Refugees or infiltrators? The Bharatiya Janata Party and “illegal” migration from Bangladesh

For South Asia, it is axiomatic that the experience of nation state formation and notions of national identity for three nations within the region (India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) have been accompanied and conditioned by the mass movement of displaced peoples. In the case of Bangladesh, a violent campaign by the Pakistani state to suppress Bengali demands for regional autonomy resulted in the movement of approximately 9 million refugees into India and provided the justification for the intervention of the Indian military on the basis of "indirect aggression" (Weiner 1993, 1740-41). Migration and displacement have, therefore, occupied a central position in the process of nation formation and in moments of international conflict and tension between the nation states of the region…