Borderline Justice

Himanta Biswa Sarma’s deportation drive lays bare the moral bankruptcy of India’s secular pretenders.

Assam

Assam has long been a state drowning in decades of demographic anxiety. Recently, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma’s uncompromising drive to deport illegal migrants despite their inclusion in the error-ridden National Register of Citizens (NRC) has earned him both fury from the usual quarters and applause from a weary public. That his actions have rattled the complacent consensus of India’s ruling class, judiciary and professional hand-wringers is evidence not of overreach, but of long-overdue resolve.

The NRC, updated under the direct gaze of the Supreme Court and released in 2019, excluded over 19 lakh names yet was never notified, never ratified and remains legally inert. This judicial Frankenstein was supposed to be the gold standard for citizenship verification. Instead, it has proved a monument to institutional indecision. The Registrar General of India has left it in limbo. The Supreme Court, having once micromanaged the process, has now disowned the consequences. Into this vacuum has stepped Sarma.

The Assam CM’s assertion that mere inclusion in the NRC cannot be the sole determinant of citizenship is logical. He has pointed out that manipulation, fraud, and the meddling of so-called activists like Harsh Mander compromised the exercise from the outset. Mander, a darling of Delhi’s liberal elite, allegedly spent years seeding the process with sympathetic cases and encouraging backdoor entries.

Opposition parties including the Congress, the AIUDF and the Raijor Dal have raised a predictable hue and cry by turning legislative assemblies into theatre stages while ignoring their own past flirtations with identity politics. For decades, these parties paid lip service to the fear of infiltration while profiting electorally from vote banks built on precisely such ambiguity. It is not Himanta Biswa Sarma who is communal but the opposition’s selective secularism that reeks of opportunism.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court, after having played midwife to the NRC’s birth, now shirks its responsibility to oversee the aftermath. The Court has yet to ensure the issuance of rejection slips - basic legal documents that would allow the excluded to appeal. In their absence, nearly 2 million people are trapped in a Kafkaesque purgatory, neither citizens nor aliens. And yet, it is Sarma who is accused of undermining due process.

The deportation drive, operationalized under the long-forgotten Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act, 1950, may be legally controversial but it is constitutionally backed and procedurally sound. The Act empowers district commissioners to identify and remove illegal immigrants. The Centre has done nothing to repeal or update this law.

Some pushed back to Bangladesh have returned. The latter country has long refused to acknowledge the problem, let alone cooperate. But this does not mean India must absorb undocumented migrants by default. When confronted with a neighbour’s intransigence, sovereignty demands assertiveness, not surrender.

The emotive images of women and children left in no-man’s-land make for painful viewing. But to reduce the entire policy to a handful of anecdotal injustices is wilfully dishonest. Every state has the right to defend its borders. Every government has the duty to protect the integrity of citizenship. And every democracy must distinguish between sympathy and statecraft. Human rights cannot become a smokescreen for illegal settlement.

Nor can one ignore that some of the ‘victims’ possess identity documents of dubious provenance. In Assam, voter IDs, Aadhaar cards and even land records have been forged at scale.

It is no coincidence that minority rights organisations have closed ranks in coordination. The convention held by AAMSU and 18 other groups in May was less about justice and more about narrative control. Their resolutions are loud on emotion, but silent on infiltration. They seek an Assam without borders.

For decades, Assamese politicians oscillated between denial and deferral. Himanta Biswa Sarma, for all his polarising methods, has offered something else: decision. It is imperfect, at times messy, but it is something that bureaucrats, judges and moralists have consistently lacked – courage. And that is precisely why they fear him.