“Has anyone ever thought of us here?” said 64-year old Mohadev Majumdar. “We got tortured there. And are now having to beg here. What will ...
“Has anyone ever thought of us here?” said 64-year old Mohadev Majumdar. “We got tortured there. And are now having to beg here. What will CAA do? We don’t have hope from any party.”
In 1971, a teenaged Majumdar fled what was then East Pakistan after his father was shot dead by the army. While technically India closed its system of awarding citizenship to East Bengali refugees once the Liberation War broke out in Bangladesh, Majumdar managed to informally acquire the trappings of citizenship – documents such as voter ID and a subsidised ration card – all the while eking out a menial existence as a peanut hawker on Kolkata’s local trains.
Majumdar is not alone – one study by Dhaka-based economist Abul Barkat estimated that between the years 1964 and 2013, as many as 11.3 million Hindus had fled Bangladesh. In order to woo this massive demographic, the BJP launched an aggressive campaign in 2019 to bring in amendments to India’s Citizenship Act that would allow undocumented migrants to become Indian citizens – as long as they weren’t Muslim. Additionally, the party said that this new law would ensure a “chronology” that would see only Indian Muslims having to undergo a citizenship test under a future...
