Fear Of Inundation By Illegal Bangladeshi Migrants Drives Sikkim To Urge Locals To Have More Children

Sikkim has taken a novel and laudable step towards precluding largescale influx of Bangladesh-origin Muslims into the state by incentivising locals to have more children. 

Sikkim chief minister Prem Singh Tamang (popularly known as P.S.Golay) announced measures to encourage state government employees to have more children. A package of incentives will also be rolled out for private citizens who are permanent residents of the state. 

Golay, while addressing a ‘Maghe Sankranti’ event at Jorethang town in South Sikkim Sunday (January 15), announced that the population of the indigenous people of the state has started dwindling with local families having only one child. 

This is alarming since the state will, in the near future, register a negative population growth and, eventually, a large population of aged people. But since manpower requirement in the state will increase in future and there will not be enough local manpower to meet the demand, it will trigger largescale influx of migrants. 

Leaders of the ruling Sikkim Krantikari Morcha (SKM) told Swarajya that the fear is of illegal Muslim migrants from Bangladesh who have flooded large parts of neighbouring North Bengal pouring into the Himalayan state as labourers and workers. 

Sikkim’s economy is improving, thanks to tourism, organic farming, hydropower generation and a large number of industrial units that have come up in the state in recent years.

“This will create more jobs and livelihood opportunities. But thanks to the myopic policy of the earlier Pawan Chamling government which had encouraged a ‘one child norm’, the state’s indigenous population will start decreasing in numbers soon. That will result in people coming in from outside the state to meet our manpower requirements,” explained SKM leader Rakesh Bhandari. 

“Sikkim’s requirement for skilled manpower will be met mostly by locals and a small number of genuine Indian citizens from other states. Most of them (from other Indian states) will not cause any demographic change since they have their roots in their own states and will return to their native states,” explained Bhandari. 

“It is with the requirement for semi-skilled and unskilled manpower that the problem arises. This requirement will be filled up almost entirely by manpower from neighbouring Bengal and, to some extent, Bihar. Bangladesh-origin Muslim migrants constitute a large majority of the unskilled and semi-skilled labour force in Bengal and these people will flood our state,” Bhandari said. 

Sikkim already has stringent restrictions on entry and employment of people from outside the state and all people, including tourists, entering the state have to produce valid documents. “But illegal immigrants from Bangladesh have managed to get Indian citizenship and other documents in Bengal, and we cannot challenge them or bar their entry into Sikkim,” said an SKM legislator who did not want to be named. 

“But even so, it would still be okay if these Bangladesh-origin people leave Sikkim after their work in the state is over. But they do not and have the tendency of settling down in the state. They marry local women and settle down here. It is impossible to keep track of them. Their intention is to increase their numbers and then start asserting themselves socially and politically. We have seen this happening in some other small states like Nagaland and do not want a repeat of that in our state,” said the MLA. 

A former minister in the Pawan Chamling government conceded that despite the best efforts of the law enforcement agencies of Sikkim, small settlements of Bangladesh-origin Muslims have come up in some parts of the state. “They (illegal Bangladeshi migrants) possess valid Indian documents that they procure easily and fraudulently in Bengal, thanks to the political patronage they enjoy there (in Bengal). It is difficult to challenge their citizenship status and they cannot be legally asked to move away from the state as well,” said the former Minister who is now with the BJP. 

“The main issue is that these Bengali and Urdu speaking Muslims are illiterate, polygamous and beget many children, and are rabid Islamists. They are religious radicals and aggressive in maintaining their own social and religious identity and do not follow local customs and social norms. So they  can never have cordial ties with the local people and their main objective is to increase their numbers to bring about a demographic change,” he explained. 

The only way to counter the influx of these Bangladesh-origin and Urdu-speaking Muslims into Sikkim is to limit the need for manpower from outside the state. And that can be done if most of the manpower needs of Sikkim are met by locals. 

“That is why the chief minister is rolling out incentives for locals to have more children. Locals constitute a little over 80% of Sikkim’s current population (2022 estimates put the state’s population at 6.78 lakh) and we should keep it that way. For a small state like Sikkim with a very small and decreasing population, getting inundated by unwanted migrants will not take long,” said SKM functionary Bikram Rai. 

Rai pointed out that the presence of even 50,000 migrants would trigger a demographic imbalance in Sikkim. And the entry of 50,000 migrants to fill the requirement for unskilled and semi-skilled manpower in Sikkim over a span of a few years will be barely noticeable. “That is what poses a real and imminent danger,” said Rai.

Chief Minister Golay said that women who are in government service will get one increment after giving birth to the second child and two increments after becoming the mother of the third child. 

The state government gives one year’s maternity leave and one month’s paternity leave to its employees. The government has also installed IVF facilities in its hospitals and women who cannot conceive naturally are being encouraged to take the IVF route. A sum of Rs 3 lakh is also given to them as incentive. 

The state government is also planning to roll out similar incentives to locals who are not in government service. “The entire objective is to immediately arrest the negative birth rate among locals and reverse it dramatically so that families have at least two, if not three or more children,” said Rai. 

A number of other measures will also be rolled out not only to encourage locals to have more children, but also to discourage migration of unskilled and semi-skilled labourers.