Bangladeshi Migrants In India

In January 2011, Felani Khatun was shot dead while attempting to cross the border from India to Bangladesh. Her body remained hung on the fence as a warning to those who illegally crossed an international border. Migration to India from the current geographical and political entity called Bangladesh is more than a century old and had begun long before the nation states were created in South Asia. Often termed as ‘foreigners’ and ‘infiltrators’, Bangladeshi migrants such as Felani find their way into India for the promise of a better future. Post 1971, there has been a steady movement of people from Bangladesh into India, both as refugees and for economic need, making this migration a complex area of inquiry. This book focuses on the contemporary issue of undocumented Bangladeshi migration to the three Indian states of Assam, West Bengal, and Delhi, and how the migrants are perceived in light of the ongoing discourses on the various nationalisms in India. Each state has a unique history and has taken different measures to respond to Bangladeshi migrants present in the state. Based on extensive fieldwork and insightful interviews with influential members from key political parties, civil society organizations, and Hindu and ethnic nationalist bodies in these states, the book explores the place and role of Bangladeshi migrants in relation to the inherent tension of Indian nationalism.

Contributed articles presented at the two seminars on same theme at Delhi in 2001 and in Gauhati in 2003 moderated by Astha Bharati and C-NES.

Research Paper (postgraduate) from the year 2014 in the subject Politics - Region: Far East, , course: M.Phil, language: English, abstract: In the era of globalisation, where opening of borders is being advocated all over the world, there is one issue over which no nation-state is ready to compromise with its territorial borders. The issue of migration and refugees is considered so sensitive that states have often linked it with their sovereignty, independence and even existence. Environmental degradation has become a crucial issue in the contemporary world. The effects of climate change are likely to trigger mass human movement both within and across international borders. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (“UNHCR”) predicts that between 50 and 200 million people may be displaced by 2050. Thus, the human impact on the environment is creating a new kind of global casualty for the twenty-first century—an emergent class of environmental migrants. Environmental crisis in the rural areas of developing countries is increasingly becoming an important cause of cross-border migration of population and South Asia is no exception to this phenomenon. Such movement of population in the Indo-Bangladesh context is generating a range of destabilising socio-political, economic, ethnic and communal tensions in India. It has embittered Indo-Bangladesh relations, causing tensions between the two countries. .

Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award Winner of the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for History A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year A Saveur “Essential Food Books That Define New York City” Selection In the final years of the nineteenth century, small groups of Muslim peddlers arrived at Ellis Island every summer, bags heavy with embroidered silks from their home villages in Bengal. The American demand for “Oriental goods” took these migrants on a curious path, from New Jersey’s beach boardwalks into the heart of the segregated South. Two decades later, hundreds of Indian Muslim seamen began jumping ship in New York and Baltimore, escaping the engine rooms of British steamers to find less brutal work onshore. As factory owners sought their labor and anti-Asian immigration laws closed in around them, these men built clandestine networks that stretched from the northeastern waterfront across the industrial Midwest. The stories of these early working-class migrants vividly contrast with our typical understanding of immigration. Vivek Bald’s meticulous reconstruction reveals a lost history of South Asian sojourning and life-making in the United States. At a time when Asian immigrants were vilified and criminalized, Bengali Muslims quietly became part of some of America’s most iconic neighborhoods of color, from Tremé in New Orleans to Detroit’s Black Bottom, from West Baltimore to Harlem. Many started families with Creole, Puerto Rican, and African American women. As steel and auto workers in the Midwest, as traders in the South, and as halal hot dog vendors on 125th Street, these immigrants created lives as remarkable as they are unknown. Their stories of ingenuity and intermixture challenge assumptions about assimilation and reveal cross-racial affinities beneath the surface of early twentieth-century America.

The Problem Of Bangladeshi Immigrants Has Adversely Impacted On Socioeconomic And Political Conditions In India.;The Book Focuses On Unauthorized Human Movement From Bangladesh To Garo Hills, Meghalya In 1964 And Then In 1971. Causes For Migration, Relief Camps, Rehabilitation And Reclamation Of Displaced Persons From Across The Border, And Impact Of These Immigrants On The Region Are Discussed And Analysed.;The Book May Be Found Useful By The Policy Makers And Scholars Having Interest In The Region.;;;;

How do people respond to a state that is violent towards its own citizens? In State, Violence, and Legitimacy in India, this question is addressed through insights offered by ethnographic explorations of everyday policing in Delhi and the anti-insurgency measures of the Indian army in Lakhipathar village in Assam. Battling the dominant understanding of the inverse connect between state legitimacy and use of violence, Santana Khanikar argues that use of violence does not necessarily detract from the legitimacy of the modern territorial nation-state. Based on extensive research of two sites, the book develops a narrative of how two facets of state violence, one commonly understood to be for routine maintenance of law and order and the other to be of extraordinary need for maintaining unity and integrity of the nation-state, often produce comparable responses. The book delves into the debates surrounding state–citizen relationship in India, while critically engaging with dominant notions of state legitimacy and its relation with use of violence by the state.