A steady influx from Bangladesh continues in the time of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) but there has been a steep outflow too, in the aftermath of the NRC, a report of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) has highlighted.
The latest NCRB report, released recently, says altogether 1,118 persons, including 622 males, 358 women and 138 children, were apprehended by the BSF while crossing over to India from Bangladesh in 2018 while 871 Bangladeshi nationals, including 603 men, 224 women and 44 children, were apprehended in 2017.
The report doesn’t say why these alleged infiltrators were crossing the international border.
At the same time, the report highlights the steep rise in the “outward” movement from India to Bangladesh during the time period. While 821 Bangladeshi nationals were apprehended by the BSF while illegally crossing over to Bangladesh from India in 2017, 2,971 Bangladeshi nationals were arrested while leaving India in 2018, it says.
BSF sources claimed that the number of Bangladeshis leaving India shot up in the aftermath of the publication of first draft of NRC in Assam on December 31, 2017.
“Fear among illegal settlers seems to have triggered the migration after more than 40 lakh people were excluded from the NRC’s second draft in mid-2018,” a BSF source said.
The director-general of Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB), Major General Md Shafeenul Islam, had said earlier this month that 445 Bangladeshi nationals had left India in the last two months.
“About 1,000 people were arrested in 2019 for illegally crossing the border from India to Bangladesh, of whom 445 were returning home in November and December alone,” he said.
The NCRB report says security forces arrested at least 2,070 Bangladeshis across the country in 2018 for committing crimes like murder, sexual abuse and forgery. In 2017, 2,725 Bangladeshis were arrested in India for committing similar crimes.
The bureau started compiling data on people caught while crossing India’s international borders in 2017.
The BSF guards the international border in West Bengal, Assam, Tripura and Mizoram. The Assam-Bangladesh border areas have been infamous for influx, cattle smuggling, fake currency and gun-running rackets.
Groups protesting against CAA fear that the Act will open the road for lakhs of Bangladeshis to sneak into the state while the government has been defending the law saying that it will grant citizenship to only a “marginal” number of people who are already in India.
The NRC was conducted in Assam to detect and deport illegal migrants who came to the state after the midnight of March 24, 1971. The cut-off date adheres to the 1985 Assam Accord. The CAA seeks to grant Indian citizenship to religiously persecuted minorities belonging to six non-Muslim communities from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan who came to India before 2015.
