. "Political activism needs to grow at the same rate that our population has grown; the hope is that the rise in numbers will serve as a catalyst to enhance political activity in our community and our civic engagement in mainstream society."This is the political lobby the government and the BJP are praying
for. This is the lobby for which they created the post o a special
ambassador, Mr Agnihotri (Indian Currents did a cover story on him in 2002). This is the lobby with free money that may be invested in India, but more important, with money they can send to the RSS and its organisations while ensuring that the likes of Narendra Modi can never be identified as criminals with the American legal system of international human rights.Possibly this is the first group which will apply for the dual
citizenship, as and when it becomes possible. Prime minister Vajpayee has said the Bill will be introduced in the Budget session of Parliament in February, possibly with some budgetary sops for Foreign Direct Invests from NRIs.Now for the bad Indian blood, metaphorically speaking.
These are the Bangladeshis. Culturally and ethnically
indistinguishable from their brethren living in the Indian West
Bengal, or in parts of Assam and Orissa.Bengal was partitioned even before India was, by the British in the first quarter of the last century, purely on grounds of religion. But as East Bengal emerged as a Muslim dominated province, there remained crores of Hindus in the rich rice fields and the big towns of Dhaka and Chittagong, among other places. Till the second partition when east Bengal became part of Pakistan. Many Hindus fled East Pakistan, and were absorbed in India without a murmur as legitimate refugees. The post Chittarnjan park in Delhi, earlier called the East Pakistan Displaced persons colony, EPDP, together with Tagore Park in North
Delhi, are examples of that wave of refugees.The real cataclysm came with the Civil war in Pakistan after the Army generals, goaded by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto refused to recognise the electoral victory of Mujibur Rehman in the n national elections. Refusing to make him president, they let loose a regime of military terror in East Pakistan, forcing tens of thousands of Muslim refugees into Indian West Bengal and Assam.
The Liberation of Bangladesh by the Indian army never did stop this flow of refugees. No longer fleeing military terror, they now fled economic destitution. The flow continues. A Porous border of several thousand kilometres, much if it water logged, insufficient and corrupt officials in the border forces re but a few of the many
reasons Bangladeshis continue to flock to India. Crossing Bengal, they slowly drift west and south, and are found in slums and ghettos all over the country.They fill a vacuum of cheap labour, outbidding internal migrants from Rajasthan, Bihar, UP, Madhya Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.
They also, say the police, add to the crime wave. But there is no
special data to prove that Bangladeshis are involved in large scale crime which still remains the preserve of basically some Indian communities and some well off, politically backed Indian groups. Petty crime is a different matter, and Bangladeshis have their share of drugs and prostitution rackets, their own women and children as the main victims.The law and order machinery reacts ruthlessly. The Bangladeshis are at the receiving end of marked police brutality. Human rights groups have over the last twenty years pointed to the bias in the police. Hindu Bangladeshis soon merge and are absorbed into the system, without the police harassing them.
All over the country, Human rights groups have in the past felt that
political drives to identify Bangladeshis and the police action in
accordance with such directives, has led to the victimisation of all
Bengali speaking Muslims. Various central accords with cut off dates, such as in the case of the Assam accord, have not helped matters.By now, many if not most of the Bangladeshis have the same civic
documents that any other citizen has - a voter's card, a ration card, often even a passport, thanks to the famous Indian corruption.Ho will Advani be able to implement his latest directive without
provoking a cry of bigotry is a moot question.It may be perhaps relevant to recall just one reminder from the
papers of the past. This had to do with Orissa where the BJP opposed deportation of Bangladeshis . The BJP, a partner in the ruling coalition, took strong exception to the Orissa government's action of deporting 21 Bangladeshi nationals from Raighar block in the tribal-dominated Nawarangpur district. BJP state unit president Manmohan Samal, met Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik to express his unhappiness over the government's decision. Samal described the government's action as illegal and said the Bangladeshi nationals had already been settled in Raighar over the last three decades and allotted land and ration cards. The Centre had rehabilitated them as they were treated as refugees rather than as infiltrators as described by the state government, he said. Samal demanded that the government reconsider its decision to deport the Bangladeshi nationals from Raighar.The issue of national identity cards itself is a matter of another
controversy.The west has identity cards in many countries, but despite globalisation, the west also has a social network, including unemployment doles and pensions for senior citizens.That is the worth of an identity card that promises little more than starvation? And which is being designed not for the benefit of the citizen but to help identify aliens.The issue, as always with this government, is of public morality, of
law and of human rights. There is little at this stage to show that
it will be able to succeed.
Jan 9th 2003