We not know yet whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi was requested by President Trump to grace “Howdy, Modi”, an event-cum-electoralrally, indeed an extravaganza that was high on optics and the decibel limit. It was attended by over 50.000 Indian-Americans at a football stadium in Houston, Texas. Mr Modi was taken around the town, particularly to have a glimpse of over 30 government- owned, privately-run jails in which thousands of out-ofstate prisoners are incarcerated. The Brazoria Detention Center, a government-owned facility located forty miles away from Houston, and run by Capital Corrections Resources, Inc., was in the news in August 1997 when a videotape broadcast on national television showed black male prisoners being bitten by police dogs and viciously kicked in the groin and stepped upon by guards.

Modi and Trump share many anxieties that are common to the respective democracies that they helm. The construction of a detention camp for illegal immigrants at Matia in Lower Assam’s Goalpara district will accommodate 3,000 inmates can be compared with the Brazoria Detention Center. The parallel is as poignant as it is relevant. More so, because the NRC exercise has unnerved a vast cross-section of people in Assam, though the putative ‘targets’ were thought to be Bengali-speaking Muslims, following the convergence between Assamese ‘nativism’ against Bengalis and the BJP’s Hindu-nationalist agenda against Muslims. There are approximately 1,140 detainees in the six temporary prison camps in Kokrajhar, Goalpara, Jorhat, Tezpur, Dibrugarh and Silchar.

Already the Centre has asked all states and Union Territories to set up at least one detention centre each with ‘modern’ amenities for illegal migrants/ foreigners. An 11-page ‘2019 Model Detention Manual’, issued by the Ministry of Home Affairs, has recommended the setting up of “one detention camp in the city or district where a major immigration check post is located”. It states that “all members (of a family) should be housed in the same detention centre”, lest the humanitarian aspect provokes criticism. Parallels are, however, not hard to find. In yet another stable democracy of the Middle East, Israel, heavily armed Israeli soldiers often arrest Palestinian children at checkpoints, on the street, or in their homes in the middle of the night.

Many ‘disappear’ without any clue about their whereabouts or without any legal assistance after they are taken to detention centres in Israeli settlements or military camps. It bears recall that in August 2015, during his first presidential campaign, Trump had proposed the mass deportation of illegal aliens as a part of his immigration policy. He proposed a “Deportation Force” to carry out this plan, eerily reminiscent of the “Operation Wetback” programme of the 1950s during the Eisenhower administration that ended following a congressional investigation. Ironically, while both the Republicans led by Trump and the BJP led by Modi share the same aversion towards ‘illegal’ immigrants, Indians in the US might well be destined to stand at the sticky end of Trump’s immigration policy. The US President alone cannot be faulted. The practice of creating enemy aliens in the US came to the forefront during World War II, as after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) signed the Executive Order 9066, which authorised the secretary of war to designate military areas “from which any or all persons may be excluded as deemed necessary or desirable”.

By August 1942, this diktat led to the removal of over 110,000 Japanese Americans ~ two-thirds of whom were US citizens ~ from California, Washington, Oregon, and Arizona. Their internment in camps were located in the remote areas of the Midwest and the Southwest. Should we emulate the US while implementing the NRC? Would it be prudent to act on the basis of paranoia and with preconceived and prejudiced ideas against those who can be ejected and those who can remain in India? There has to be a foolproof mechanism to detect illegal aliens, to keep records of them, to seal the porous borders, and to keep a tab on those corrupt border security personnel and worse, on the social engineers among our politicians who let them in for political gains. How would India feel if the host countries expel Indian immigrants as there has been a ceaseless tide of migrants from India and South China to labourscarce regions such as Myanmar, Sri Lanka, parts of South-east Asia, and the Pacific islands, as well as more distant locations on the coast of Africa, South America, and the Caribbean?

Where migration is intended to be temporary, permanent populations such as the Indians in Mauritius, British Guyana, Natal, Trinidad, Réunion, and Fiji had been alerted. During the postwar period, substantial migration took place to North America and Western Europe from Asia, notably from China, Japan, and Korea, as well as from the Indian subcontinent, the oil-producing Gulf states (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates). This happened first from other Arab states and then from the 1970s from across Asia, initially from India and Pakistan, and subsequently from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and South-east Asia. By 1990 the foreign-born exceeded one-third of the population of the six Gulf states.

According to one estimate, of the 306 million people living in the US in 2010, 40.2 million or one in eight were born in another country, and among all foreign-born, 29 per cent were found to be unauthorised. The corresponding fraction for the Mexico-born population was 58 per cent, while for those from India or China the unauthorised segment was 13 per cent. A recent study by the Pew Research Centre reveals that India, South Korea, the Philippines and China are the biggest source of aliens in the United States today. The purpose of drawing extensively from the American policy on immigration in general and “illegal aliens” in particular is that if we consider that a large number of potential immigrants and infiltrators to be impacting our demography and draining our resources. Therefore, it is deemed to be quite legitimate to drive them out.

A large segment of US voters believe that immigrants are taking away their jobs and putting excessive burden on social security and healthcare services. But then, such Indian immigrants whom Modi addressed at Houston this year constitute the very diaspora that might be at the receiving end of Mr Trump’s immigration policy. As the country’s Home Minister, Amit Shah is determined to “wean out” illegal immigrants from “every inch” of the country. He has referred to them as “termites,” who deserve to be thrown “into the Bay of Bengal”. He wants to make sure that “all such immigrants are deported as per international law”. This has made the scenario murkier. Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina recently returned to Dhaka worried if India will push those excluded by the NRC into Bangladesh.

The implications of the NRC for Bangladesh, overburdened with the inflow of Rohingyas, is not clear. It would be risky to speculate on whether India wants to push all those whom it considers to be illegal immigrants back to Bangladesh. This is bound to have serious repercussions or whether India’s ulterior plan is to keep them ~ 19.6 million and counting ~ in detention camps, and thus stoke another sub-continental humanitarian crisis. There are critical issues that cry out for urgent policy intervention. India’s rank in the Global Hunger Index is but one of them. The illegal immigrants and the construction of detention camps to house the proliferating numbers have given a new dimension to a declining economy with dwindling jobs.

Forget about raising questions on issues that matter, the real blitzkrieg is to keep people busy with red herrings before elections. Or when it comes to the crunch, to divert attention and swing public opinion on emotive matters that are unconnected to their development and wellbeing. Thus the discourse over citizenship, legal or illegal, is not only to pit one category of people against another on religious and ethnic lines, and create a false sense of urgency.

(The writer is a Kolkata based commentator on politics, development and cultural issues)