HC orders immediate steps to fence border

GUWAHATI, Oct 2 – Asking the Centre and the State Government to "seriously attend not on paper but with practical effort" to the grave problem of Bangladeshi infiltration, the Gauhati High Court today directed the Centre and the State Government to take "immediate steps without any excuse" for complete sealing/fencing of the international border with Bangladesh.

"Such a step must be given priority keeping in mind the duty cast upon the Union of India to protect every State against external aggression and internal disturbance," Justice BK Sharma observed while dismissing a writ petition (no. 45 of 2009) and ordering for deportation of the petitioner, a Bangladeshi national, Md Attaur Rahman who had earlier been 'deported' to Bangladesh. It also ordered deletion of his name from the voters' list.

It may be recalled the court had earlier termed the entire machinery of deportation as a farce because of the "manner and method in which deported Bangladeshis could come back to India and invoke the writ jurisdiction."

Mincing no words, the court rubbished the plea of the respondents, i.e., the State and Central governments, that fencing along a particular stretch of the border in Karimganj district had not been sanctioned because the area was intersected by rivers, and that another stretch was demarcated.

"Such excuses are not at all tenable. Does it mean that the said stretches will always remain open for the illegal Bangladeshi migrants to enter into Assam with eventual entry of their names in voter lists to enrich the political prospects of people’s representatives?... it is also not acceptable in these modern days of technology that the stretch intersected by rivers is not possible to be fenced," the court observed.

Castigating the governments for their inept handling of the infiltration problem, the court said that nobody seemed bothered about the fallouts of large-scale influx and the failure of the governments to ensure the infiltrators' deportation, which included i) illegal stay of foreigners, ii) producing children as they like, iii) casting votes by foreigners in elections including elections involving legislative assembly and parliament, iv) probable threat to the security of the State, and most importantly, v) the constant and unabated process of annihilating the indigenous people of Assam towards rendering them minority in their own homeland.

"The Union and the State Government must also take special drives for detection and deportation of illegal Bangladeshi migrants whose large presence in Assam is an established fact, the fallouts of which has been emphasized by the Supreme Court in the Sarbananda Sonowal case…unless the matter is seriously taken into consideration by those at the helm of affairs with consequential follow-up effective action on a war footing, the illegal Bangladeshi migrants whom this court had earlier described as 'kingmakers' would soon become the 'kings'," the judgement read.

Observing that the counter-affidavits had been dumped by the governments only to answer the writ petition without addressing the larger issues involved about which mention was made by the court in its earlier order dated August 5, 2010, the court asked both the Centre and the State Government to clarify the queries made in the present order and also as to whether any useful purpose had been served in establishing and continuance of the proceedings by the Foreigners Tribunals.