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The Mischief Exposed

The Mischief Exposed

Author:
Publication: BJP Today
Date: September 16-30, 2000

Now we know how irrational and unpatriotic our lawmakers can be. Ever since the Supreme Court took cognizance of the public interest litigation filed by the All India Lawyers Forum for Civil Liberties on the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act of 1983 by giving Parliament time until January 2001 to repeal the Act, those responsible for the black law and those irrationally in support of it seem to have got into a hysteria over it. They want their scheming, but they also want their image as 'patriotic' Indians to remain unscathed. For some, the well-laid plans of many years to carve out a fundamentalist Muslim state in this part of the subcontinent (with Assam in it, of course) are in a bit of unexpected danger. As for the Congress, its diabolic pretence about the foreign infiltrators being "Indian minorities" already exposed, there is panic right down the ranks down the ranks about what would happen if their Bangladeshi vote-banks could not be protected. And what would the party do at a time when they are down to only about 113 seats in the Lok Sabha? So the Congress has doggedly stuck to its old and suicide stand of declaring that the party would shoot down any Bill that the Centre might table in Parliament to scrap the IM(DT) Act. The Congress leader of Assam would rather leaves the State and move somewhere else, than admit now to their diabolic role in starting the influx in the first place. And since most of them have real estate outside the State, they can well afford such a course of action, leaving the people to their fate. Accountability is so unfashionable these days! However, it took the original Congressman and former Speaker of the Lok Sabha, Mr. Purno A. Sangma to try his hand at some rationalization over the irrational stand to oppose any move to repeal the IM(DT) Act. According to Mr. Sangma, people should stop talking about the Act because it divides people along communal lines. If it really does so, would it not be the strongest reason for getting rid of the black law once and for all'? How is anything achieved by either brushing it under the carpet or burying our heads in the sand? But he does admit, unlike the others who have remained Congressmen, that there is large-scale illegal infiltration across the border. For, does he not say that the Centre should give the entire money that it is "unnecessarily" spending on fencing the Indo-Bangladesh border to Bangladesh, so that poverty does not drive the Bangladeshis to this side of the fence? (Mr. Sangma is right about the poverty part, though two successive Bangladesh High Commissioners to India have tried to convince us that Bangladeshis do not have to sneak into Assam for economic reasons; the wages in Bangladesh, they maintain, are better than what they are here!) But how is this India's responsibility? And would he also insist, by the same token, that the money spent on protecting the Indo-Pakistan border be also given to Pakistan to improve its economy? What is more pertinent, however, is how a democrat of his stature, so well versed in the law and the principle of equality under the Constitution, can argue that two separate immigration laws should be permitted to coexist in the same country? Is he in a position to furnish even one just one example of a similar dispensation anywhere else in the civilized, democratic world? Can he produce one single example of the immigration law of any country being sabotaged by the lawmakers to make it impossible for any illegal migrants to be detected or deported from just one State of the country? Or is he saying that all fait accomplish and collective mistakes made by lawmakers should be allowed to continue unto perpetuity until that part of the country is no longer its part, and when people will not have to bother about the IM(DT) Act since it will be a law of another country? Or has Mr. Sangma completely failed to see the fundamentalist design of including Assam in a Muslim country in the making, which has nothing to do with economics at all?

The other crisis arises from the Muslim ministers of the ruling AGP threatening to quit over the AGP's support for repealing the IM(DT) Act which, according to them, safeguards the rights of the 'minorities'. (A clear case of using even one's false teeth as paperweight for want of anything better.) The AGP should call their bluff and let them do it. It will achieve two things: (a) an end to the endless compromises that any political party would have to make to remain in power with the Bangladeshi vote bank, and (b) it will confront us with the reality today rather than allowing a worsening situation to fester. A fall in the government will inevitably bring in a spell of President's rule which may not be such a bad solution in the circumstances. It will also show the entire country which way the loyalties of some of our 'secular' lawmakers lie. And if we have 'minority' leaders pretending that the IM(DT) Act alone can safeguard minority rights, they must explain to us how minority rights are being protected in other States where the Foreigners Act is in force. All said and done, it is a good thing that the showdown has come now. Better now than later.

(Editorial, The Sentinel, September 1, 2000)
 


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