Securitisation of Bangladeshi Migrants to Assam: An Analysis of India's Parliamentary Discussions

Among the three major political bodies in Assam, the Assamese relied on the strong support of the Bengali Muslims in their struggle over control of Assam's politics, economy, and language after 1947. This alliance was broken in the 1970s and today Bengali Muslims, who originated from present day Bangladesh, are viewed as security threats who need to be addressed through extraordinary measures. Is calling Bangladeshi migrants security threats a culmination of a securitisation process? How did the process of securitisation take shape? Who were the actors and audience? Who needed protection? Using the sociological approach to securitisation as its theoretical framework, this study analyses the mechanism of securitising Bangladeshi migration to Assam starting between the 1970s and the 2010s. Employing the method of discourse analysis, the study analyses the relevant parliamentary debates during the time frame of 1971 to 2020, in India's Lok Sabha (Lower House of India's bicameral Parliament). The project categorises the debates into different decades to grasp how the portrayal of Bangladeshis changed over time and what the different key-words used, reveal about the process. The study finds out that the Bangladeshi migrants went through a securitisation process that ended up in legitimising..