20 Bangladeshis in Kerala’s voter list are misleading

On Thursday, a few days before the election in Kerala on April 6, opposition leader Ramesh Chennithala unveiled a list of more than four false ‘fake’ voters, claiming there were major inconsistencies in the voter list. The Electoral Commission told the Supreme Court that it identifies just over 38,000 such voters.

Amid this, a viral post on social media claims that Kerala has 20 illegal Bangladeshi voters. The claim was shared with an article titled, “Massive election fraud detected in Kerala: 20 Bangladeshi immigrants in Lakh are voters”. The article was published by a website called “Social Observer”.

The verified Twitter handle of social activist Madhu Purnima Kishwar also shared the claim.

India Today Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) found no material evidence in support of the claim. There is no report by established media houses or academic journals saying that Kerala has 20 Bangladeshi voters. The center also revealed in Lok Sabha that it has no accurate data on the number of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

The archived versions of the posts can be seen here and here.

AFWA investigation

We first went through the “Social Observer” article that was shared with the viral claim. The article quotes Stanly Sebastian, an educational entrepreneur, as saying that there are 20 Caribbean Bangladeshis and Rohingya Muslims in Kerala who have ration cards and ID cards, and it is the voters who will decide which government will govern the state.

Apart from quoting Sebastian, however, the article mentions no source for this data. We then contacted Sebastian, a Kerala native who currently resides in Bangalore.

In conversation with AFWA, Sebastian said from an independent investigation he conducted, it was revealed that more than 20 Bangladeshi residents live with church cards in Kerala. He claims that he is not claiming that all these 20 Lakh Bangladeshis will be part of Kerala’s voter list.

‘I did not say there are 20 Bangladeshi nationals in Kerala’s voter list. “There must be 20 Bangladeshis with different government credentials in the state, and many of them must have an election ID,” Sebastian said. However, when AFWA asked for documents to substantiate his claim, he could not provide any information.

A total of 2.74 crore voters were published in Kerala’s final election list by EC. The figure includes 1.37 female voters, 1.29 male voters and first time 7.4 voters.

Congress’s Chennithala recently approached the Supreme Court with the fake names in the voter list. It should be noted, however, that the opposition did not comment on Bangladeshi voters in its complaint to the EC or HC.

Chennithala approached the court, claiming that more than 4 lakh multiple entries were found in the voter list, and in some cases, a voter was entered in more than five booths. The EC maintained that only 38,586 duplicate entries were found, and most of these were errors that occurred during the renewal of the voter list.

Bangladeshis in India

According to Census 2011, more than 23 Bangladeshi immigrants live in India. An analysis by December Today by India Today revealed that 76 per cent of them had lived in India even before 1991, and over the past 30 years the number of Bangladeshis coming to India has decreased.

According to the United Nations International Migrant Stock 2019 report, the number of Bangladeshi immigrants in India is a little over 30 lakh. These data also show that the number of international immigrants and refugees in India has been declining since the 1990s.

In 2019, BJP MP Nitesh Ganga Deb in Lok Sabha asked if there had been an increase in the number of illegal settlements in Bangladesh in the country over the past few years. In response, Interior Minister Junior Nityanand Rai said the government had no accurate data on the number of such immigrants.

When asked if the government had received reports indicating an increased presence of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh in Kerala, Rai responded according to the available information. No such report was received from the Kerala government.

AFWA then reaches out to Irudaya Rajan, an expert in Kerala’s migration patterns. Rajan is chair of the University of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOIA)’s research unit on international migration at the Center for Development Studies.

No exact data is available on how many Bangladeshis live in India, let alone Kerala. When Bangladeshis come to work in Kerala, they claim to be from West Bengal, and no one then crosses their nationality. “We do not deny the presence of undocumented Bangladeshis in India, but their numbers are small,” Rajan said.

Benoy Peter, a member of the working group on ‘labor migration to Kerala’, set up by the Kerala State Planning Board, and executive director of the Kerala-based NGO Center for Migration and Inclusive Development, said in the Ernakulam district (which is the highest number of migrants), only two out of every thousand would be a Bangladeshi.

‘Migration from Bangladesh to Kerala is not significant compared to other Indian states. In 2018, Kerala was estimated to have 35 lakh workers from other states. It is therefore not possible to have 20 Bangladeshi voters alone. There may be some Bangladeshis coming with people from Bengal to Kerala. But there is no proper data available, ”Peter explained.

According to a report by ‘The New Indian Express’ published in January 2019, the Ernakulam district, the industrial center of Kerala, has become the critical site for dozens of Bangladeshis and Rohingyas planning their illegal migration to Australia, Canada and Europe.

Taking all the evidence, we can clearly say that the allegation that Kerala has 20 Bangladeshi voters in Lakh is misleading.