Tackling Massive Influx

At long last, decades after the problem has completely altered the demography of Assam, the Union government is understood to be trying to chalk out a plan to deal with the problem of large-scale infiltration of foreigners. Instructions are reported to have been given to the agencies concerned to expedite the construction of border roads and fencing to check illegal infiltration. The Centre must now pretend that it is uware of the fraud that has been perpetrated over the years by the contractors entrusted with the task of putting up barbed-wire fencing along the Indo-Bangladesh border. In some places, there are no fences, in others there are rusted remnts of what was once supposed to be a fence and in yet others there are just the pillars leaving the border quite open for the easiest of all intertiol border crossings without passports. This fact is brought out clearly by the recent report that along the Indo-Bangladesh border, nearly 30 per cent of the watch posts meant for keeping a tab on illegal infiltrators are not functiol. No wonder, the law enforcing agencies continue to be clueless about 37,789 untraced illegal Bangladeshi immigrants who came to Assam after March 25, 1971. What one fails to understand is why there should be two different norms for guarding our intertiol borders on the west and the east. In the west, our border with Pakistan is well guarded with shoot-at-sight orders to deal with illegal intruders. In the east, we have an almost open border with Bangladesh, with P. Chidambaram insisting that there should not even be any use of force to deal with illegal infiltrators when he was Union Home Minister. But perhaps this should be regarded as normal for the only country in the world that once had two separate immigration laws—one for the entire country and one just for Assam. We shall never be able to deal with the problem of illegal influx if we make the mistake of regularizing illegal influx from Bangladesh in the case Hindus alone.