Intelligence agencies are discreetly surveying the extent of any demographic change in Bengal and Assam areas bordering Bangladesh, especially those with sizeable Muslim populations.
The move is likely to trigger charges of the religious profiling of Muslims ahead of next summer’s Assembly polls in the two states.
Sources in the security establishment denied any political side to the move. They termed it a “routine” analysis of border populations in Assam and Bengal, meant to keep an eye on “the presence of radical elements in border towns”.
“Don’t read anything into it; such surveys have been done in the past too,” an Intelligence Bureau official told The Telegraph.
“The current survey is being conducted to update the data on demographic changes in border areas, especially in Muslim pockets, in relation to illegal migration from
Bangladesh.”
The survey comes at a time the Election Commission is expected to conduct a special intensive revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls in Bengal that will ask voters to prove their citizenship. Opposition parties have condemned SIRs as an exercise in “voter list manipulation”.
The BJP has been claiming an “alarming demographic shift” in Bengal under the ruling Trinamool Congress’s “political patronage”, alleging that several border constituencies have seen a sharp rise in voters.
Led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and home minister Amit Shah, the BJP has also been raising the bogey of Bangladeshi “infiltrators” spreading across the entire country.
Hundreds of Bengali-speaking migrant workers – mostly Muslims – have allegedly been detained and tortured by police in BJP-ruled states since May, prompting them to return to Bengal in their thousands.
During his Calcutta visit last month, Modi said that “infiltrators” were putting pressure on the country’s resources and infrastructure, and urged people to vote for the BJP to free Bengal of these illegal immigrants.
He accused the Mamata Banerjee government of “promoting infiltration” for the sake of “securing votes”.
Intelligence reports had in the recent past flagged the mushrooming of madrasas and mosques along Bengal’s borders with Bangladesh, a Union home ministry official said.
“The reports also said that several border villages in Bengal were predominantly Muslim,” he said.
“The survey is meant to ascertain the ground reality and ensure that mosques and madrasas are not used by terror groups for anti-India activities.”
A former IB official, however, said the survey, coming ahead of the Assembly polls in Bengal and Assam, seemed “politically motivated”.
“Otherwise, why is such a survey not being conducted in Hindu-dominated pockets?” he said.
He argued that the survey, coming amid the relentless anti-Muslim narrative spread by the Right-wing ecosystem, could trigger fear among minorities about being kept under surveillance and systematically spied on.
“Such racial and religious profiling exemplifies not just ineffective policing but the wasteful spending of taxpayers’ money,” he said.
The BJP’s poll campaigns in Bengal in recent years had attracted charges of attempted religious polarisation, invoking as they did issues like the National Register of Citizens, “infiltration” from Bangladesh and Mamata’s alleged “appeasement politics”.
In 2018, the BSF had faced accusations of religious profiling after it prepared a report highlighting an unexpected increase in the Muslim population along the India-Pakistan border in Jaisalmer, Rajasthan.
Prepared by the BSF’s intelligence wing and sent to the Union home ministry, the report had expressed concern at the rise in the number of mosques in the region.
It spoke of the presence of radicals, suspected to be enticing local people to pass on information relating to military movement.
The BSF guards the India-Bangladesh border, too.