West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari’s 3D policy of ‘detect, delete, deport’ has led to hundreds of undocumented workers queuing up at the Indo-Bangladesh border, seeking to return home rather than face detention.

The ‘detect’ and ‘delete’ aspects of the policy have been firmly vindicated by the Supreme Court’s thumbs-up to the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls on Wednesday. But the ‘deport’ aspect is far more difficult to implement.

The Bangladesh government has posited its own 3D policy of ‘deny, dissemble, delay’ regarding the undocumented migrants. Even before Adhikari took the oath as CM of West Bengal, Bangladeshi Foreign Minister Khalilur Rahman warned that Dhaka would take action if “push-in incidents occur amid the change of power” in West Bengal.

The famously porous 4,096-km-long border has reportedly witnessed numerous incidents of the BSF attempting to push ‘back’ people, while the Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) resists the push ‘in’.

Challenges of detection and border management

West Bengal has historically been a weak spot in terms of curbing illegal migration. Bangla nationalism, based on a shared linguistic identity, informed the lenient policy towards illegal migrants adopted by successive governments after the 1971 refugee crisis (when 10 million people fled from East Pakistan into West Bengal and the Northeast).

Since then, migration from Bangladesh has been for economic rather than political reasons. Standard Bengali is spoken in both countries, allowing migrants to mingle with........

© Free Press Journal