Reading the below summary (please scroll down below to read ) makes me feel very sympathetic to Sri. Amit Shah or for that matter anyone who occupies the Home Minister of India seat.
I now understand with much greater clarity than ever before how British Colonialism must bear full responsibility for India’s stupendous and enervating illegal immigration problem .
Our vast porous land borders that are massive and wide open doorways for millions of illegal migrants from abroad are actually the accursed legacy of British imperial rule— Indo-Pakistan, Indo-Nepal, Indo-Myanmar, Indo-Lanka, Indo-Bangladesh, Indo-Tibet…
The creation of so many independent nation-states all around India was actually the bloodless way (except the Partition riots in Punjab in 1947) by which the British succeeded in Balkanising greater India and in leaving behind a perennial, suppurating source of mutual tensions and forever conflicts amongst the peoples of South Asia at large.
The British left India in 1947 but the terrifying ghost of their Divide and Rule Pax Brittanica dictum still haunts India today but as “Divide and Prevail legacy” from halfway across the globe.
I am able to clearly imagine today how if India had not been vivisected into so many different nation-states , our country would never have had to grapple daily with the currently insoluble problem of illegal immigration. They would all have been our very own people, our own countrymen … not illegal immigrants.
Yes, but then, I am sure many of you will jump up to say to me that we would probably be encountering then another altogether different but equally big problem such as the one we know China faces today viz. internal migration of vast waves of people moving about from one part to another part of the country in search of better and urban living standards, jobs and education.
Howver, I would argue that such a problem, daunting though as it would certainly be, would still however not be a pestering, festering law and order or grave national security problem such as what India suffers today —- to name only a few, they are Voter Fake ID, citizenship proof issue, undocumented domicile status , cross-border smuggling, currency counterfeiting, and border patrolling, etc.
As in China today, India would then only have had to deal mostly with the central governance problem of providing education, food and energy security to a much larger population, and having to allocate and spend more on larger defense-outlay budget to protect more distant but then also far fewer borders with neighbouring countries such as China and Iran.
The 500 years in world-History during which the “sun never set on the British Empire” (because even“God wouldn’t trust an Englishman in the dark”), the idea of Balkanisation of many parts in the world through redrawing and inventing borders was realised by Western Imperialists not only by dividing and ruling peoples. They did not stop there. They ensured through insidiously Balkanised legacies they left behind everywhere — as they certainly did in India — its baleful impact and wretched consequences would just continue to wreak havoc in many different ways upon those peoples amongst whom the seeds of enmity, confusion, mayhem and instability were sown ever so deeply.
Conquest is achieved not by military conquest alone. Conquest by redrawing borders — Balkanisation— is, in fact, ever more lasting …
Sudarshan Madabushi
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India’s illegal immigration issue is fundamentally different from that of the US and Europe: it is shaped by porous land borders and large numbers of undocumented migrants mainly from neighboring countries, especially Bangladesh and Myanmar, rather than by transcontinental refugee flows or border crises seen in the West.
India’s Illegal Immigration Scenario
- Scale and Origins: Estimates of illegal immigrants in India range from 2 million to over 20 million, with the largest group being Bangladeshi nationals. There are also significant populations of Rohingya from Myanmar (about 40,000–75,000), along with smaller numbers from Nepal and Pakistan.
- Key Hotspots: Border states like Assam, West Bengal, and Tripura are especially impacted, but large cities (Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru) also have significant undocumented enclaves.
- Socio-political Impact: Illegal immigrants have triggered periodic political controversy, with debates over voter rolls, access to public benefits, and cultural change; issues like the Assam NRC exercise and the Citizenship Amendment Act have directly targeted these populations.
Contrasts With US and Europe
- US/Europe Issues: Their crisis is driven by arrivals from Latin America, the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia (including some from India), resulting in border surges, asylum backlogs, and debates over refugee quotas and integration.
- India’s Problem: India’s challenge is less about refugees or asylum, and more about steady, large-scale, undocumented entry and settlement for economic reasons, mostly from immediately neighboring countries, enabled by hundreds of kilometers of permeable land borders.
- Policy Response: Unlike the militarized border and sanctuary policy debates in the US/Europe, India’s approach includes local documentation drives (NRC), regular deportations, and periodic demolition of illegal settlements, but persistent political and administrative bottlenecks limit effectiveness.
Numbers Compared
India thus faces a chronic, long-standing, large-scale illegal immigration challenge dominated by its neighbors, rather than acute crises or sudden border waves like those witnessed in the US and Europe.
End of summary