BGB's falsehood

Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) Director-General Maj Gen Md Shafeenul Islam has indulged in telling blatant lies when he said in Guwahati on Friday that there has been no unabated illegal migration from his country to India, or for that matter Assam. The BGB chief was in Assam in connection with a crucial meeting with his counterpart, Border Security Force (BSF) Director-General Rakesh Asthana, following which he made the above statement. The BGB Director-General even went to the extent of saying that there was a need to change the "perception" that huge illegal infiltration is taking place into India from his country. His justification behind saying so is that there has been an impressive growth of GDP in Bangladesh and the per capita income in his country was now about 2300 US dollars, and hence Bangladeshis don't need to migrate to India.

He also claimed that Bangladeshis travelling to India for various purposes – from medical treatment to fishing – always carry valid papers. What appears is that either the BGB chief is a person totally ignorant about demographic issues in his country vis-à-vis Assam and north-eastern India, or he has deliberately made the above statement under orders from Dhaka. The BSF chief should have handed over to the BGB chief copies of statements made in the Indian Parliament by successive governments about large-scale infiltration of Bangladeshis to India. The BGB chief probably is not aware that the Modi government had in November 2016 told Rajya Sabha that there were over two crore Bangladeshi nationals staying illegally in India. The previous UPA government had in 2004 told Parliament that at that time the number of Bangladeshis illegally staying in India was 1.2 crore. There was a clear 67% increase in the number of Bangladeshis illegally staying in India between 2004 and 2016. Parliament is on record that the majority of the Bangladeshis living illegally in India had entered surreptitiously, while some had refused to return after entering India with proper travel documents.

On July 15, 2004, the UPA government had informed Parliament that of the 1.2 crore Bangladeshis illegally staying in India (as on December 31, 2001), over 57 lakh were in West Bengal and over 50 lakh in Assam. Most of these 50 lakh Bangladeshis in Assam had also managed to enter their names in the National Register of Citizens (NRC) by various fraudulent means. The BGB chief however on Friday also admitted that at least 86 Bangladeshi nationals were killed on the Indian side in the last three years till December 18, 2020. He can now ask himself whether his statement that there has been no illegal influx to India was true or false. He can also ask the Bangladesh Assistant High Commissioner why he had gone to different prisons in Assam to meet Bangladeshis lodged there if there was no influx.