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Round up “Bangladeshis”, put them
in Guantanamo Bay style camp: India tells Rajasthan
WSN Bureau
 AT a time when
the war on terror is arguably the top priority agenda item of the
United
States, and by a stretch of harsh truth of geopolitics,
India
too, it is a shame the way New Delhi is leading its war against
terrorism. Less than a week after five bomb blasts killed scores in
Jaipur, Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje has spilled the
beans about how the Indian nation state is dealing with the
situation.
In a
free-wheeling long-winded interview on prime time national
television, Vasundhara Raje said the Indian Government has told the
provincial regime to gather Bangladeshi immigrants together and put
them in a
Guantanamo Bay
style “transit camp somewhere”. She said she has no idea what will
happen after they are put in such a “camp” and under what law can a
state government, or any government, haul together people of one
ethnicity and put them in a “camp” without following any rule of
law.
On top of that,
Raje herself drew parallel to
US President
George Bush’s actions and the
Guantanamo
Bay.
She also said
the Centre has asked her government to pay for such camps.
“There George
Bush had done it, here you’re asking the states, ‘You please do it.’
Therefore, I keep saying I think it’s time for us to look at this in
a holistic fashion,” Raje said on television.
She said the
Union Home Ministry actually wrote to the Rajasthan government to do
all this. The Centre, she said, wrote: ‘Why don’t you just collect
them and put them into a transit camp somewhere?’. Asked if the
Centre’s communiqué meant the state could set up its own
Guantanamo Bay,
she said, “Something like that. But it’s much more serious than
that.”
Raje agreed that
it was illegal, inhuman and immoral for any state to even think of
putting thousands of people in quarantine. Raje’s bombshell comes in
the wake of serial bomb blasts in Jaipur in which Bangladeshi terror
outfit HuJI is the prime suspect.
Nevertheless,
the role of the Rajasthan government has also not been a happy
story. It has declared that it would identify and deport Bangladeshi
immigrants from the state. As per official estimates, there are an
estimated 10,000 Bangladeshis in Jaipur alone. All District
Collectors and Superintendents of Police have been asked to identify
them within 30 days.
BJP and
Congress no different:
Raje may be
crying hoarse about Centre asking it to do something inhuman but the
fact remains that her own government’s stand as well as the
repeatedly declared stand of her Hindu right wing Bhartiya Janta
Party (BJP) has been no different.
In fact, in
2003, L K Advani, then Deputy PM and now BJP’s declared candidate
for Prime Ministership, had led a consolidated campaign on the
issue, determined to push back thousands of Bangladeshi migrants.
Ugly scenes were witnessed on the India-Bangladesh border when
Indian troops pushed back some 200 odd immigrants, mostly very poor
destitute men and women with little children. They remained stranded
for nearly a week under open skies, their meagre belongings and rags
under the gaze of many cameras, and their fate making many stone
hearted men cry. Most of the men were snake-charmers, earning their
livelihood by begging for pennies.
Advani took
credit for the great push as New Delhi insisted they were illegal
Bangladeshi immigrants. Advani has repeatedly said his party’s
government will deport an estimated 20-million “illegal Bangladeshi
immigrants” and calls them a security threat. His party calls such
declarations as worthy of “utmost urgency and seriousness.” Advani
had then also called on state governments to target more than
11-thousand Pakistanis living illegally in the country.
21
May,
2008
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