Racketeers in metro cities legalizing Bangladeshis stay

GUWAHATI: The arrest of 31 Bangladeshis at Guwahati Railway Station on Monday has exposed a racket active in Bangalore, Delhi and a few other metro cities to legalize stay of such nationals from the neighbouring country in India.

All the 31 Bangladeshis were engaged in petty jobs in Bangalore and they arrive in Guwahati Railway Station on Sunday night by the Bangalore Express to catch the train to Agartala to cross the border and enter Bangladesh. They were arrested by the Government Railway Police while planning to board the Kanchanjunga Express to go to Agartala on Monday morning.

Sources said many of them have PAN cards, voter cards and Aadhaar cards, which, according to them, were given to them by some brokers or dalals in Bangalore in exchange of money. Mohamed Suleman Sorrower (39), one among 31 arrested claimed to have cast his vote three to four times in elections held in Delhi and said he has all documents to prove his Indian citizenship. Suleman recently paid money to a broker named Farooq to facilitate his journey to his birth place in Bangladesh.

“Since these Bangladeshis are cheap labourers the chances of their employability in petty jobs in metro cities like Bangalore and Delhi are very high. This situation is being exploited by a section of racketeers by providing valid Indian documents such as voter cards and PAN cards to Bangladeshis in exchange of huge amount of money to legalize their stay in India,” the source said.

On other hand, a former Air Force official has claimed that he had made an e-mail correspondence with the authorities concerned in Karnataka in 2017 cautioning that illegal Bangladeshis, in the guise of people of Assam, were looking for jobs in Bangalore. After getting jobs in Bangalore the Bangladeshis manage to get valid Indian documents so that they could return to Assam to get access to various government benefits, the official wrote in his e-mail.

Meanwhile, the GRP on Tuesday produced the 31 Bangladeshis before the CJM Court here. The court remanded four Bangladeshis to four-day custody of GRP and sent 21 to judicial custody and six children to Shishu Griha, a State-run children shelter home.