NEW DELHI, 09 April. - (ANA) - Even before President Donald Trump brought nativism front and center in U.S. politics, India was rummaging through American jurisprudence for intellectual ammo to justify similar policies. The world's second-most-populous country experienced a massive influx of Bangladeshi refugees in 1971 when Pakistan declared war on Bangladesh to prevent it from seceding. Pakistan's brutality triggered the single largest displacement of people in the second half of the 20th century, with 10 million Bangladeshis, predominantly Muslim, fleeing to bordering Indian states.

 

 Although two-thirds of these refugees eventually returned home, the rest settled in places such as Assam, a lovely, bucolic state famous for its tea, nestled in the northeastern Himalayan range. This generated tensions with the local Assamese. After some grisly episodes of bloodletting, the Indian Supreme Court intervened in 2005.

 

 It scrapped an existing law that it insisted was hamstringing the government's expulsion efforts and created an expedited deportation timetable. 

 

How did India's highest court justify all this? By quoting an entire passage from the notorious 1889 ruling Chae Chan Ping v. United States, in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Chinese Exclusion Act and declared that "the highest duty of a nation" is to "give security against foreign aggression and encroachment," including from "vast hordes" of foreigners "crowding in upon us." This is exactly how Trump characterizes Central American refugees—and how Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi characterizes Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants. 

 

Moreover, just as Trump is expanding detention camps to house asylum-seekers who illegally cross the border, the Modi government is building a vast network of detention camps to segregate Indian Muslims who can't prove that their ancestors hailed from India.  - (ANA) -

 

AB/ANA/09 April 2020 - - -