Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma on Wednesday claimed there has been a “massive increase” in attempts at undocumented immigration into the state following the political crisis in neighbouring Bangladesh, The Indian Express reported.

At a press briefing about Assam’s performance in 2024, Sarma linked the increase in attempts at undocumented immigration to the troubles faced by Bangladesh’s textile industry.

Bangladesh descended into a political crisis after Sheikh Hasina, the prime minister at the time, was ousted from power and forced to flee to India in August amid widespread student-led protests against her Awami League government.

Subsequently, Nobel laureate economist Muhammad Yunus took over as the head of the country’s interim government.

On Wednesday, the chief minister claimed that while “infiltrators” were being intercepted and pushed back at the border in Assam, the persons were Muslims and not from Bangladesh’s minority Hindu community.

“Every day, Assam Police are detecting 20 to 30 infiltrators and equal numbers are also being witnessed in Tripura,” he said. “So when we tried to research why this is happening, [we found that] after the unrest in Bangladesh, the textile industry has virtually collapsed.”

Sarma claimed that the workers employed in Bangladesh’s textile industry are trying to cross the border and that several factory owners in India “are incentivising this, giving a good amount of money for importing cheap labour illegally”.

He said: “Once there was unrest in Bangladesh, the economy collapsed. Obviously, the majority community is affected more than the minority community in Bangladesh. In the textile industry too, most of the labourers were from the majority community.”

The matter was discussed at the North East Council plenary in Tripura in December and has been raised with the Union home ministry, he added.

The Indian security forces had detained and pushed back about 1,000 undocumented migrants since August 2024, PTI quoted Sarma as saying.

The Bharatiya Janata Party leader also said that the Hindus who wanted to come to India “must have come earlier, 30-40 years back” and do not want to leave Bangladesh now.

“They must have some kind of affinity to the soil of the land,” he said. “They must be patriotic Bangladeshis. Even after tremendous atrocity, they do not want to come out of Bangladesh because their forefathers were there in that land. I think we should also not encourage them to come to India.”

Several incidents of violence against religious minorities in Bangladesh have been reported after the fall of the Hasina government.

In August, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had urged Yunus to ensure the safety of Hindus and other minorities. Yunus had claimed at the time that reports of attacks on religious minorities in Bangladesh had been exaggerated.