India-Bangladesh to have formal agreement soon to take back illegal immigrants

Guwahati: In what may be a major step in tackling the age-old problem of immigrants in Assam, India and Bangladesh have started exploring modalities of a formal agreement to take back illegal immigrants, identified and asked for deportation by “competent legal authorities” of the respective countries.

Disclosing that a formal agreement between the two countries may be signed during the visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Bangladesh soon, authoritative security sources in the home ministry told Deccan Chronicle that Prime Minister has accepted the invitation of Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, the date for which and other modalities are being worked out.

 Informing that over the years no Indian government had taken up the issue of illegal immigrants, security sources said that India has already sounded to its counterparts in Dhaka that the issue of influx would top the agenda of Prime Minister’s visit to Bangladesh.

It is significant that Supreme Court of India has also taken serious view to the problem of illegal immigration and in one of the observations said that it was causing “cultural and political” conflicts in Assam.

The records of the ministry of home affairs claim that 28,131 illegal infiltrators were deported to Bangladesh up to March 2014, but majority of them were pushed back on the international border, as there has been no arrangement of deporting them through official channel. There have been common practices of these immigrants returning back to Assam again after being pushed to Bangladesh.

In past two years Assam has deported only 134 illegal immigrants to Bangladesh, even though 36 Tribunals, tasked with detecting the foreigners, had found as many as 5,652 offenders between 2010 and 2012.

The dismal record of deportation, where only 134 of 5,652 people were deported, is also an indication of the futility of the whole exercise when most of those declared illegal immigrants just vanished in absence of any official arrangement of deportation.

Security sources said that Bangladesh government has agreed to discuss the issue and on principle they have given their consent for an agreement in preliminary rounds of discussions.