Increasingly, across a widening swathe of the world, the central campaign issue for right-wing parties is immigration. Recent statements by top leaders, along with a series of administrative moves, suggest that with the Ayodhya Ram temple built and Article 370 abrogated, immigration is now emerging as the key political issue for right-wing politics in India as well.

In his Independence Day speech from the ramparts of Red Fort on August 15, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that “under a deliberate conspiracy, seeds of a new crisis are being sown to alter the demography of the country. Infiltrators are snatching away the livelihoods of our youth and targeting our sisters and daughters. This will not be tolerated.” He announced that a high-powered Demography Mission would be launched to ensure India’s unity, integrity, and security, tackling both strategic and social challenges.

The Prime Minister mentioned the new Demography Mission again a few days later, this time in an election campaign speech in Bihar. In that speech at the Magadh University grounds in Bodh Gaya, Modi alleged that the Rashtriya Janata Dal and Congress, the main opposition parties in Bihar, were supporting illegal immigrants for vote bank and appeasement politics.

Alleged illegal immigration has thus indirectly become the main election issue in the upcoming Bihar polls scheduled for October-November, courtesy the controversy over the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls. “Inclusion of the names of foreign illegal immigrants” was cited by the Election Commission as one of the reasons for conducting the revision of electoral rolls when the move was announced in June. 

Draft electoral rolls following this exercise removed 65 lakh names from the existing voter lists. 

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has labeled this as “vote chori”. The opposition “Mahagathbandhan” alliance, whose principal component parties are the RJD and Congress, organised a “Vote Adhikar Yatra” led by Gandhi and RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav to raise the issue of non-inclusion of people in electoral rolls.

After the Bihar polls, an all-India revision of electoral rolls, on the lines of the one in Bihar, is already being planned. The exercise would be completed by early 2026, before assembly elections in West Bengal and Assam, both of which are expected around March 2026.

These two states are at the heart of the politics of migration in India. 

No Indian state has a longer history of politics of migration than Assam. It is a history that traces back to before the independence of India, to a time when the country’s British colonial rulers made and unmade borders at will.

In 1905, Bengal was divided into Eastern Bengal, corresponding to today’s Bangladesh, and Western Bengal, including Bihar and Orissa, on the basis of religion. Assam was forced into a union with East Bengal to create the new province of Eastern Bengal and Assam. 

Meanwhile, the Eastern Bengal Railway line had recently reached Dhubri in Lower Assam. A long-cherished hope of the British rulers, to import labour from neighbouring East Bengal for the cultivation of crops such as rice and jute, now began to fructify. The movement of migrants from neighbouring East Bengal found mention in the 1911 Census of Assam which was published in 1912. It became a topic of discussion in the new Assam Legislative Council which was inaugurated that same year.

Representative politics in Assam since its very inception was thus embroiled in debates over migration. At that time it was migration within what was still one country, and, for a brief period, one province, but after the Partition of India in 1947 the stakes rose as it became one of migration between countries. 

The first wave of migrants as identified in the 1911 Census had been mainly Muslim peasants from Bengal districts such as Mymensingh, Pabna, Bogra and Rangpur. The second wave, which followed the Partition of 1947 and its attendant horrors, was of mainly Hindu refugees from East Bengal fleeing persecution. 

In Assam and what was then its capital of Shillong in what is now Meghalaya, the arrival of large numbers of Bengali refugees soon became a matter of great concern for the local populations. The first organised reaction to this influx came in 1960, in the shape of a violent movement called “Bongal Kheda” that primarily targeted Hindu Bengalis. 

The political turn that launched these anti-immigrant sentiments into the Assam Agitation, however, was famously a question related to electoral rolls. Bypolls had to be held for the Lok Sabha in 1979. Among the seats that went to polls was Mangaldoi in Assam. The All Assam Students’ Union alleged that names of around 45,000 illegal immigrants from Bangladesh had been found in the voters’ list for Mangaldoi. This set off the Assam Agitation that lasted from 1979-85, culminated in the Assam Accord, and eventually led to the National Register of Citizens exercise in Assam.

Despite the completion of the Supreme Court monitored NRC in Assam under BJP governments in the state and at the centre, and the exclusion of 19 lakh people from the final NRC list, the issue of alleged illegal immigration is back to where it was before the NRC.

Soon after the Assam NRC list was released in 2019, Home Minister Amit Shah had promised in parliament and outside that a nationwide NRC would follow. That has not happened yet, but the SIR exercise has sparked suspicions among opposition leaders that it is actually a “backdoor NRC”, a description used by Trinamool Congress leader and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. 

Simultaneously, the BJP is preparing its own lists of “illegal immigrants” in the Bihar electoral rolls, particularly in districts with large Muslim populations, which it will submit to the Election Commission. The same modus operandi will no doubt be replicated with greater gusto in West Bengal, which unlike Bihar actually borders Bangladesh, and has a large Bengali Muslim population. When Indians speak of “infiltrators” or “illegal immigrants” they automatically assume that the infiltrators must be Bangladeshis – a population largely indistinguishable from Bengalis, since the same language is spoken both sides of the border, and there is a Hindu Bengali minority there just as there is a Muslim Bengali minority here. Therefore, the exercise in Bengal is almost certain to be far more contentious than in Bihar.

The overall situation is reminiscent of 1979 and the Assam Agitation. 

What it represents is the merger of the Assam model of anti-immigration politics with the Gujarat model combining development rhetoric and Hindu nationalism. 

Global political rise

The rising tide of anti-migrant politics is lifting Right-wing boats globally.

The politics of migration was at the heart of Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign. A survey by Pew Research Center found that for 82 percent of Republican voters in the 2024 US elections, immigration was “very important for their vote”. This made it the most important political issue in the elections for Trump voters, because the only other issue that a larger percentage of such voters considered important was the economy.

A similar trend can be seen across Europe. The politics of migration was key to the victory of Giorgia Meloni in Italy and has propelled the rise of Marine le Pen in France, the AfD in Germany, and the Sweden Democrats in Sweden. In the UK, both the Conservative Party and the Reform UK party led by Nigel Farage have made migration their core issue.

Given the longstanding success of anti-immigrant politics in Assam, and the current global success of such politics in countries around the world, it is reasonable to expect that the fusion of the Assam model with the Gujarat model will have a serious impact on national politics in India for years to come. 

Samrat Choudhury is an author and journalist. His latest book is Northeast India: A Political History, published by Hurst in the UK and Harper Collins in India.

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