AA Edit | Stop All Discrimination In India Over Language

West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s Bhasha Andolon or language movement against the alleged harassment of Bengali-speaking workers employed outside their home state on suspicion of their being Bangladeshi infiltrators may have an element of the theatrical about it but the underlying problem calls for the nation’s immediate attention.

Several BJP-led state governments have started campaigns to take discriminatory positions against Bengali-speaking Indian citizens under one pretext or other, the most obvious one of these being their allegedly being mistaken for as Bangladeshi infiltrators. Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma is a pioneer in this brand of politics, which he thinks will help him consolidate the BJP’s vote bank among indigenous voters. The shock defeat of the BJP in the Jorhat Lok Sabha seat last year has been largely seen as the sign of the saffron party losing its hold on indigenous voters ahead of the Assembly election next year. Mr Sarma went to the extent of stating that writing Bengali as one’s mother tongue in the upcoming census would help quantify the number of “foreigners” in the state. He has been attempting to disguise his divisive politics based on racial profiling as patriotism but no one is fooled.

The BJP government in Odisha, meanwhile, has arrested 447 Bengali-speaking migrant workers in June and July this year. While most of them have been released, some are still in custody despite possessing valid identity documents. The governments in Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh have also detained Bengali-speaking workers, mostly masons, despite having valid documents to prove their identity. The police often cite procedural lapses on their part to detain them; they were even denied access to legal counsel. The same was the case in Maharashtra where Bengali-speaking workers were detained in Pune on the suspicion of being undocumented migrants. The police even detained the children of the migrant labourers there.

Sadly, their experience in the national capital is no different either. Residents in a migrant labour settlement in Vasant Kunj, for instance, have often been targeted for evictions, electricity and water supply cuts as well as routine harassment by police. The Haryana government has of late been regularly detaining Bengali-speaking migrant labourers for interrogation even while they have valid documents. Such instances have been reported from several places in the state, including Gurugram.

All these administrative excesses are in violation of several articles of the Constitution that guarantee fundaments rights to the people, viz., Article 19 (1) (d) or the right to move freely throughout the territory of India, 19 (1) (e) or the right to reside and settle in any part of the territory of India and Article 19 (1) (g), the right to practise any profession, or to carry on any occupation, trade or business. There may be illegal immigrants in the country with no valid documents and the government has a duty to identify them and send them back to their home countries. But that cannot be at the expense of the rights of those who are bona fide citizens of India.

Most importantly, though, the Union government must also realise that it becomes all the more undemocratic, unacceptable and even dangerous when language becomes the tool for profiling citizens. The states, the foundational units of the country, are formed on the basis of language and the arrangement has worked beautifully in taking the idea of unity in diversity forward. The Union government and the party which runs it must realise this and immediately put an end to this spate of incidents. On this dangerous course they must effect an early about-turn.