7 ms·

'A nightmarish mess': millions in Assam brace for loss of citizenship

43 points by akbarnama 7y ago

groundlogic 7y ago
Heartbreaking story. Here's another story you should also consider reading: "[flagged] Hong Kong police spraying protesters with blue-dye water to mark for arrest (insider.com)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20846681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20846681 This story was flagged by longtime members to YN (those are the people who get to flag stories) - I have little doubt that many of those are also loyal to mainland china and the CCP. The story reached the #2 spot on HN before the mass flagging. (I wonder how many minutes this comment will last before being mass-flagged in a coordinated manner by a particular cohort?) I really call on YC/HN to remove/rework this flagging system. It's a tool that gangs can use to delete dissent. It's unworthy of civilized discourse. Edit: Ah, there we go, now this entire story is [flagged] and off the main page.
- himeexcelanta 7y ago
  Thank you for mentioning this.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  Very uncomfortable such an important story can get flagged.
- AdrianB1 7y ago
  Not disagreeing, but please help me understand the link between HN and a democracy (or how an action on HN can be undemocratic).
  - wilg 7y ago
    Voting is similar to voting.
  - groundlogic 7y ago
    You're right. I rewrote that bit.
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    Democracy isn't just about government. It's a way for humans to organise in a shared space.
    - AdrianB1 7y ago
      No, it is not. If you share an apartment you don't vote how much to pay to the landlord. You have a vote when you own a share or you have a consultative vote when the owner is interested in opinions, but other than the government nothing is a democracy. Even going with friends on a trip is not a democracy, it is either a consensus or there is no trip.
      - cameronbrown 7y ago
        A flat isn't strictly a shared space though. It's a space your landlord owns completely and is renting out to you. HN is technically pg's/YC's but it's clearly been setup to be a reasonably fair facsimile of democracy, with a few obvious differences (people with more karma = more power) but upvotes and downvotes are definitely a democratic process here.
- Zenst 7y ago
  If you have any concerns or suspicions of abuse of these forums - hit Contact (bottom right on the page) and Dang and the crew will check it out, may be something innocuous like a bug or some other reason. But they take things seriously and will look into it and get back to you. While back I saw a valid comment flagged, checked users history and all looked good, yet lots of flagged comments - I suspected abuse of some form and turns out was a bug in a spam filter that tripped the user into being flagged. So please do contact them for clarity, they hate bugs like the rest of us and in this instance was equally glad it wasn't abuse - as was I. But if they are not made aware, it may get overlooked. [edit spells]
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  > This story was flagged by longtime members to YN (those are the people who get to flag stories) - I have little doubt that many of those are also loyal to mainland china and the CCP. Whoa there. "Many" long time HNers are loyal to the CCP? I call BS. Some? Probably. Many? I'm very skeptical.
  - groundlogic 7y ago
    This story just got flagged? I dunno... Anyway, my main complaint here is that it seems like a very small number of old users can shut down any story if they are acting together.
    - luckylion 7y ago
      There's no need to be part of a conspiracy to not want HN to turn into a CNN/BBC/Guardian RSS feed. I get that you want to spread your message far and wide, but maybe this isn't the right place for it. Ads get flagged down, politics tend to get flagged down, celebrity news as well. There are other places for those.
      - groundlogic 7y ago
        Sure; I get that part. But on the other hand, the message really seems to resonate with the average HN reader. Lots and lots of upvotes.. and then deletion.
        johnchristopher 7y ago
        That could just mean news junkies are upvoting the dopamine outrage porn first because they check the front page more often than the majority of users who happen to flag it later because they aren't 24/7 on HN.
        PavlovsCat 7y ago
        > That could just mean news junkies are upvoting the dopamine outrage porn first I love how in any other context, that would give you a stern warning. Calling something "pearl clutching"? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20844863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20844863 Claiming people who are interested in some things that get flagged as "news junkies" out for "dopamine outrage porn", utterly dehumanizing them? That's just fine. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791955 I made that list just from things I happened to notice, if I actually checked all penalized stories 24/7 it would be a lot longer. At this point it really takes outright attacking people like you did, while they are forbidden from doing the same, to pretend the pattern is not there. The usual "send us an email, we'll get back to you" is no help either -- you let public discourse be manipulated, it needs to be discussed in public. > Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. -- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn By the way, this includes downvoting without reply, flagging, all that, the proof is in the pudding. Even after this topic has been flagged off the front page, I got 2 downvotes in 15 minutes? Seems like it's still being patrolled by "hooded executioners". https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/cxz64b/300_uncut_footage_of_the_hk_police_terrorist/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/cxz64b/300_uncut_... Sweeping totalitarianism under the rug has nothing to do with being a hacker or an intellectual, and trying to silence people silently, from the dark, is befitting.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- detaro 7y ago
  "long time members"? Isn't the flagging threshold still something like 30 Karma points? Also, please stop breaking site rules with your comments, it won't lead to your "requests" being seen any more favorable...
  - groundlogic 7y ago
    What rule am I breaking?
    - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
      Not sure it's quite a "rule", but: You took a discussion about a story, and derailed it with a completely different story. That gets annoying. Also, the way you did it is a trope that I personally find highly annoying ("if you care about X, then you must/should/need to also care about Y"). I consider it highly manipulative... except that for some reason, your post fit the pattern, but didn't set off my "I'm being manipulated" alarms. You didn't seem to be trying to do that, but you still hijacked the discussion. Note well: Your story is worth talking about. It just doesn't belong in the discussion of this article. As to why the other article disappeared... HN has a "flame war" detector. Any article that has more comments than upvotes has probably become a flame war. They usually or always kill those. You can vouch for them, though, as a way of saying that this shouldn't have been killed. (You need to have "show dead" turned on in your profile to still be able to see it. Also, you may have to have some level of karma to be able to vouch for something.)
    - tim333 7y ago
      Kinda doesn't fit with this: (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) In Comments ... Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. ... Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That destroys intellectual curiosity, which is what the site exists for.
    - detaro 7y ago
      In addition to what others have mentioned, there's an explicit rule to not accuse other commenter of organized efforts to promote or suppress something without clear evidence, especially not on quite emotionally charged reasons.
yumraj 7y ago
For the record, these people should never have been citizens in the first place. These are the folks who came through porus border from Bangladesh illegally.
- blincoln 7y ago
  If their families have been there since 1938, as is the case for one of the people mentioned in the article, where would you suggest they are citizens?
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    OP isn't wrong, but it's also Assam's fault for not properly maintaining it's border. Once you start making people stateless several generations removed from those who did cross illegally, that's on them.
    - makomk 7y ago
      The border in question wasn't even a border in 1938 because that predates the partition of India. Bangladesh, the country that certain Indian political factions are claiming these people are from, only came into existence in 1972 and mainly just recognises people who were permanent residents there in 1971 as citizens.
  - yumraj 7y ago
    > If their families have been there since 1938 But they hadn't been. Don't base your opinion on a single article. A lot of process was followed after decades of issues and finally on the order of Supreme Court. In fact, the number of people identified by most counts is order of magnitude smaller than what it should have been.
- srean 7y ago
  Some may well have, but given my country is so well known for the correctness of its paperwork and documentation (not) many would be caught in the crossfire, especially the uneducated and the poor. Many in the current govt believe that india is essentially a hindu country and some 'purification' is in order. The problem isnt the fact that they could be Bangladeshis. The problem is that they are Muslims, had they been Hindus the government would have fallen over themselves to make a case for giving them citizenship. If one reads pro hindutva magazines, for example, swarajya thats exactly what they champion.
qazpot 7y ago
These people never had a citizenship to begin with, so they are not losing citizenship, they were breaking the law by being illegally in the country.
- AdrianB1 7y ago
  Hard argument to make for that, see USA where this is a mainstream topic for decades.
- pm90 7y ago
  That is a stupid argument. They're people, sure they don't have the paperwork, but they've built homes and a life for themselves. Why disrupt that? What is the goal here? Its not like India is so small that there isn't space for more people.
  - qazpot 7y ago
    > hey're people, sure they don't have the paperwork, but they've built homes and a life for themselves. Why disrupt that? They have settled here illegally. > Its not like India is so small that there isn't space for more people. Actually yes India already has a population problem the last thing it needs is illegal immigrants further contributing to the problem. Although this is not politically correct but these people also have the very large number of children because of their religious teachings.
    - pm90 7y ago
      The fertility rate is actually dropping a lot. In total, these are a few million people. Even if they had a ridiculous number of children, they would still not make any significant demographic difference. They would provide the country with more labor though.
      - talonx 7y ago
        >>Even if they had a ridiculous number of children, they would still not make any significant demographic difference. But they do. The "demographic difference" here is being made because India is vastly more varied culturally than you might be aware.
rootw0rm 7y ago
what madness. if you're born on the wrong side of an imaginary line and make your way across...and just try to exist...someone can hold you in a cage forever. it's insane how many people think this is okay.
- makomk 7y ago
  Even being born on the right side of the line is not enough in this case, even if you can prove it - India does not have birthright citizenship like the US. Also, people have apparently been declared non-citizens without even being given the chance to prove otherwise - including an Army veteran employed by their own border force: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-48523963 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-48523963 In reality, India seems to be holding people in cages forever simply for being members of the wrong racial group, nothing more or less.
- AdrianB1 7y ago
  My college colleague who crossed the border illegally from her country in Europe (she was a citizen) to the neighboring country in Europe was shot to death. I think she would have preferred some prison time instead. Laws are laws, some are insane, but most people agree that obeying laws is good and enforcing laws is good.
- rayiner 7y ago
  It’s not an “imaginary line.” It’s the line between different political entities—different democratic polities. Who is allowed to be on which side of the line determines who gets a say in your shared governance. The borders in the region between Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan reflect real and meaningful divisions between groups of people who don’t want to be lashed together in the same polity and exercised their right to self determination to sever ties with each other. That is, of course, not a defense of the specific measures India is undertaking. But to deny India’s right to police it’s border is to deny Indians’ their self determination. (And I say that as a Bangladeshi. If the shoe were on the other foot, Bangladesh would react no differently.)
- yumraj 7y ago
  Name one country, at least one which is doing well economically better than its neighbors, which has open borders and anyone is allowed to go there and gets citizenship just by entering there.
devoply 7y ago
In a country of 1.4 billion let's deport 1 million for shits and giggles to appease Hindu nationalists. You know what Indian Muslims should do to punish Modhi is simply have 1 extra child. Similarly the legal Mexican immigrants in the US should do the same to punish Trump. Make Hindustan Great Again.
- qazpot 7y ago
  > Indian Muslims should do to punish Modhi is simply have 1 extra child Indian Muslims have been having more children than any body can afford long before Modi came in power. Going by your logic Indian Muslims seems to be punishing India. I would like to point out that India Muslims have 7-8 children as part of their religious teachings.
  - devoply 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_population_growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_population_growth > Growth rate of Muslims has been consistently higher than the growth rate of Hindus, even since the census data of independent India has been available. For example, during the 1991-2001 decade, Muslim growth rate was 29.52% (vs 19.92% for Hindus)[19] However, Muslims population growth rate declined to 24.6% during 2001-2011 decade, in keeping with the similar decline in most religious groups of India. As the West has learned if you wish to control a population then you must not make them a poor underclass... Poor underclasses always produce more children than richer classes. But yeah it's true India's Muslims have been growing faster than India's Hindus. My point was this is not going to fix that and it's simply an insult to human rights to be punished using the same methods being used to attack it. By growing the population even more. In another words to fix the population issue you need to move everyone up the economic ladder so that they become self-indulgent individualists who stop caring about religion and their community and starting caring about themselves and enjoyment of their lives. At which point they will stop having children and the population will shrink. Without anyone suffering from anything except lonliness.
pm90 7y ago
What in the world. First the Rohingya's, then the Kashmiris and now Assam. It seems like minorities are being systematically targeted all across the subcontinent.
- gregimba 7y ago
  The common denominator seems to be these are majority muslim groups. A religious minority is being systematically targeted in multiple places.
- yumraj 7y ago
  Yep, the same minority when in majority wipes out, or force converts the corresponding minorities till there are none left.
thrawaw3234432 7y ago
This is what happens when you let something rot for electoral gains. Without historical knowledge, it is easy to take the humanitarian cause, but with it, things become complicated (like every conflict zone), which is perhaps why "liberal" outlets conveniently forget to talk about them (think Israel, Palestine, Jewish exodus from Middle East, Europe). The year 1971 was when a party from East Pakistan won the state elections; this was rejected by the Punjabi-dominated Army, which started killing Bangladeshis by the millions. A letter by the US Ambassador (in Dhaka, Kolkata?) was completely ignored by Nixon and his henchman, Kissinger. This led to a genocide, which took a religious turn (as it always does), and Hindus were killed and raped en masse. The exodus, which was merely a repeat of the one following partition, led Indira Gandhi (a brutal dictator in her own right), to help create an independent state of Bangladesh. The refugees were never repatriated, and the open border meant easy passage for people. Governments from states neighbouring Bangladesh have encouraged Muslim voters to illegally emigrate to bolster their electoral majorities; this is not a contentious fact in India. Indeed, the communists even killed over 5000 Hindu refugees using state police in Marichjhapi, in order to secure their vote share in the decade after the war; there is, as usual, a total silence to the brutal state-sponsored genocides by the Left. There is however a strong distaste for the trespassers, and this is indeed along religious lines. Bangladesh is also a breeding ground for the global Jihad, and this is precisely why Myanmar too reacts the way it has. In India, Muslim majority areas are often ... erm ... not exactly places where minorities are left in peace (Kashmir, Ramanathapuram, Bhatkal, Malda, tons of districts in Bengal, Bihar, UP). Having this many Bangladeshis, being supported by corrupt political elites, is not exactly a problem it needs right now. India in particular has one too many Kashmirs brewing, and unlike the Christians and Muslims who have historically either been "harvesting" lands by one means or the other, India's natives have no real homeland. Not even India, which constitutionally discriminates against Hindus. Letting a wound fester, sadly, has its consequences. The instabilities caused by the jihadis has grave consequences to India's economy and culture, and it has every right to deport illegal immigrants.
- srean 7y ago
  Barring a few exaggerations here and there, your comment is very accurate, knowledgeable and also uncontroversial. I am a little surprised that this required a throwaway handle. Regarding exaggerations Marichjhapi death toll, the unofficial one, was around a thousand at max. Official one of course is ridiculous -- 2. If you are insinuating that Muslim population in Malda, West Bengal are up to no good, thats patently false because I have eyes on the ground there. Hope you comment more on HN.

43 points by akbarnama 7y ago

Heartbreaking story. Here's another story you should also consider reading: "[flagged] Hong Kong police spraying protesters with blue-dye water to mark for arrest (insider.com)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20846681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20846681 This story was flagged by longtime members to YN (those are the people who get to flag stories) - I have little doubt that many of those are also loyal to mainland china and the CCP. The story reached the #2 spot on HN before the mass flagging. (I wonder how many minutes this comment will last before being mass-flagged in a coordinated manner by a particular cohort?) I really call on YC/HN to remove/rework this flagging system. It's a tool that gangs can use to delete dissent. It's unworthy of civilized discourse. Edit: Ah, there we go, now this entire story is [flagged] and off the main page.

himeexcelanta 7y ago
Thank you for mentioning this.
cameronbrown 7y ago
Very uncomfortable such an important story can get flagged.
AdrianB1 7y ago
Not disagreeing, but please help me understand the link between HN and a democracy (or how an action on HN can be undemocratic).
- wilg 7y ago
  Voting is similar to voting.
- groundlogic 7y ago
  You're right. I rewrote that bit.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  Democracy isn't just about government. It's a way for humans to organise in a shared space.
  - AdrianB1 7y ago
    No, it is not. If you share an apartment you don't vote how much to pay to the landlord. You have a vote when you own a share or you have a consultative vote when the owner is interested in opinions, but other than the government nothing is a democracy. Even going with friends on a trip is not a democracy, it is either a consensus or there is no trip.
    - cameronbrown 7y ago
      A flat isn't strictly a shared space though. It's a space your landlord owns completely and is renting out to you. HN is technically pg's/YC's but it's clearly been setup to be a reasonably fair facsimile of democracy, with a few obvious differences (people with more karma = more power) but upvotes and downvotes are definitely a democratic process here.
Zenst 7y ago
If you have any concerns or suspicions of abuse of these forums - hit Contact (bottom right on the page) and Dang and the crew will check it out, may be something innocuous like a bug or some other reason. But they take things seriously and will look into it and get back to you. While back I saw a valid comment flagged, checked users history and all looked good, yet lots of flagged comments - I suspected abuse of some form and turns out was a bug in a spam filter that tripped the user into being flagged. So please do contact them for clarity, they hate bugs like the rest of us and in this instance was equally glad it wasn't abuse - as was I. But if they are not made aware, it may get overlooked. [edit spells]
AnimalMuppet 7y ago
> This story was flagged by longtime members to YN (those are the people who get to flag stories) - I have little doubt that many of those are also loyal to mainland china and the CCP. Whoa there. "Many" long time HNers are loyal to the CCP? I call BS. Some? Probably. Many? I'm very skeptical.
- groundlogic 7y ago
  This story just got flagged? I dunno... Anyway, my main complaint here is that it seems like a very small number of old users can shut down any story if they are acting together.
  - luckylion 7y ago
    There's no need to be part of a conspiracy to not want HN to turn into a CNN/BBC/Guardian RSS feed. I get that you want to spread your message far and wide, but maybe this isn't the right place for it. Ads get flagged down, politics tend to get flagged down, celebrity news as well. There are other places for those.
    - groundlogic 7y ago
      Sure; I get that part. But on the other hand, the message really seems to resonate with the average HN reader. Lots and lots of upvotes.. and then deletion.
      - johnchristopher 7y ago
        That could just mean news junkies are upvoting the dopamine outrage porn first because they check the front page more often than the majority of users who happen to flag it later because they aren't 24/7 on HN.
        PavlovsCat 7y ago
        > That could just mean news junkies are upvoting the dopamine outrage porn first I love how in any other context, that would give you a stern warning. Calling something "pearl clutching"? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20844863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20844863 Claiming people who are interested in some things that get flagged as "news junkies" out for "dopamine outrage porn", utterly dehumanizing them? That's just fine. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791955 I made that list just from things I happened to notice, if I actually checked all penalized stories 24/7 it would be a lot longer. At this point it really takes outright attacking people like you did, while they are forbidden from doing the same, to pretend the pattern is not there. The usual "send us an email, we'll get back to you" is no help either -- you let public discourse be manipulated, it needs to be discussed in public. > Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. -- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn By the way, this includes downvoting without reply, flagging, all that, the proof is in the pudding. Even after this topic has been flagged off the front page, I got 2 downvotes in 15 minutes? Seems like it's still being patrolled by "hooded executioners". https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/cxz64b/300_uncut_footage_of_the_hk_police_terrorist/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/cxz64b/300_uncut_... Sweeping totalitarianism under the rug has nothing to do with being a hacker or an intellectual, and trying to silence people silently, from the dark, is befitting.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
detaro 7y ago
"long time members"? Isn't the flagging threshold still something like 30 Karma points? Also, please stop breaking site rules with your comments, it won't lead to your "requests" being seen any more favorable...
- groundlogic 7y ago
  What rule am I breaking?
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    Not sure it's quite a "rule", but: You took a discussion about a story, and derailed it with a completely different story. That gets annoying. Also, the way you did it is a trope that I personally find highly annoying ("if you care about X, then you must/should/need to also care about Y"). I consider it highly manipulative... except that for some reason, your post fit the pattern, but didn't set off my "I'm being manipulated" alarms. You didn't seem to be trying to do that, but you still hijacked the discussion. Note well: Your story is worth talking about. It just doesn't belong in the discussion of this article. As to why the other article disappeared... HN has a "flame war" detector. Any article that has more comments than upvotes has probably become a flame war. They usually or always kill those. You can vouch for them, though, as a way of saying that this shouldn't have been killed. (You need to have "show dead" turned on in your profile to still be able to see it. Also, you may have to have some level of karma to be able to vouch for something.)
  - tim333 7y ago
    Kinda doesn't fit with this: (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) In Comments ... Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. ... Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That destroys intellectual curiosity, which is what the site exists for.
  - detaro 7y ago
    In addition to what others have mentioned, there's an explicit rule to not accuse other commenter of organized efforts to promote or suppress something without clear evidence, especially not on quite emotionally charged reasons.

yumraj 7y ago

For the record, these people should never have been citizens in the first place. These are the folks who came through porus border from Bangladesh illegally.

blincoln 7y ago
If their families have been there since 1938, as is the case for one of the people mentioned in the article, where would you suggest they are citizens?
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  OP isn't wrong, but it's also Assam's fault for not properly maintaining it's border. Once you start making people stateless several generations removed from those who did cross illegally, that's on them.
  - makomk 7y ago
    The border in question wasn't even a border in 1938 because that predates the partition of India. Bangladesh, the country that certain Indian political factions are claiming these people are from, only came into existence in 1972 and mainly just recognises people who were permanent residents there in 1971 as citizens.
- yumraj 7y ago
  > If their families have been there since 1938 But they hadn't been. Don't base your opinion on a single article. A lot of process was followed after decades of issues and finally on the order of Supreme Court. In fact, the number of people identified by most counts is order of magnitude smaller than what it should have been.
srean 7y ago
Some may well have, but given my country is so well known for the correctness of its paperwork and documentation (not) many would be caught in the crossfire, especially the uneducated and the poor. Many in the current govt believe that india is essentially a hindu country and some 'purification' is in order. The problem isnt the fact that they could be Bangladeshis. The problem is that they are Muslims, had they been Hindus the government would have fallen over themselves to make a case for giving them citizenship. If one reads pro hindutva magazines, for example, swarajya thats exactly what they champion.

qazpot 7y ago

These people never had a citizenship to begin with, so they are not losing citizenship, they were breaking the law by being illegally in the country.

AdrianB1 7y ago
Hard argument to make for that, see USA where this is a mainstream topic for decades.
pm90 7y ago
That is a stupid argument. They're people, sure they don't have the paperwork, but they've built homes and a life for themselves. Why disrupt that? What is the goal here? Its not like India is so small that there isn't space for more people.
- qazpot 7y ago
  > hey're people, sure they don't have the paperwork, but they've built homes and a life for themselves. Why disrupt that? They have settled here illegally. > Its not like India is so small that there isn't space for more people. Actually yes India already has a population problem the last thing it needs is illegal immigrants further contributing to the problem. Although this is not politically correct but these people also have the very large number of children because of their religious teachings.
  - pm90 7y ago
    The fertility rate is actually dropping a lot. In total, these are a few million people. Even if they had a ridiculous number of children, they would still not make any significant demographic difference. They would provide the country with more labor though.
    - talonx 7y ago
      >>Even if they had a ridiculous number of children, they would still not make any significant demographic difference. But they do. The "demographic difference" here is being made because India is vastly more varied culturally than you might be aware.

rootw0rm 7y ago

what madness. if you're born on the wrong side of an imaginary line and make your way across...and just try to exist...someone can hold you in a cage forever. it's insane how many people think this is okay.

makomk 7y ago
Even being born on the right side of the line is not enough in this case, even if you can prove it - India does not have birthright citizenship like the US. Also, people have apparently been declared non-citizens without even being given the chance to prove otherwise - including an Army veteran employed by their own border force: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-48523963 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-48523963 In reality, India seems to be holding people in cages forever simply for being members of the wrong racial group, nothing more or less.
AdrianB1 7y ago
My college colleague who crossed the border illegally from her country in Europe (she was a citizen) to the neighboring country in Europe was shot to death. I think she would have preferred some prison time instead. Laws are laws, some are insane, but most people agree that obeying laws is good and enforcing laws is good.
rayiner 7y ago
It’s not an “imaginary line.” It’s the line between different political entities—different democratic polities. Who is allowed to be on which side of the line determines who gets a say in your shared governance. The borders in the region between Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan reflect real and meaningful divisions between groups of people who don’t want to be lashed together in the same polity and exercised their right to self determination to sever ties with each other. That is, of course, not a defense of the specific measures India is undertaking. But to deny India’s right to police it’s border is to deny Indians’ their self determination. (And I say that as a Bangladeshi. If the shoe were on the other foot, Bangladesh would react no differently.)
yumraj 7y ago
Name one country, at least one which is doing well economically better than its neighbors, which has open borders and anyone is allowed to go there and gets citizenship just by entering there.

devoply 7y ago

In a country of 1.4 billion let's deport 1 million for shits and giggles to appease Hindu nationalists. You know what Indian Muslims should do to punish Modhi is simply have 1 extra child. Similarly the legal Mexican immigrants in the US should do the same to punish Trump. Make Hindustan Great Again.

qazpot 7y ago
> Indian Muslims should do to punish Modhi is simply have 1 extra child Indian Muslims have been having more children than any body can afford long before Modi came in power. Going by your logic Indian Muslims seems to be punishing India. I would like to point out that India Muslims have 7-8 children as part of their religious teachings.
- devoply 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_population_growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_population_growth > Growth rate of Muslims has been consistently higher than the growth rate of Hindus, even since the census data of independent India has been available. For example, during the 1991-2001 decade, Muslim growth rate was 29.52% (vs 19.92% for Hindus)[19] However, Muslims population growth rate declined to 24.6% during 2001-2011 decade, in keeping with the similar decline in most religious groups of India. As the West has learned if you wish to control a population then you must not make them a poor underclass... Poor underclasses always produce more children than richer classes. But yeah it's true India's Muslims have been growing faster than India's Hindus. My point was this is not going to fix that and it's simply an insult to human rights to be punished using the same methods being used to attack it. By growing the population even more. In another words to fix the population issue you need to move everyone up the economic ladder so that they become self-indulgent individualists who stop caring about religion and their community and starting caring about themselves and enjoyment of their lives. At which point they will stop having children and the population will shrink. Without anyone suffering from anything except lonliness.

pm90 7y ago

What in the world. First the Rohingya's, then the Kashmiris and now Assam. It seems like minorities are being systematically targeted all across the subcontinent.

gregimba 7y ago
The common denominator seems to be these are majority muslim groups. A religious minority is being systematically targeted in multiple places.
yumraj 7y ago
Yep, the same minority when in majority wipes out, or force converts the corresponding minorities till there are none left.

thrawaw3234432 7y ago

This is what happens when you let something rot for electoral gains. Without historical knowledge, it is easy to take the humanitarian cause, but with it, things become complicated (like every conflict zone), which is perhaps why "liberal" outlets conveniently forget to talk about them (think Israel, Palestine, Jewish exodus from Middle East, Europe). The year 1971 was when a party from East Pakistan won the state elections; this was rejected by the Punjabi-dominated Army, which started killing Bangladeshis by the millions. A letter by the US Ambassador (in Dhaka, Kolkata?) was completely ignored by Nixon and his henchman, Kissinger. This led to a genocide, which took a religious turn (as it always does), and Hindus were killed and raped en masse. The exodus, which was merely a repeat of the one following partition, led Indira Gandhi (a brutal dictator in her own right), to help create an independent state of Bangladesh. The refugees were never repatriated, and the open border meant easy passage for people. Governments from states neighbouring Bangladesh have encouraged Muslim voters to illegally emigrate to bolster their electoral majorities; this is not a contentious fact in India. Indeed, the communists even killed over 5000 Hindu refugees using state police in Marichjhapi, in order to secure their vote share in the decade after the war; there is, as usual, a total silence to the brutal state-sponsored genocides by the Left. There is however a strong distaste for the trespassers, and this is indeed along religious lines. Bangladesh is also a breeding ground for the global Jihad, and this is precisely why Myanmar too reacts the way it has. In India, Muslim majority areas are often ... erm ... not exactly places where minorities are left in peace (Kashmir, Ramanathapuram, Bhatkal, Malda, tons of districts in Bengal, Bihar, UP). Having this many Bangladeshis, being supported by corrupt political elites, is not exactly a problem it needs right now. India in particular has one too many Kashmirs brewing, and unlike the Christians and Muslims who have historically either been "harvesting" lands by one means or the other, India's natives have no real homeland. Not even India, which constitutionally discriminates against Hindus. Letting a wound fester, sadly, has its consequences. The instabilities caused by the jihadis has grave consequences to India's economy and culture, and it has every right to deport illegal immigrants.

srean 7y ago
Barring a few exaggerations here and there, your comment is very accurate, knowledgeable and also uncontroversial. I am a little surprised that this required a throwaway handle. Regarding exaggerations Marichjhapi death toll, the unofficial one, was around a thousand at max. Official one of course is ridiculous -- 2. If you are insinuating that Muslim population in Malda, West Bengal are up to no good, thats patently false because I have eyes on the ground there. Hope you comment more on HN.