The math doesn’t add up. It never does when the stakes are this high and the rhetoric is this loud. Home Minister Amit Shah just dropped the latest update to the BJP’s long-running "infiltrator" patch notes: five years. Give them another term, and the system gets a full scrub. No more bugs. No more unauthorized users. Just a clean, verified database of a nation.

It’s a bold claim. It’s also a logistical nightmare that would make any CTO wake up in a cold sweat.

Let’s be real. We aren’t talking about a simple "find and replace" function in a spreadsheet. We’re talking about the physical removal of human beings based on a criteria that remains as murky as a dial-up connection in a thunderstorm. Shah’s pitch is simple enough for a campaign poster, but the tech stack required to pull this off is terrifying. You need more than just a border fence. You need a frictionless surveillance apparatus that can distinguish a "citizen" from an "outsider" in a country where millions don't even have a birth certificate.

The government’s favorite tool, Aadhaar, was supposed to be the fix. It was the "one ID to rule them all." But we’ve seen how that plays out. Biometric failures. Dead people still on the rolls. Living people declared digitally deceased. Now, imagine scaling those errors up to a deportation drive. In Assam, the National Register of Citizens (NRC) already gave us a beta test. It cost roughly ₹1,600 crore—about $200 million—and ended up excluding 1.9 million people, many of whom were actually citizens who just couldn't produce the right 40-year-old scrap of paper.

That’s the friction. The cost isn't just the money spent on detention centers that look like high-security warehouses. It's the processing power of a bureaucracy that’s already running at 100% CPU usage. To deport "every infiltrator" in five years, you’d need a legal and physical infrastructure that India simply hasn't built. You need a fleet of buses, a massive increase in judicial headcount to handle the inevitable appeals, and—most importantly—a neighbor willing to open the door and take them in.

Bangladesh hasn't exactly been checking their "Requests" folder on this one.

Shah knows this. He isn’t stupid. He knows that "deportation" is often a code word for "disenfranchisement." It’s about the threat of the delete key. If you can’t actually move people across a border, you can at least move them out of the legal system. You can make them "stateless," a ghost in the machine. They stay, they work, but they don't vote. They don't claim benefits. They become a permanent underclass that exists in the margins of the code.

It’s a classic Silicon Valley move: announce a feature that won’t ship for years to keep the investors—or in this case, the voters—engaged. It’s the "Full Self-Driving" of Indian politics. It’s always just one more update away. Just five more years of data collection. Just one more massive sweep of the server.

Meanwhile, the actual problems don’t get fixed. The economy is twitchy. Youth unemployment is a persistent lag. But those are hard problems. They require nuanced policy and boring work. It’s much easier to point at a "bug" in the population and promise a total system wipe.

The BJP’s pitch relies on the idea that the state is an efficient computer. It assumes the data is clean and the intent is pure. But we know better. We know that when you try to force a complex, messy reality into a binary "In/Out" system, the system breaks. People get caught in the gears.

So, Shah promises a five-year timeline. He paints a picture of a streamlined, secure border where every "infiltrator" is identified and exported. It sounds efficient. It sounds decisive. It sounds like something that could actually happen if you just ignore the laws of physics, international diplomacy, and basic human rights.

The real question isn't whether they can actually deport millions of people in 1,825 days. The real question is what happens to a country that spends all its energy trying to find someone to delete.

If you spend five years perfecting a machine built for exclusion, what do you do when you finally run out of people to exclude?