“Operation Pushback”: Sangh Parivar , State, Slums And Surreptitious Bangladeshis In New Delhi

The remarkable ease with which the xenophobic tenor of the Hindu Right nationalist organizations or Sangh Parivar found favour with many privileged Indians in the early 1990s cannot be easily or comfortably discounted. Indeed, it even perniciously swayed a moderate secular central government led by the long dominant Congress Party. By mid–1992, when Sangh Parivar made the manifold dangers of the unsanctioned immigration by growing numbers of poverty–stricken Bangladeshi Muslim peasants their rallying cry, the lenient attitude of the Indian state towards these immigrants had hardened with astonishing rapidity. Unsettled by this sweeping tide of Hindu chauvinism, a hurriedly enforced “Action Plan” to locate and identify these undocumented immigrants was followed by brisk efforts under “Operation Pushback” to deport them from New Delhi — India’s capital city and locus of bureaucratic, political and financial power. Haphazard and sporadic in implementation, Operation Pushback, while unmasking partisan dispositions coursing through the Indian bureaucracy, also exemplified Congress’ belated attempts at redeeming its enervated standing. It is also worth noting that the highly circumscribed material realities of the Bangladeshi immigrants residing in Delhi’s numerous slums made them easy targets of these perverse politics, and that subsequent opposition, internally and from neighbouring Bangladesh, to the gratuitous brutality displayed towards the first groups of deportees contributed to the Operation’s abrupt truncation.