Even while the SAARC leadership met on Bentota´s sunny beaches, India´s prime minister was being embarrassed by his insistent ally, Bombay´s don, Bal Thackeray. As part of his cleansing drive, the Maharashtra government of the bjp and Shiv Sena was forcibly removing "illegal immigrants/infiltrators" from the slums of Bombay.
It was no coincidence that most of those removed were Bengali Muslims, who as Thackeray claimed, "would have decided our fate by voting [against him]". His argument was that they were not Indian citizens, and that they were stealing jobs. The issue made headlines when the West Bengal government strongly objected to the move. In the melee that ensued (Maharashtra vs West Bengal), the poor immigrant was left stateless.
The Bangladesh government, as always, got into the farcical act of denying that any of its citizens had crossed the porous border into India to earn a living. The beleaguered Indian Central government wobbled along ambiguously.
Thackeray´s move was flawed on two very important counts: he blatantly abused, for sectarian reasons, the loopholes in India´s weak system of guaranteeing procedural rights to immigrants (assuming all those he got deported were indeed immigrants), and he attacked, on purely economic grounds, the keystone of Bombay´s prosperity – migration.
India´s Foreigners Registration Act gives a foreigner certain procedural rights, such as a chance to argue his case in court, and to prove his citizenship through any of the following: ration card, birth certificate, voter ID, or domicile card. However, the law in India, unlike most other democracies, overwhelmingly favours the authority, where the victim is guilty till he proves his innocence. Proving innocence is easy when you have the means, not when you are barely cobbling together a square meal.