Decoding Delhi LG's Xenophobic Push to Expel 'Illegal' Bangladeshi, Rohingya

In poll-bound Delhi, communally targeting minorities has unfortunately become a familiar political gimmick.

Minority communities like Rohingya refugees and Bengali-speaking Muslims continue to face discrimination and hate campaigns in the national capital.

(Photo: Vibhushita Singh/The Quint)

Earlier this month, the Lieutenant Governor (LG) of Delhi, VK Saxena, shot off a letter to the city’s police chief, urging him to conduct a “special campaign” to identify and expel “illegal Bangladeshis” and “Rohingya infiltrators” on “mission mode”.

The letter from the Centre-appointed administrator came in the wake of the recent attack on Bollywood actor, Saif Ali Khan, by an alleged undocumented Bangladeshi national in his Mumbai penthouse.

In what comes off as a reckless exercise in fearmongering, xenophobia, and classism, the LG suggested that undocumented immigrants from Bangladesh and Rohingya refugees are likely involved in ‘criminal/illegal activities’ in Delhi and are able to find employment as shop workers or domestic workers by accepting below minimum wage pay.

He even urged the public to verify the documentary credentials of their employees and house helps.

The LG’s letter – nearly a month before the Assembly elections in Delhi – is disturbing for four reasons.

Fiction Over Fact

First, it is based on hearsay and speculation, not facts. There is no data to suggest that undocumented immigrants from Bangladesh and Rohingya refugees are involved in criminal activities in the national capital.

There are also no credible estimates of the number of undocumented Bangladeshis or Rohingya refugees living in the national capital.

Recently, the Delhi Police, which falls under the Union Home Ministry, deported 132 foreigners living illegally in the city, none of whom were Bangladeshi or Rohingya.

Even in relative terms, there is no evidence to indicate that the crime rate is higher among the undocumented immigrant population in the city as compared to other groups, which is also reflected in data released by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). In fact, NCRB data from 2023 shows that there has been a rise in crime against foreigners living in the city.

The LG himself cited no figures to back his sweeping claims. His propositions are based on an irrational extrapolation of the Saif Ali Khan case, in which the accused is yet to be convicted of the crime in court.

One wonders how or why the constitutional head of the National Capital Territory wrote an entire official letter on a yet-unproven criminal case from another city. The injudiciousness displayed in doing so corrodes the integrity of the LG’s office.

Stoking Vigilantism

Second, the LG’s suggestion to conduct verification drives of shop employees, construction workers and domestic workers could encourage vigilantist aggression against a section of Delhi’s working-class population.

Such a directive is designed to turn private citizens into informal bureaucratic agents tasked with citizenship verification, which in reality, should only be undertaken by trained officials under a strictly legal framework.

It also unjustly projects poor working class communities as de facto security threats to the middle class and rationalises privatised regimes of surveillance against them.

Even beyond its formal legality, documentary checks are based on a tenuous premise – that anyone without relevant (or ‘correct’) papers is an ‘illegal immigrant’.

This, in turn, is based on an even more dubious assumption that most Indian citizens have access to formal citizenship documentation. While over 93 percent of people living in India have Aadhaar cards, these do not prove one’s citizenship.

As previous studies have shown, a large section of the older Indian population (born before 2005) does not have birth certificates, which are generally accepted as proof of citizenship. Similarly, a mere 6.5 percent Indians have valid passports.

It is this general lack of access to formal documentation among poorer communities that should worry the LG more than the prospect of undocumented foreigners inundating the city.

Moreover, Assam’s arbitrary citizenship determination regime has shown that documentary evidence is vulnerable to pedantic misreading and can produce false conclusions about one’s citizenship status.

When even trained officials manning the state’s quasi-judicial Foreigners Tribunals failed to generate fair citizenship determinations using paperwork, how does Delhi’s LG expect common people to do so? Or is that precisely the intent – to create an extrajudicial regime of citizenship determination that emboldens the majority and keeps religious minorities in check?

Stigmatising Bengali-speaking Muslims

Third, the LG’s speculative propositions risk sharpening ethnolinguistic suspicion and hostility against working-class Bengali-speaking Muslims. This community, routinely profiled as ‘illegal Bangladeshis’ and more recently, as Rohingya, despite their Indian roots, has long been at the shortest end of Delhi’s xenophobic politics, regardless of the party in power.

In 1992, the Congress at the Centre, under pressure from an ascendant Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), detained hundreds of Bengali-speaking Muslims and expelled them to the West Bengal-Bangladesh border. Such expulsion drives have become increasingly frequent since the Narendra Modi government took charge in 2014. They tend to follow in lockstep with election cycles, as in the case of other political agendas.

With the upcoming state elections in Delhi, the anvil has fallen over working-class Bengali Muslims once again.

Even as both the BJP and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) deliberately provoke anti-immigrant sentiments to bolster their poll prospects, the police have reportedly begun rounding up Bengali Muslims from the city’s slums on allegations of them being illegal Bangladeshis. Last year, the police also detained several Rohingya refugees from the informal shelters in Kalindi Kunj. 

Instead of countering the BJP’s anti-Muslim, anti-refugee plank on secular and humanitarian grounds, the AAP, which is in the fray to defend its ruling pole in Delhi, has only sparked a whole new cycle of anti-Rohingya rhetoric in the run up to the polls.

This brings us to the fourth aspect of the LG’s misdirected outrage.

War Refugees Not 'Infiltrators'

The Rohingya living in Delhi are asylum seekers fleeing war and persecution in Myanmar or extreme socioeconomic deprivation in southeastern Bangladesh where they live in squalid refugee camps.

They should be treated distinctly from other groups of undocumented immigrants, as a special group of vulnerable people in need of humanitarian assistance, social support and legal safeguards. They constitute a microscopic population in terms of their size compared to the overall demographic strength of Delhi (or India). To see them as ‘infiltrators’ is unfair, baseless and inhuman.

While India hasn’t ratified the 1951 UN Refugee Convention or its 1967 Optional Protocol, it is bound by international customary law, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (which it has ratified), and its own constitutional guarantee of right to life to protect the Rohingya from forced deportation, detention, and violence in India.

The Rohingya in Myanmar are currently caught in a new wave of armed conflict in Rakhine State.

The raging war between the military regime and the Arakan Army has drawn the Rohingya into a crossfire of violent attacks and attendant forced displacement, making forced deportations to Myanmar particularly dangerous.

As the constitutional head of India’s national capital, the LG is expected to know and honour these domestic and international norms and contexts. As a neutral arbiter, he should not be using his office to contribute to the politically motivated xenophobia that has now become a hallmark of Delhi elections.

Yet, in his letter, one can locate a rapid unravelling of precisely these established norms of constitutionalism, political decency and basic humanity in today’s India.

(Angshuman Choudhury is a joint doctoral candidate in Comparative Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore and King’s College London. This is an opinion piece. All views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them)