Cleaning the ‘Bangladeshi’: DNA and citizenship in contemporary India

Despite the tremendous diversity of languages and cultures in India, we are all but leaves of the same tree – migrants and mixed. The genome data that we have of Indians show that there are no genetic differences between caste groups. Tribals too are not some isolated communities. 

“Tribals are us,” as Tony Joseph reminds us. 

Yet the utopia of a Hindu cultural field and race, free from the Muslims, is rife, nourished by the far right ideologies and politics in contemporary India. Those ideals don’t fall too far from what is categorised as negative eugenics.

When we speak of citizenship, the subject of race is not far away. The affinity between race and citizenship can also be explored with the term ‘eugenics’ that Francis Galton coined in the late 19th century. 

Eugenics is largely an immoral pseudoscience that believes in producing ‘perfect’ people or racial improvement through genetics. It is a belief in the purity of humans and is derived from the Greek word eugenes which means ‘good in birth’ or ‘good in stock’. It has a racial and mass character with a wide variety of approaches. We also have proponents of positive eugenics. For instance, vegetarianism is seen by many as a positive eugenics and a way of purifying one's body. Such claims can hardly be backed by science. 

Linguist and literary critic GN Devy writes that in eugenics, the term “pure, and its antonym, impure, used as adjectives for blood, provide the foundation for racism”. When we talk of race and eugenics, the elaborate histories of its application in Europe and America are often discussed. The case of the Nazis and their fixation on a pure Aryan race – an effort in which six million Jews were exterminated – takes away most of our attention. With the Holocaust, eugenics is a synonym for the concentration camp and evil. 

As Devy aptly puts it, this pseudoscience victimises both minorities like Adivasis in India and science too. Many groups such as Nehalis, Jarwas, the Nicobarese, Malpaharias and Kondhs have been subjected to gene testing. Race lurks in such endeavours. 

However, in India, too we have seen a massive scale of sterilisation, mostly involuntary, with violent consequences, particularly for women. Sterilisation is one of the most popular contraceptive methods in the world and a significant toolkit of eugenics. It is reported that in India, 40-50 lakh tubectomies are performed annually and about two women die daily as a result of those procedures. A report published in 2022 by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs noted that India accounts for “48 percent of the global number of women who use female sterilisation. Female sterilisation would be the fourth most used method…worldwide if India were not included in the calculation.”

The colonial foot soldiers, writes Hanna Green for the Pulitzer Centre, saw India as a place of “uncontrollable fertility that threatened disease, destruction, and war.” Large family sizes were seen as a problem, equated to national instability. In turn, sterilisation was used as a rational intervention to reduce population size. Incentives such as cash payments or food were also provided to undergo sterilisation in the name of family planning. It took a coercive form, argues Mytheli Sreenivas, with sterilisation certificates being tied to welfare and public policies such as ration cards, land allotments, new housing for slum dwellers, and even electricity connections. 

India’s intervention on its citizen’s fertility started early, during the Emergency period under Indira Gandhi, with an extended focus on men in its initial stages. In 1976 alone, 6.2 million men had to suffer sterilisation programmes by the Indian government. Rates of sterilisation in men have declined drastically since, and rates among women have shot up particularly post-1980s, after the Emergency in India. It is also important to note that higher fertility rates are observed among the poor, which tends to decline with rise of women’s education levels. 

This obsession with overpopulation was also not limited to the Indian government alone. The United States showed significant interest in population reduction in the sub-continent. From its colonial past, it has now become a gendered and a “developmental” issue with USAID, World Bank, and the UN playing their usual act. Although, overpopulation as a term was not recorded until the late 19th century. 

In New India, different boundaries of cultural, social and religious are injected into discussions of race. Late migrants are seen as impure and thus, imperfect religious and social subjects for assimilation into national or regional culture. Assamese nationalism is one such case, which sees the migrants from erstwhile East Bengal and ones with roots in Bengali culture as an enemy figure to Assamese people and culture. It includes both Hindus and Muslims. 

Of late, the target subject and exclusion has been primarily Muslims in Assam, particularly the Miya community, by the BJP government in the state. These ideas of seeking a “Bangladeshi” free or “foreigner” free homeland for Assam, which can be seen as an attempt to purify the Assamese cultural field from the Bangladeshis, propelled Assamese nationalist’s demand for updating the National Register of Citizens. 

One of the initial, formal demands of updating the 1951 NRC was made by the All Assam Students Union. It submitted a memorandum to the prime minister of India on September 23, 1981, in which the following demand for NRC was made: “(a) The NRC of 1951 should be made up-to-date by taking into consideration the additions to the number of each family since the time of completion of the register.”

The question of foreigners in Assam is the main object of the NRC process which left out over 1.9 million people from the final register. Its objective was to detect ‘illegal immigrants’ in the state and register ‘genuine citizens’ into the register as citizens. The NRC first introduced in Assam in 1951 was meant to be a rough notebook of the personal particulars of all the people enumerated in the decadal census of the same year. Those notebooks were deemed to be ‘inadmissible’ by the Guwahati High Court in 1970.

Before the SC finally ordered its updating, many tripartite talks took place between the AASU, the Assam government and the India government. At least 18 rounds of talks among these three stakeholders were held to discuss the various provisions and implementations of the Assam Accord. The NRC was slowly developed in these talks. 

The laws around the NRC have been significantly shaped by the demands and concerns placed by the Assamese nationalists. In one of the modalities that came out of the tripartite talks, DNA sampling was suggested as one of the data. 

In the modalities prepared by the Assam government, the section on DNA read as follows: “In case of any doubt in respect of parental linkage, the Circle Registrar of Citizen Registration may refer the matter to Deputy Commissioner of DNA test, and Deputy Commissioner may make necessary amendment in this regard.” 

This suggestion of DNA data is also found in the petition filed by Abhijeet Sharma, representing an NGO called Assam Public Works, and others before the Supreme Court in 2009. His petition proposed the digitisation of data and DNA sampling; the latter would be limited to what it called the “Bangladeshi parent group” which included “immigrants” to Assam prior to March 25, 1971.

Needless to say, only immigrants from Bangladesh were of interest to the petitioners. It’s as if they wanted to purify and segregate the “Assamese” from the “Bangladeshi”. Mrinal Talukdar writes that the petitioners argued that the DNA sampling of this group would be “voluntarily”, “in the interest of the country”, and all their descendents would be considered citizens. In the next phase, the Bangladeshi parent group was to be further classified under the “need to prove citizenship” group and their data would be fed into computers.

This idea of DNA was also submitted in 2013 by the Assam government to the union home ministry. However, it went missing from the version that was made public by the central government in 2014. The missing DNA clause had mixed reactions. Some thought it to be insignificant while a section of civil society groups accused the centre of foul play. 

It’s true that DNA testing can help provide relief for certain specific cases. But bringing it to the forefront will open a can of worms. The segregator mindset of the Assam Public Works petitioners, who wanted to classify “Bangladeshis” as a separate group altogether, could have paved a path to racialised citizenship over and above the turn to “faith-based” citizenship that we now see with the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019.

A future written in history

‘Pure’ is a nasty adjective. These demands – for DNA in the NRC process, for the use of DNA to identify the “Bangladeshi” – are also a eugenic idea with its attendant politics. 

Pravin Togadia, the president of the International Hindu Parishad, recently raised the issue of DNA and said it should be used to identify the Bangladeshi. He spoke of making Assam “clean” of Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants. Togadia’s fixation on DNA and Muslims as “dirt” that requires cleaning is not new. He’s made similar claims in the past too.

The figure of the “Bangladeshi” in the context of Assam is nearly racialised. It is tied to a community that is attributed with certain traits, that requires “cleaning” and removal from the cultural and political space of Assam. We see such sensibilities and ideas exploding in the doings of both state and society. 

For instance, the desire for purity is seen when Miya cultural artefacts were said not to be part of Assamese society and therefore could not be displayed together in the Srimanta Sankardev Kalakshetra. It is witnessed when Miya poetry was declared not to be Assamese literature, and when a Miya mother was disowned as Assamese because she did not “look like one”. It’s also seen, for that matter, when Miya MLAs, who are referred as “infiltrators” by Assam’s CM, are accused of taking over Assam’s legislature, and Miya people of taking over the jobs and land of the indigenous.

Such knee-jerk anxieties of Assamese nationalists, while demonising Miyas in literature and art, share sensibilities of race that give us alternate accounts about how citizenship is not equal or just for minorities in India. This landscape is regional. To add to it, we also have a landscape of the national, filled with Hindutva fanatics, which hardly requires any introduction. 

The state too has constantly profiled Miyas as an internal security issue. From SK Sinha’s report to Sarbananda Sonowal v. Union of India, the profile of the Bangladeshi migrant has always captured the imagination of the law and the state. The Assam government’s recent interventions on marriage and a two-child policy have specifically targeted people dwelling in char areas. Different types of jihad – love, flood, economic, food – are additional means to profile Muslims as unwanted and dangerous subjects.

Such specific interventions single out the Miya community and further victimise them by isolating them and denying them any fraternity with other groups in Assam. Their mobility and freedom are suffocated by both state and society. 

A camp in any form is a crime against humanity. In a letter submitted to then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in September 2012, the Assam Sanmilita Mahasangha proposed to “put the identified illegal foreigners under detention camps or keep them under house arrest and take appropriate steps to get their fingerprint on biometric machine and photograph”. The comfortability, indifference and sheer lack of reflexivity of the meaning and consequences of a detention camp in Assam has disturbed me deeply as a witness to the violent outcomes of the citizenship process and nationalism. 

So many in Assam are ‘connoisseurs of the camp’, to borrow an expression from Susan Sontag, that, at times, I feel their sensibilities are out of my reach. That such a banal demand for camps is articulated in public life, as you see in the letter above, shows the extent of moral, legal and political commitment afforded in Assam to the issue of foreigners.

The NRC and the pedagogy of Assamese nationalism have collectively produced a public and moral life that is obsessed with the figure of the foreigner and outsider. It is as if the “indigenous” exists only in reference to hate for them. Such an outlook provides fertile ground to form ideas of eugenics and race. From the parties who demanded NRC from Assam to Pravin Togadia, these ideas – of purity, lebensraum, hate for a particular community, citizenship of blood (jus sanguinis) – culminate to produce a culture that is not far from the ethos of the camp, of the Nuremberg laws that have become markers of evil and anti-humanity.

Only time will tell whether DNA will be used to identify the “Bangladeshis”. But the culture that approves of it has only gained more ground. One can be certain that it won’t just stop at identification. The possibilities of punishment open to the identified body is what should haunt us. They have already been sent to the camps, evicted, and gunned down. What more? In what form and degree? Like the Palestinians, who are turned into unwanted beings stripped of their humanity, the “Bangladeshis” are too seen as such subjects who are “destined for cleaning” and removal. Their futures are already written in the stories of their past.

Suraj Gogoi teaches sociology at RV University in Bengaluru. He thanks Soundarya Iyer and Amit Kurien for their inputs in writing the piece.

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