GoI’s effort at reaching out is important. But this should have been done much earlier, when the build-up of support and opposition to the Act was clear. Assam groups had expressed their public opposition to the earlier Bill as far back as 2018. The opposition has come not just from some politicians (including from within BJP itself) but also from many sections of student and professional groups.

Yet, the answers given in government statements have only muddied waters. When Bangladeshi foreign minister A K Abdul Momen, who cancelled his visit to Delhi hours after the Rajya Sabha passed the Bill into law, said that his country did not ‘judge anybody by their religion’, India’s external affairs ministry responded, saying that its reference had been to earlier military regimes and governments — non-Awami League administrations — in Bangladesh where atrocities against minorities had taken place. But the problem is that the Act picks December 2014 as the new cut-off date. Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her Awami League have been in power without a break since 2009, and had earlier held office between 1996-2001. GoI’s main publicity arm, the Press Information Bureau (PIB), issued a series of tweets seeking to clarify ‘facts’, which it terms as ‘Mythbusters’. In one, it says that the “scale of atrocities” against minority groups in Bangladesh “has been coming down in recent years”. Does the latter not mean that the problem has not ended, even as the statement posits that “largescale migration on account of religious persecution is now a remote possibility”?

The key word ‘persecution’ is not defined in any manner. No benchmarks are established. How can it be assumed without robust data that such a drop in migration has taken place only because of religious oppression? People migrate for many reasons: economic, environmental, marriage, education, etc. GoI says that the population share of Hindus in Bangladesh has fallen from 28% to 8%. No absolute numbers are mentioned. Yet, even this 8% figure does not match what former foreign minister, the late Sushma Swaraj, had said in Rajya Sabha last year in an earlier debate when she had asserted that Bangladesh’s Hindu population had, in fact, increased from 8.4% in 2011 to 10.7% in 2017 (bit.do/fk7Hk).

The 2011 Census of India lists the number of Bangladeshis who described their period of residence in India from one year to over 30 years. Bangladesh was founded in 1971, hence the cut-off date; before that, it was, of course, East Pakistan. Here are the stats: 17.6 million before 1991; 2.7 lakh during 1992-2001; 1.09 lakh during 2002-2011; while 1.01 lakh people stated that they were ‘unsure’.

Officially described as a ‘memorandum of settlement’, it is the lightning rod on the CAA issue. The accord outlined that while abiding by relevant international laws as well as India’s own, foreign nationals who had crossed over into Assam illegally after March 25, 1971, would be identified, their names struck off electoral lists and expelled. No religion was mentioned. Does advancing that new deadline by 43 years on the basis of religion based migration not change that?