Borderline of Exclusion?

Nobody can hand over their country to illegal immigrants, no country can — so how can India?” Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday (August 15) delivered a forceful warning against illegal immigration during the 79th Independence Day address from the Red Fort, declaring that India would not allow outsiders to take the rightful place of the nation’s youth and daughters. He also announced a high-power demography initiative to address population dynamics and protect the rights of Indian residents. The Prime Minister uttered this warning on the very day when two provinces of British India, Bengal and Punjab, were divided on religious lines to create two Dominions, under the British Commonwealth, India and Pakistan. Eventually, these two Dominions emerged as independent nations who have fought five wars among them since their birth. In 1971, East Bengal/ Pakistan, which was merged with Pakistan after the division of Bengal in 1947, declared independence from Pakistan, and a new independent nation was created. Love for the mother language (Bangla), not religion, was the driver of the independence struggle which saw the birth of a new nation.

In the context of rising harassment, intimidation, detention and pushback of Bengali-speaking Indians in the name of ‘illegal Bangladeshi and Rohingya immigrants’, India’s Prime minister’s warning deserves critical assessment.

Significantly, the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is speaking in the same language as the US President Donald Trump while dealing with ‘illegal immigrants’. A White House press release dated June 20, reads: “The Trump Administration remains relentless in its mission to apprehend and remove the scores of dangerous criminal illegal immigrants who were allowed to infiltrate our communities by incompetent politicians — and we will stop at nothing until these public safety threats have been taken off our streets.” President Donald Trump vowed to remove as many as 1 million immigrants a year from the US. Since Trump’s inauguration, there have been more than 1,000 deportation flights to other countries, up 15 per cent over the January to July period last year. The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) removal flights have gone to 62 countries since January 20, 2025.

The US government has deported 1,703 Indian nationals, including 141 women, so far in 2025, Minister of State for External Affairs Kirti Vardhan Singh told Parliament in early August. According to Singh’s written reply in the Lok Sabha, between 2020 and 2024, 5,541 Indian nationals were deported from the US. State wise break of deportees were: 620 from Punjab, 604 from Haryana, 245 from Gujarat, 10 from Jammu and Kashmir and 6 listed under “unknown”.

Illegal Immigrants: Genesis of the Idea in India

India follows the principle of single citizenship, meaning that all citizens of India have the same rights and obligations, regardless of the state they reside in. It has two primary pieces of legislation governing nationality requirements, the Constitution of India and the Citizenship Act, 1955. On November 26, 1949, the Constituent Assembly of India formally adopted the Constitution of India. While the entire Constitution came into effect on January 26, 1950, certain provisions related to citizenship, elections, and the provisional parliament were given immediate effect on November 26, 1949. As the partition of Bengal and Punjab resulted in large-scale population movements across the new borders separating India and Pakistan, the Constituent Assembly limited the scope of the Constitution’s citizenship provisions for the immediate purpose of determining citizenship of these migrants.

As per that provision, persons who migrated from the area that became part of Pakistan could be registered as Indian citizens if they (or a parent or grandparent) were born in any part of pre-Partition India as defined by the Government of India Act, 1935 and had either become domiciled in Indian territory before July 19, 1948, or had been registered as a citizen of India by Dominion officials after that date, but before commencement of the Constitution. Following the Indian Independence, the government negotiated a free movement agreement with Nepal that resulted in the 1950 Indo-Nepal Treaty of Peace and Friendship which allows all Indian and Nepalese citizens the officially sanctioned ability to live and work in either country.

The Citizenship Act of 1955 outlines the rules and regulations for acquiring and terminating Indian citizenship. The Act specifies five ways to acquire Indian citizenship:

• By Birth: A person born in India after the commencement of the Constitution (January 26, 1950) is generally an Indian citizen.
• By Descent: A person born outside India after January 26, 1950, is an Indian citizen if either of their parents was an Indian citizen at the time of their birth.
• By Registration: Certain categories of people, like those married to Indian citizens, can apply for registration as Indian citizens.
• By Naturalisation: Foreigners who meet specific conditions, such as residing in India for a certain period, can apply for naturalisation.
• By Incorporation of Territory: If a territory is added to India, the Central Government can specify who will be citizens of India.

The 1986 amendment of the Citizenship Act, initiated by the Rajiv Gandhi government under a commitment made to the student leaders of Assam while signing the Assam Accord (1985), is seen as a contradiction of the birthright naturalisation principle of the Indian Constitution. It states that, effective from July 1, 1987 (the date of enforcement of the Citizenship Amendment Act, 1986), every person born in India on or after January 26, 1950 but before the commencement of the Act, and either of whose parents was a citizen of India at the time of his birth, shall be a citizen of India by birth. This meant that if a child was born in India to parents who were not citizens of India at the time of birth, the baby would not get Indian citizenship by birth. Thus, the era of ‘stateless people’ began in India.

The 2003 amendment (under A.B. Vajpayee) further restricted citizenship by birth to a person born in India on or after the commencement of the Act, both of whose parents are citizens of India, or one of whose parents is a citizen of India and the other is not an illegal migrant at the time of his or her birth.

The new Act of 2003 introduced and defined the notion of “illegal immigrant,” making illegal immigrants ineligible for citizenship by registration or by naturalisation. According to the Act, an illegal immigrant in India is a foreigner who has entered India either without valid documents, or who initially had valid documents but has overstayed the permitted time, as per the general provisions of the Citizenship Act as amended in 2003. They are also liable to imprisonment for 2–8 years and fines.

It appears that India denied the birthright naturalisation principle in 1987, nearly 38 years before American President Donald Trump issued Executive Order (EO 14160) on January 20, 2025, denying citizenship to persons born to a mother unlawfully present in the United States when the father was neither a US citizen nor a lawful permanent resident (LPR) at the time of the person’s birth.

D-Voters and Detention Camps

Exactly 42 years after the division of Bengal and Punjab in 1947, the Assam Accord (1985) was signed on August 15—the same day when the two Indian states were horridly divided to create India and Pakistan. The Accord was signed between the Government of India, the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU), and the All Assam Gana Sangram Parishad (AAGSP), who led a six-year-long political movement (1979–85), which occasionally turned violent (e.g., the Nellie massacre of 1982) for the alleged eviction of Bangladeshi immigrants.

The Assam Accord is considered the “mother of the citizenship controversy” in Assam and India. It aimed to address illegal immigration from Bangladesh by setting a cut-off date of March 25, 1971, for determining citizenship. Different provisions were applied based on arrival dates: those arriving before 1966 were recognised as citizens; those arriving between 1966 and March 1971 were eligible after a ten-year waiting period without voting rights; and those arriving after March 1971 were to be considered illegal immigrants and deported in accordance with the law. The government also agreed to update the National Register of Citizens (NRC) for Assam, with 1971 as the cut-off year, to identify genuine citizens and illegal immigrants.

The amendment of the Citizenship Act (1955) in 1986 incorporated the Assam Accord’s provisions into the Act. This amendment graded residents into three categories: voters, doubtful/dubious voters (D-voters), and illegal immigrants with no voting rights. This categorisation of residents has a striking recumbency to the 1982 Citizenship Law of Myanmar, which currently recognises three categories of citizens, namely full citizens (pink card holders), associate citizens (blue card holders), and naturalised citizens (green card holders). More than one million members of the Rohingya Muslim minority, a persecuted ethnic group from western Myanmar, have been rendered stateless and are ineligible to vote.

‘D’ (doubtful) voters are individuals whose Indian citizenship is under question, and they are barred from voting or contesting elections. The Election Commission of India (ECI) introduced this category in 1997 in Assam to identify those who failed to prove their citizenship. Any person whose citizenship status is in doubt during electoral roll verification is marked as a ‘D’ voter. Cases are then referred to Foreigners Tribunals (FTs), which decide whether the person is an Indian citizen or an illegal immigrant. Families may have some members recognised as citizens while others are marked as ‘D’ voters, causing legal and social distress. The 2003 Citizenship Rules mandate that details of individuals whose citizenship is doubtful be entered in the National Population Register (NPR) with a remark for further verification. They are not allowed to vote or contest elections until they get clearance from a Foreigners Tribunal (FT). If declared a foreigner, the person may be deported or placed in a detention centre. Many Indian citizens have been detained, with no clear mechanism for their release even after years. According to the Home Ministry of Assam, over 2.4 lakh D-voter cases are registered in Assam, and 43,000 identified as foreigners, Northeast Live Digital Desk reported on March 3, 2025. The exclusion of 19.06 lakh applicants from the updated final draft of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam has kept alive the apprehension of a substantial increase in the number of people declared as foreigners by the tribunals.

Legal analysts argue that immigration detention is neither a recent development nor limited to Assam. It has been part of the punitive mechanism set up by immigration law since its inception, particularly Section 3(2)(e) of the Foreigners Act, 1946, and para 11(2) of the Foreigners Order, 1948.

In 2009, Tarun Gogoi’s Congress-led coalition government notified makeshift detention centres located in jails. The official notification, “No. PLB.149/2008/88 dated 17/06/2009,” stated that the State government had decided to set up these centres to detain “foreigners” as soon as they were declared such by Foreigners Tribunals until they were deported back to their countries. The Matia transit camp in western Assam’s Goalpara district is the country’s largest detention camp, with the capacity to accommodate 3,000 inmates (each of its 15 buildings can house 200 people). Before the Matia camp became operational in 2023, people declared as foreigners in Assam were lodged in six makeshift detention centres located in jails at Goalpara, Kokrajhar, Silchar, Dibrugarh, Jorhat, and Tezpur.

On January 3, 2013, a Guwahati High Court order directed the government to deport people within two months of their detection as foreigners, “within the meaning of the 1946 Act.” This meant that the onus was on people labelled as “D” voters to prove they were not foreigners, as per the Foreigners Act, 1946. The same applied to children and others not included in the electoral rolls whose citizenship was suspected by police. The court said: “The persons detected to be foreigners shall be taken into custody immediately and kept in detention camp(s) till they are deported from India within the aforesaid timeframe.” On February 4, 2025, the Supreme Court directed the Assam government to start the deportation process of 63 foreigners lodged in the Matia transit camp, reports Frontline.

Amid reports about the detention of 123 Rohingya and Bengali-speaking people, who were allegedly pushed back into Bangladesh from India, Assam CM Himanta B. Sarma made a statement in May 2025 confirming that “illegal migrants” from Bangladesh were being “pushed back” to avoid legal procedures. “Earlier we used to detain them, register a case, produce them in court, and put them in jails. But now we have decided that we will not bring them inside and will push them back from the border itself. So pushing them back is a new phenomenon,” Sarma said.

As the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate in 2014, Narendra Modi promised in an election rally in Silchar (Assam) that all detention camps in Assam would be closed if his party came to power at the Centre. The lodging of “D” (doubtful/disputed) voters and people declared “foreigners” by the Foreigners Tribunals in detention camps was, he claimed, a violation of human rights. He alleged that whenever the Congress government became apprehensive of losing support, it assigned the “D” tag to certain voters. Ironically, detention centres have been on the rise since 2014. As of now, there are different detention centres across the country functioning for punitive and non-punitive purposes, managed by state government correctional homes, shelter homes, Border Security Force camps, and sites of the Foreigners Regional Registration Office. Recent detention centres are mandated under Amit Shah’s Model Detention Manual 2019, which was released on January 9, 2019.

According to the Prison Statistics India 2019 manual of the National Crime Records Bureau, as of December 31, 2019, there were a total of 5,608 foreign prisoners in India, out of which around 2,171 were convicts, 2,979 were undertrials, 40 were detainees (mostly in Jammu and Kashmir and Delhi), and 418 were held as other kinds of prisoners. Of these, the highest number was that of Bangladeshis, who constituted around 2,513 prisoners. Estimates of foreigners and non-citizens omit child detainees in juvenile homes and those held at other quasi-correctional state institutions such as reception centres outside the prison system.

Growing Prison Economy

According to a new report from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), in 2022, incarcerated workers in the US produced at least USD 11 billion in goods and services annually but received just pennies an hour in wages for their prison jobs. Nearly two-thirds of all prisoners in the US had jobs in state and federal prisons. That figure amounted to roughly 800,000 people, researchers estimated in the report.

The prison economy survives on forced prison labour. From fighting wildfires to toiling in the kitchens of some of the country’s most popular food franchises, incarcerated workers perform vital functions across the United States and produce billions of dollars in value for the public and private sectors. Prisons rely heavily on free or underpaid labour to operate costly facilities and produce goods and services on which the public sector depends. This reliance on free and underpaid labour is consistent with the racist and anti-worker economic development model followed in western capitalist economies.

India may also follow the US model of a prison economy using cheap prison labour. The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise in Bihar by the Election Commission of India (ECI), which dropped 65 lakh voters from the electoral list, will create thousands of D-voters, many of whom may end up in detention centres if urgent corrective actions are not taken by the ECI.

The writer is a professor of Business Administration who primarily writes on political economy, global trade, and sustainable development.
Views expressed are personal