By IANS
Guwahati : The authorities here have admitted that 54 people identified as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh to Assam in the last five months have all vanished before they could be deported.
"The 32 Foreigners' Tribunals in Assam during the past five months disposed of 545 cases out of the 3,000 cases registered, of which 54 people were identified as illegal Bangladeshi infiltrators. But the fact remains that none of those identified could be deported as per law as they all did the vanishing trick," a senior home ministry official who did not wish to be named told IANS.
A team of home ministry officials, led by U.N. Panjiar, border management secretary, was in Guwahati Wednesday for a tripartite talk with the All Assam Students' Union (AASU) and representatives of the central and state governments.
The meeting was to discuss the sensitive issue of illegal infiltration from Bangladesh and measures taken by New Delhi to fence the 272 km border between Assam and Bangladesh.
"The facts and figures provided to us by officials during the meeting indicate that the entire exercise is nothing but a total farce. If those identified as illegal Bangladeshis manage to vanish, it shows the insincerity of the government," AASU advisor Samujjal Bhattacharya told IANS.
During the meeting, the home ministry team also expressed helplessness at not being able to complete the border fencing work. The central government had earlier set a deadline of December 2006 by which it would put barbed wire fencing all along the border. This deadline has now been deferred to March 31, 2008.
"All this shows that the government was encouraging Bangladeshi infiltration as there is no mechanism to deport someone even after identifying someone as an illegal migrant," AASU president Sankar Prasad Rai said.
The tardy pace of detection and deportation was earlier blamed on the controversial Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act (IMDT). The Supreme Court in July 2005 struck down the legislation, citing major flaws and replaced it with the Foreigners Act of 1946.
The IMDT Act was passed in 1985 to identify illegal Bangladeshis during the height of AASU's oust Bangladeshi movement.
According to government figures, 20 years after the historic Assam accord was signed in 1985, just about 2,400 illegal Bangladeshi migrants were expelled. Assam had witnessed a violent six-year-long anti-foreigners' uprising from 1979, spearheaded by the powerful All Assam Students' Union (AASU) that culminated in the historic Assam Accord signed in August 1985.