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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | ‘Corruption first, citizenship later’: Why CAA is having little impact on the Bengal elections -Shoaib Daniyal

‘Corruption first, citizenship later’: Why CAA is having little impact on the Bengal elections -Shoaib Daniyal

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published Published on Apr 3, 2021   modified Modified on Apr 3, 2021

-Scroll.in

Everyday politics dominates the discourse amongst the state’s large population of Hindu Bangladeshi migrants.

“Has anyone ever thought of us here?” said 64-year old Mohadev Majumdar. “We got tortured there. And are now having to beg here. What will CAA do? We don’t have hope from any party.”

In 1971, a teenaged Majumdar fled what was then East Pakistan after his father was shot dead by the army. While technically India closed its system of awarding citizenship to East Bengali refugees once the Liberation War broke out in Bangladesh, Majumdar managed to informally acquire the trappings of citizenship – documents such as voter ID and a subsidised ration card – all the while eking out a menial existence as a peanut hawker on Kolkata’s local trains.

Majumdar is not alone – one study by Dhaka-based economist Abul Barkat estimated that between the years 1964 and 2013, as many as 11.3 million Hindus had fled Bangladesh. In order to woo this massive demographic, the BJP launched an aggressive campaign in 2019 to bring in amendments to India’s Citizenship Act that would allow undocumented migrants to become Indian citizens – as long as they weren’t Muslim. Additionally, the party said that this new law would ensure a “chronology” that would see only Indian Muslims having to undergo a citizenship test under a future National Register of Citizens.

However, the party has largely reset its strategy in the present Assembly election, almost completely dropping the Citizenship Amendment Act from its campaign.

A large part of the reason for this dramatic shift lies in Majumdar’s apathetic answer. Seven decades after Partition and five after the birth of Bangladesh, citizenship is less of an issue than the BJP first thought. Instead, more prosaic bread and butter issues dominate the discourse, even amongst refugees and their families.

Local first

Nikhil Mallik, a Matua community leader in the refugee-dominated Matia village of North 24 Parganas, is greatly agitated by the recent updation of the National Register of Citizens in Assam as well as the state’s targeting of people with the claim of apprehending illegal Bangladeshi migrants. “We have seen thousands of Matuas in detention camps,” Mallik claimed. “In 2003, the BJP bought a black law that made us anuprabeshkari, infiltrators. Now it has done the NRC in Assam.”

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Scroll.in, 3 April, 2021, https://scroll.in/article/991194/corruption-first-citizenship-later-why-caa-has-had-little-impact-on-the-bengal-elections


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