SIR and vanishing rights | Bengali-speaking migrant labour in the crosshairs

Bengali-speaking migrants face rising harassment and suspicion, often being misidentified as illegal Bangladeshis.

The Election Commission of India (ECI)’s release of the voter list for West Bengal based on a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls carried out in 2002, has stirred a hornet’s nest. 

The political slugfest going on in Bihar over the deletion of 6.5 million voters from the electoral rolls following a similar exercise is a precursor to what is likely to follow in West Bengal.

The battle lines for the next Assembly elections in West Bengal, now less than a year away, therefore, seem to have been drawn.

The ECI’s sudden release of the earlier SIR-based voter list of 2002 for West Bengal and the hasty attempts at training booth-level officers suggest that the next revision of electoral rolls will take place on the eve of the polls. 

The 2002 SIR in West Bengal set the total number of voters in the state at 45.8 million, spread over 80,000 polling booths. However, the political debate has heated up as the voter list for Kulpi Assembly seat in South 24 Parganas district was found missing from the published list. 

Similarly, the voter lists of about a hundred booths in the Gaighata Assembly constituency, and a few others in South 24 Parganas, Birbhum, and Howrah districts, were also found missing. 

The SIR is not new in the context of electoral rolls. However, the 2021 census could not be conducted because of the COVID-19 pandemic. With elections around the corner in Bihar and West Bengal, the recent steps of ECI have raised many eyebrows. While the census and the SIR are separate exercises, the voter population in the two lists can otherwise be tallied. 

Although polls are also going to take place for the Assembly in Tamil Nadu, it is unlikely to have a SIR. 

Given the Bihar developments, there are apprehensions about the potential disenfranchisement of many resident Indians through the process of SIR. 

The insistence on proving the citizenship of voters has drawn attention in West Bengal as there is a perceptible rise in the harassment, humiliation, and curtailment of the basic right to life and livelihood of Bengali-speaking migrant labour working in Delhi National Capital Region (NCR), Haryana, Maharashtra, and other states ruled by the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP). 

Bengali-speaking individuals are being hounded and dubbed as ‘Bangladeshis’ and ‘illegal immigrants’ implying that they are not citizens of India. Bengali migrant workers from West Bengal not only have to prove their citizenship in the rest of India but will now be asked to do so in their home state when the SIR is conducted.

While the neoliberal economy has facilitated the mobility of capital and technology, the movement of labour has been severely restricted, coupled with the gradual retreat of the state from the economy to assist corporate capital. 

These developments in recent decades have not only securitised cross-border migration, including that of Indian labour, across the globe, but have also raised walls within India.

This time it is the Bengali-speaking Muslims who are facing the wrath of the police, administration, and local populations of the migrant-receiving states. Earlier, especially in Mumbai, migrant workers from south India and northern India have faced the wrath of the local Maharashtra political parties.

The BJP’s targets are Bengali-speaking Muslims whom they suspect to be Bangladeshi migrants. However, even Hindu Bengalis, mainly belonging to the so-called lower castes, have not been spared. Hearing them speak the Bengali language has been triggering suspicions of their being ‘Bangladeshis’. 

The rounding up, violent questioning, and physical harassment by the local administration of such people continued in many cases even after the migrants produced their photo identity cards, including voter cards, Aadhar cards, and sometimes income tax Personal Identity Number (PAN) cards. 

The hapless migrants wonder which document can show their Indian citizenship while the administration seems to indicate that these documents they possess are mainly for accessing different services and benefits provided by the government, and that do not necessarily prove citizenship. 

Therefore, the SIR in West Bengal will take place in the context of dispossession of the right to livelihood of migrant labour from the state. 

There may be a number of Bangladeshis living in India without valid documents. However, can the identification of those Bangladeshis be possible through the exclusion of Indian Bengalis? In fact, through this process, the space for migrant workers from West Bengal in low-paid jobs is shrinking further within India. 

Migrants from West Bengal, Bihar, and eastern Uttar Pradesh, among other states, move into the more prosperous urban areas in other parts of India attracted by employment opportunities in the industrial or service sectors. They do so as they are pushed out of the agricultural sector due to adverse human-land ratio, and because of lower agricultural yields due to climate change. 

However, as modern industrial production increasingly requires fewer workers in the industries, these migrants become dependent on low-productivity – low-wages employment in the urban informal sector. 

With the expanding platform economies in India, particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more migrant labour is getting associated with those precarious jobs. The migrant women largely work as housemaids. 

The poor economic conditions of these migrants compel them to huddle together in the slums of cities such as Delhi, Noida, Gurugram, or Mumbai, only to be identified as potential ‘Bangladeshis’. This results not only in harassment but even deportation to Bangladesh as the local police and people fail to distinguish between Indians and Bangladeshis. 

As Bangladeshis without valid travel documents are perceived as dangerous threats to the State security, in this dominant security discourse, the security of the Bengali-speaking migrants, and their right to livelihood and human dignity get easily eclipsed. 

In this context, it is clear that there are political connotations underlying the decision of the ECI about the SIR. 

The current situation may benefit different political parties in different ways to mobilise selective sections of the electorate. However, in the long run, this attempt at proving citizenship to avoid disenfranchisement, that too just before the elections, will only erode Indian democracy and marginalise migrant labour across the country.

(Sabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhury is former Vice Chancellor and Professor of Political Science at Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata.)

(This article was first published under Creative Commons by 360info.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.