By OUR STAFF REPORTER
New Delhi, 3 Feb: The challenge of migration confronting the world has come in for close scrutiny, with the experts looking at the human movement through diverse prisms.
Participating in a conversation around Bhaskar Roy’s new book, ‘Border Crossers’, here on Friday, former Indian ambassador to the US, Meera Shankar said that, with President Trump vowing a harsh crackdown on the undocumented émigrés, ‘immigration has become a huge issue playing into white American anxiety about impending demographic change and browning of their society’.
Taking a broad perspective of the looming crisis, Shankar stressed that the best guarantee against migration was to develop the neighbouring countries. The diplomat cautioned that though India had agreed to take back 18,000 purported undocumented migrants, ‘this process could prove difficult to navigate and hugely disruptive’.
Surveying the scenario in India’s neighbourhood, she proposed a formalised work permit system for Bangladeshis to prevent illegal migration. She also held those guarding the borders responsible for abetting migration by not discharging their responsibilities scrupulously.
Shankar praised Border Crossers for capturing the trauma and moral predicament of migration authentically.
Dr Sanjeev Chopra, former Director, Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, said that the novel had focused on the raw and pulsating issue of migration as a human factor. ‘’Migration cannot be stopped by policing alone,’’ he said.
He said that instead of offering a solution to any issue, Partition of the Indian subcontinent had actually opened up new areas of discord, distorting the social balance evolved over the centuries. He said that though the country’s borders had not yet been entirely fenced up, barbed wire along Punjab’s boundary with Pakistan solved many problems.
Reading out a few gripping paragraphs from Border Crossers, Chopra said, ‘’This book has gained such a high level of excellence it should be part of the university curricula.’’ Chopra said that this was the first migration novel to come out of India.
Roy said that hugely impressed by the diasporic writers’ love-and-longing-for-home stories which are an outcome of their cultural alienation, he had chosen to chronicle the narrative of the undocumented Bangladeshi migrants in India’s big cities.
Taking a wider view of the migration waves around the world, the author said that at a time when right-wing politics seemed dominant in many parts of the world, one tended to forget that the receiving cultures often benefited from the boat people. He recalled that Dr Uğur Şahin, the German scientist who developed the breakthrough Covid vaccine, is a Turkish migrant.
