Global warming may heat up conflicts, too

For now, Bangladesh's Islamists are largely confined to a narrow band of remote hills in the extreme southeast. But if global warming creates more "dead land" – abandoned because it has been made infertile by sea-level rise, it could "create space for [terrorists] to operate," says Peter Ogden of the Center for American Progress, who cowrote a study titled "The Security Implications of Climate Change."

More stress for a stressed nation

That would be an unwelcome development for a country frequently under duress. In its 36 years of independence, Bangladesh has had 14 governments – four of which were replaced by military coups. The current government is again under military stewardship, with civilian leaders being rounded up on corruption charges.

"This is an added stress on a country that doesn't necessarily have the capacity" to deal with it, Mr. Ogden says.

More certainly any increase in migration will increase competition for land, water, and jobs. In India, the border district of Dhubri is already being pushed to its limits. Many of the environmental trends that stress Bangladesh are present here, too. For instance, Dhubri is losing huge swaths of land each year to the wandering course of the Brahmaputra River.

Like many in Bangladesh, Ramzan Ali has lost his livelihood because of it. He squats on an embankment of silt above what used to be his farmland. Today it is under water. Of the four acres he once had, he now has less than one, and that is fallow because of siltation. The family's only income comes from his son, who works in a mill in Dhubri town.

Squeezed by erosion and the arrival of Bangladeshi migrants, other families have had to move upriver permanently – where, ironically, they, too, are seen by the people there as Bangladeshis. According to recent voting records, 99 percent of the residents in the area nearest the Bangladeshi border are migrants.

"Our land is shrinking," says Abdul Hamid Sheikh, standing in a shallow skiff that ferries locals to the river island of Bhasani Char. "If this migration continues, it will affect us, too."

Experts expect the effects to intensify as global warming intensifies, with more Bangladeshis being forced into India.

The fear is that this fate awaits every state in the Northeast. In the wake of the turmoil of Bangladeshi independence in 1971, one state, Tripura, saw its indigenous people consigned to a minority by Bangladeshi refugees. In India, virtually every state has its own lineage of kings, literary heritage, and language. Migration threatens to extinguish local cultures. This has made the people of the Northeast fierce guardians of their cultural identity.

On one hand, it has given rise to nu­­merous anti-Indian, pro-independence insurgencies. On the other, it has created a climate of paranoia about Bangladesh, a country of 150 million people packed into an area roughly the size of Iowa.

For this reason, the debate about Bangladeshi migration here is often based not on fact or reasoned analysis, but "on conjecture and perception," says R.N. Mathur, director-general of police in Assam, the state at the heart of the Northeast – and the migration debate. "The issue is mainly political."

Politicians stoke local fears

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