BEFORE NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION Sardar Patel Bhawan, New Delhi. Case no. 2012

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1 BEFORE NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION Sardar Patel Bhawan, New Delhi Case no Complainants (i) Smriti Irani,MP(RS),National President,Mahila Morcha-BJP (ii) Sudhir Aggarwal, National Convener, Human Rights Cell, BJP In the matter of :- Complaint regarding planned terror & Human Rights Violations against Original Tribes & other Hindus in Assam and barbaric killings of about 100 innocent people and about people been displaced. To, Hon ble Chairman National Human Rights Commission and companion members. MOST RESPECTFULLY SHOWETH: Taking serious note of planned terror & Human Rights Violations against Original Tribes & other Hindus in Assam, Bharatiya Janata Party, Human Rights Cell filing this Complaint with National Human Rights Commision,New Delhi. 1. The root cause of this violence is the joint failure of the federal and

2 (2) Assam state governments to stop wave after wave of Bangladeshis from swarming into different parts of Assam and drastically changing the state s demographic profile, especially of the districts close to the border. In Bodopopulated areas, this flood has caused large-scale usurpation of tribal lands and made Bodos feel fearful that they are being marginalised in their own land.there is a well-known word for it ethnic cleansing.the Bodo have found themselves at war for survival from time to time. They feel it is about rights, not alone claim over Land and local resources. 2. Here are a few facts: July 15, 2004, Sriprakash Jaiswal, minister of state for home affairs in the UPA government, said in the Rajya Sabha: 1,20,53,950 illegal Bangladeshi migrants were residing in 17 states and Union territories as on December 31, A week later, Jaiswal told Parliament that the information that he had provided about Bangladeshi infiltrators is unreliable and based on hearsay! Jaiswal was not the first to do this about-turn under the pressure of vote-bank politics. April 10, 1992, Assam s then chief minister, Hiteswar Saikia, stated in the legislative assembly that there were between two and three million Bangladeshi infiltrators in Assam. He was only stating the obvious. This met with intense anger from the Muslim Forum in Assam. The Forum s head, Abdul Muhib Mazumdar, a Congress party man, reminded the chief minister that the Congress party s survival in power depended on Muslim votes and warned that it would take just five minutes for the Muslims of Assam to throw your government out. Saikia soon declared there was not a single illegal migrant in the state.

3 (3) 3. In 1998 the then Governor Lt. Gen. (Retd) SK Sinha raised the red flag of warning and sent a report to Hon'ble President Sh. K R Narayan, in which he warned of a grave danger to India's security from influx of illegal infiltrators from Bangladesh. Hon'ble Governor's concerns was that the whole of India's north-eastern region was connected to the rest of India by a "chicken neck corder" which if cut off, would effectively isolate the region. The warning has also come from the judiciary. The Guwahati high court in 2008 heard a case relating to a Pakistani national who came to Bangladesh, then infiltrated into Assam, got his name registered on the voters list and even managed to contest the 1996 assembly elections. Observing in despair that this can happen only in Assam, the court noted that illegal Bangladeshi immigrants are slowly becoming the king makers in Assam and will reduce indigenous Assamese to a minority. The warning sounded by India s Supreme Court has been even direr. The prolonged agitation of the Assamese people against infiltration from Bangladesh and earlier from East Pakistan culminated in the Assam Accord [ Images ] of The Rajiv Gandhi [ Images ] government enacted the Illegal Migrants (Determination through Tribunal) Act. The Assam Accord was hailed as one of the great achievement of Rajiv Gandhi s premiership. The IMDT Act turned out to be a cure worse than the disease. Far from checking the infiltration of Bangladeshis, it gave it a boost. This happened because the Rajiv Gandhi government had deliberately introduced certain flaws into the act that enabled infiltration to continue. Neither the Congress party nor any of the self-styled secular

4 (4) parties were subsequently willing to remove these flaws. After a prolonged legal battle by anti-foreigner forces in Assam, the Supreme Court, in its July 2005 verdict, struck down the IMDT Act as unconstitutional and urged the federal government to take effective steps to stop the influx of Bangladeshis. The Supreme Court warned that large-scale infiltration from Bangladesh constituted external aggression against Assam. In the past seven years since the Supreme Court s ruling, the UPA government has done nothing to take effective steps to check the influx of Bangladeshis. Considerations of vote-bank politics have triumphed over the Congress party s weakening concern for India s unity and integrity. Bhupen Hazarika, Assam s greatest cultural icon who passed away last year, had expressed his people s anguish in a lyric he composed way back in 1968: Today s Assamese must save themselves or else they will become refugees in their own land. 4. Illegal migration and votebank politics have been the two key catch-phrases in all the debates of the past few days. But, like everything else in Assam, this is a many-layered issue. First brought in by the British for their expertise in wetland cultivation, Muslims from the then East Bengal came into Assam to further the British policy of grow more food. As the Assamese fought to assert their language in a Bangla-dominated school system, they found political support from Bengali Muslims, who not only accepted Assamese as the medium of instruction in their schools, but also as their mother tongue. Realising

5 (5) that the Muslim community voted as a block, the Congress party seized the opportunity to nurture and cultivate a votebank by creating conditions that encouraged infiltration from East Pakistan from 1951 to Interestingly, it is this period that saw the beginning of the illegal influx into the state. The later migrants were also Bangla-speaking Muslims, which made it easier for them to merge with an already established Bangla-speaking indigenous Muslim population. Not perceived as a threat initially, the migrants worked as cheap labour. However, with time and added numbers, these migrants are now being increasingly perceived as political and economic stakeholders in the state they once sneaked into. As per reliable sources, 20 million people have migrated to Assam since 1951, says Walter Fernandes, Director of the Guwahati-based North Eastern Social Research Centre. When the immigrants natural population growth rate is also taken into account, the number of migrants rises to 40 million. Around 40 percent of them are Banglaspeaking Muslims, presumably of Bangladeshi origin Today, Muslims constitute nearly a third of Assam s population, where in 1951 they constituted 24.7 percent. The proportion is higher in districts bordering Bangladesh, such as the Bodo-inhabited territory where the recent violence occurred. 5. Till time, nearly 100 people had been killed and over 500,000

6 (6) people have been rendered homeless in prolonged communal-ethnic violence in and around Kokrajhar district. Violent clashes have broken out between native Bodos and illegal Muslim migrants from Bangladesh. What is happening in Assam, and it has been happening for decades now, is ethnic and religious cleansing caused by this massive human flood. 6. Assam riots have sent a bad message to whole world. Doctored electronic messages, SMS, MMS have worsoned the situation. North Eastern people have started facing heat all over the country. People of North-Eastern origin were threatened and even assaulted in various parts of India. Lakhs have started returning to their native places in North-Eastern regions in the wake of fear of terror attacks expected after Eid. 7. Hundreds of thousands of people sheltering in squalid, overcrowded camps in Assam desperately need food, water and medicines after fleeing some of the worst communal violence in a decade. At least 12 people, including four children, have died and thousands are sick with diseases such as diahorrea and malaria caused by poor conditions in government-run camps in Assam, where up to 500,000 people have taken refuge. There is an urgent need to take a note of situation and corrective actions to be taken,however the situation is simplly worsoning day after day. 8. The Central Government gets regular reports on what is happening in the state from the governor, the Intelligence Bureau and

7 (7) other official sources. Our Prime minister has also been a member of Parliament from Assam as a representative in the Rajya Sabha, the upper House for the past 22 years. It s easy to blame Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi for inaction. No doubt, he and his government have a lot to answer for, especially since there was ample evidence about tension building up in the Bodo-populated areas for the past several months. But a far greater part of the blame lies at the doorsteps of the Prime Minister and the Congress party. Both the Congress party and the United Progressive Alliance Government it leads have been indulging in a game of denial and falsification when it comes to infiltration of Bangladeshis into Assam and other states of India. The current crisis could have been averted if only the administrative machinery had woken up on time. Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi likened Assam to a volcano that frequently erupts due to ethnic unrest. If that was the case, then the Gogoi administration of 11 years has been caught napping. On 27 July,2012 Gogoi blamed the Centre for the delay rushing Central forces to control the situation in Kokrajhar. However, on the day the PM reached Kokrajahar, he said the Centre was not to blame. After sending one minister after the other, the CM finally visited the affected areas seven days after the clashes. Initially Gogoi and the Union home ministry ruled out any foreign hand, claiming the clashes were communal. The CM has now asked for a CBI probe because he feels there could be internal and external hand in it. 9. Sums up a solution that stands the test of international propriety,

8 (8) legal validity, and national security: * Treat the Assam problem as an Indian versus foreigner issue. * Uphold the non-violability of the tribal belts and blocks in Bodo areas. * Save Assam to save India's unity and integrity in the Northeast. A fence on the international border was supposed to have been built, but has not yet been completed. The Government of Assam and the Government of India continue to remain in a state of denial, and refuse to even discuss the root of the ethnic strife. Will mere statements and compensation packages of the Prime Minister find a lasting solution to the tragedy that has occurred and prevent it from being repeated again? PRAYER Violence of any kind and targeted against anybody, is condemnable. Every human life is precious, and snuffing out any human life is a crime. But why is the Congress party silent on the ongoing demographic invasion of India, threatening our nation s unity and integrity, in the form of the never-ending influx of foreigners into our country? The Complainants humbly pray that this Hon ble Commission may direct the Union and State Government to ensure that: A. The State and Central Governmen must immediately apologize to the tribes & Hindus in Assam for allowing Bengladeshi Muslims to have a free hand for massacre of tribes & Hindus just like Kashmir.

9 (9) B. All Bangladeshi Muslims should be immediately deported from all over India & should not be given any rights in India ever again. C. Prepare an updated National Register of Citizens, by deleting the names of non-citizens from the voters' list in Assam. D. Those who are elected with such imported terrorist votes in any constituencies of Assam should be debarred from contesting elections. F. All borders with Pakistan & Bangladesh should be sealed to further protect India. The Complainants humbly pray that this Hon ble Commission may Pass any order as it deems fit in interest of Justice and to protect the human rights of Indian Citizens. (Smriti Irani, MP ) National President Mahila Morcha-BJP (Sudhir Aggarwal) National Convener Human Rights Cell, BJP Place: Bharatiya Janata Party, 11 Ashok Road, New Delhi Dated: 21 st August, 2012

Refugee Review Tribunal AUSTRALIA RRT RESEARCH RESPONSE

Refugee Review Tribunal AUSTRALIA RRT RESEARCH RESPONSE Research Response Number: IND17537 Country: India Date: 22 September 2005 Keywords: India Bangladeshis Kolkata This response was prepared by the