Staff Reporter
GUWAHATI: Why does the Assam government prefer the Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act, 1950, to the legal process of detection and deportation to expel Bangladeshis staying illegally in the state? While the detection and expulsion of Bangladeshis is swift within the scope of the Act of 1950, it is time-consuming in the meandering process of their detection and deportation through the foreigners tribunals.
According to sources, so far, tribunals have declared 1.65 lakh people as Bangladeshis staying illegally in the state. However, only around 30,000 of the declared Bangladeshis have been pushed back. The official process of deportation of Bangladeshis is a meandering one - the authorities in Assam have to send the addresses of the declared Bangladeshis to the authorities in Bangladesh through the Government of India. On their part, the Bangladeshi authorities have to ascertain the addresses of the people given to them from India. In most of the cases, Bangladeshi authorities say that they could not find such people staying in Bangladesh at any given time and refuse to accept such people as Bangladeshis. The outcome is such that out of the 1.65 lakh declared Bangladeshis, Bangladesh authorities have accepted only 466 people as theirs so far.
According to official sources, this unreliability in the official process of deportation of declared Bangladeshis has led the Assam Police and the BSF to opt for the process of pushing back. However, as often as not, the BGB (Border Guard Bangladesh) opposes the practice of pushing back. Such hurdles have made over one lakh declared Bangladeshis stay illegally in Assam. And many of them have seamlessly blended with the local population.
According to sources, due to such hurdles, the Assam government has opted for the Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act, 1950, instead of the FTs. In this process, district commissioners will receive complaints regarding suspected Bangladeshis. The district commissioners will ask the people of suspected nationalities to prove their Indian citizenship within ten days. If they fail to prove themselves as Indians, the authorities will push them back immediately.
In the existing process of detection and declaration of foreigners, the border police catch people of suspected nationalities, register cases against them, and refer the cases to the FTs. Disposing of such cases in FTs is an abysmally lengthy process. Even FT verdicts are often challenged in the high court. In most of the cases, declared Bangladeshis often do the vanishing act, and the police have to keep on searching for them.
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