Detect, Delete, Deport - The Timeline
Ritika Chopra and the Indian Express team have let the genie out of the bottle. SIR is busted!
We’re hopefully just hours away from a mass resistance that independent India has yet not seen. But right before we jump into the movement, it’s important to recall a few things. Why does India need to detect, delete and deport people? Why did SIR start? Who are the illegal immigrants? What does this have to do with each one of us?
In Whose Name?
Modi and Shah have repeatedly stated that the ‘ghuspetiyas’ across Indian cities are from Bangladesh — and the solution is to Detect Delete Deport them. We’re not worried about the Hindus from Nepal or Bangladesh, who per the NDA government have every right to come to India. So, it is a targeted operation against Bengali Muslims from Bangladesh. But why?
Who Are Bengali Muslims?
In short, India sees Bengali Muslims as threats from the eastern frontier. But it’s much deeper. Partition was conceived by Bengal. The census reports shook the core of the Bengali population when they realised that more than half of all Bengalis are Muslims. Hindus went into shock from being outnumbered by the Muslims who they considered untouchable-outcastes and employed as bonded labourers, and Muslims realized their majority status after centuries of oppression by Bengali Hindus. This statistic caused a trauma that never healed! And it led to Pakistan and later Bangladesh being born.
But Bengalis living along the borders find solidarity in their shared ethnic and caste identities. The common language, foods, customs, and even gods, form a navel bond that nation states couldn’t erase. Community living, business, employment, marriages, familial ties, and medical treatments continue even eight decades later across the border, whether we like it or not.
The Dangerous Borderline
India and Bangladesh share the world’s fifth longest border, over 4000 kms through five states. Unlike the western border that runs through large areas of deserts and uninhabited land, the eastern border runs frantically through one of the world’s most densely populated and fertile areas, across ponds and fields, kitchens and backyards. Innumerable people live, farm, fish, and share resources across the borderlines in the so-called “no-man’s land”, peppered with army men from both sides who gun you down at sight.
Citizenship in a Nation State
The madness began in Assam. The British had already taken countless Bengalis to Assam as indentured migrating labourers to cash crop plantations, to grow more food for the World Wars, and to manage the evident and subsequent Bengal Famine. By 1947, wars, partition, famines, cyclones and genocides pushed more Bengalis into Assam. Initially, the Assamese leaders focused on the Bengali Hindus who held jobs and occupied the middle class with the Bongol Kheda movement, but soon the entire focus moved to the working class Muslims - or as they labeled them “Ali, Coolie, Bangalee” birthing the Assam Agitation, claiming demographic and cultural changes in Assam due to the Miyas. Interestingly, large numbers of Bengali Hindus continuously migrated to Assam, but the brunt of causing demographic shift is carried by the Bengali Muslims alone.
The first NRC in India happened in 1951 in Assam. It’s important to note that north-eastern India (except Nagaland) was under the united state of Assam until the mid-70s.
Birth of Detect Delete Deport
This agitation reached its boiling point with the demands for new electoral rolls, barring outsider Bengalis from voting in Assam. Ignored by Indira Gandhi, and fueled by Vajpayee, this agitation turned into the Nellie Genocide in 1983 murdering 3000+ Bengali Muslims. Shortly after the Assam Accord was signed, beginning the first Detect Delete Deport project against Bengalis who came to Assam after 1971.
NRC-CAA-SIR
The only Foreigner’s Tribunals in India exist in Assam, infamous and controversial for its biases and arbitrariness— they are kangaroo courts. Nellie Massacre brought in a political solution, but unfortunately couldn’t stop the natural migration of Bengalis. NRC came back half a decade later in Assam in 2015 with the same goal of Detect Delete Deport, that left more than 9 lakh Hindus and 7 lakh Muslims in Assam stateless. The fire reached the mainland for the first time in 2019 in the form of the Citizenship Amendment Act, popularly known as the CAA-NRC protests. Squashed by the government and the Covid-19 pandemic, it returned disguised as SIR in 2025 with the same old target, erroneously deleting over 13 crore Indians across 16 states and UTs from the Voting List.
From Undocumented to Illegal - What’s at Stake?
What happened in Assam has now turned into a nation-wide catastrophe. The ruling administration is well aware that ascertaining citizenship of over 100 crore Indians is a fake project. Detect Delete Deport was never really about finding ghuspetiyas, but rather about fanning the pan-Indian Islamophobia and casteism plaguing us. But taking the farce too far, the administration has now sacrificed millions of Indian citizens at the altar of logical discrepancies, faltering bureaucracy, and inefficient, fraudulent softwares. What was faced by one community is now staring the whole of India in the face. The journey from undocumented to illegal is very subtle, and can happen in a moment. That’s the fear India has finally woken up to. The fascism that started in Assam is now threatening our very democracy.
The cauldron has boiled over and it's clearer than ever before to see the dangers of the NRC-CAA-SIR cocktail. Whatever happens next, we must remember the events that caused this national disaster to fully understand what’s happening to us. In the famous words of Amit Shah, “Aap chronology ko samjhiye!”
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