French positivist thinker Auguste Comte (1798-1857), famed as the Father of Sociology, once said: “Demography is destiny”. What he meant was that a society’s population size, structure and growth determined its political and economic future.

But when our Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched his High-Power Demography Mission last week, it was not innocent at all. It was out and out his political strategy to raise the bogey of illegal Bangladeshis living in India – the ghuspaithiya who are out on their mission to destabilise our country.

Without going into the central theory of migration, which is that ‘water seeks its own level’ – the best examples of which are the Mexican and other Latin American migrations into the United States, and also that of Indians through the Donkey Trail, which President Donald Trump has raised to a feverish pitch – it may be noted that by putting ghuspaithiya politics on the centre stage, Modi has a much larger agenda than that of Trump.

After all, Mexico is also Christian like the United States. As such, religion does not come into play there. But that Bangladesh is a Muslim nation makes all the difference for Modi’s India. Otherwise, a couple of million, or even more, in a 150-crore-strong India should not steal our sleep. One can see that only a few hundred or thousand Bangladeshis are lining up at the India-Bangladesh border points to return home, fearing their potential imprisonment.

Modi’s Demography Mission was born on August 15, 2025. While delivering his Independence Day speech that day, he thundered, “Today, I … warn the nation of a grave concern … As part of a deliberate conspiracy, the demography of the country is being altered … These [Bangladeshi] infiltrators are........

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