New Delhi/Hyderabad, Oct 17 (IANS) Telangana Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP Konda Vishweshwar Reddy has connected India’s long-unresolved border enclaves with Bangladesh to the ongoing protests in Delhi against the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, adding that the past territorial anomalies enabled illegal migration that still affects voter lists today.
In a video explanation circulating widely, Reddy described the pre-2015 situation as one of the most bizarre international borders in existence.
“India had 111 enclaves inside Bangladesh while Bangladesh had 51 enclaves inside India. In some places the complexity ran deeper: second-order enclaves existed where a Bangladeshi pocket lay inside an Indian enclave that itself sat inside Bangladesh, and vice versa. These territories, left over from the Partition era, created service-less zones in which residents lacked reliable access to administration, identity documents and clear citizenship pathways for decades.”
The anomalies were finally settled through the 2015 Land Boundary Agreement, negotiated and passed by the Parliament under Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
“Under the swap, residents were given the choice of citizenship and the last remaining pockets of foreign territory on either side of the border were eliminated.”
Reddy presented this resolution as the closure of a long-standing irregularity that had facilitated unchecked movement across the frontier.
“Such stupid borders were designed for political interests… and they continued from the day of Partition till recently, till 2015 until the Narendra Modi government came,” the Telangana BJP MP said.
He then linked that history directly to the current protests in the national capital.
“Demonstrators have opposed the Election Commission’s SIR exercise, which critics claim has removed more than 130 million names from the electoral rolls,” Reddy added.
Supporters of the BJP MP’s video said that the voter revision is a necessary housekeeping measure to identify and delete illegal or ineligible entries.
Protesters, by contrast, said that large numbers of genuine eligible voters have been wrongly struck off and have demanded the resignation of the Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.
Reddy framed the voter revision exercise as a logical continuation of earlier efforts to regularise citizenship and prevent infiltration from distorting democratic processes.
He contended that porous borders and political patronage in certain states had previously allowed illegal migration to continue as a form of vote-bank politics, naming the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal and the Congress in Assam and elsewhere, with effects felt as far as Hyderabad, Delhi, Bihar and Odisha.
In related remarks, the Telangana BJP MP broadened the charge.
He alleged that recent protests and digital campaigns form part of a coordinated international effort aimed at regime change against Prime Minister Modi.
According to Reddy, a diverse coalition of opposition parties and fringe groups—including the Congress, Samajwadi Party, DMK and extreme organisations, together with external actors—share a single objective: to unseat the government.
“They (Opposition) do not have a common cause. The common cause is not NEET, not the UPI payment system, not the Election Commission… The common cause is to defeat PM Modi, regime change,” he said, insisting that leadership change in a democracy must occur only through elections, not through orchestrated street agitation.
Reddy also claimed large-scale manipulation of social-media metrics.
Referring to an independent political figure associated with the Aam Aadmi Party, the Telangana BJP MP described a sudden surge of millions of Instagram followers as “100 per cent fake, 100 per cent paid”, contrasting the online numbers with the modest physical turnout at the early stages of the protests.
He also warned of multifaceted external pressures targeting India’s economic stability—currency volatility, disruptions in oil trade, and potential impacts on the information-technology and pharmaceutical sectors.
“In his view, strong leadership under PM Modi has so far enabled India to navigate these challenges while preserving strategic and economic autonomy.”
The discussion has added a historical dimension to an already polarised debate over electoral integrity, citizenship verification and the legacy of Partition-era borders.
While the 2015 agreement resolved the enclave problem on paper, questions about migration, documentation and the accuracy of voter lists continue to surface.
As protests persist in Delhi, interpretations of the SIR remain sharply divided; one side sees it as a safeguard against illegal entries, the other as an overreach that disenfranchises citizens.
Reddy’s intervention has injected the story of the old enclaves into that contemporary argument, presenting the current clean-up of electoral rolls as the unfinished business of regularising who belongs on India’s voter lists.
–IANS
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