Bangladeshi Migrants in India want to Return to their Homeland: Congress' Jairam Ramesh

Guwahati, December 1, 2019:

Congress leader Jairam Ramesh on Saturday sent shockwaves across the nation when he proclaimed that the Bangladeshi immigrants in India actually want to go back to their country.

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Speaking at the INSIDE NORTHEAST YOUTH CONCLAVE 2019 in Guwahati on the lines of the NRC and the 'detention camps' where declared foreigners are being kept, Ramesh said that although there are 19 lakh people who face expulsion, the process has now been aborted. However, Ramesh said that the Government does not have any mechanism to expel the people in the detention camps.

He cited a recent incident in which he had gone to a detention camp in Silchar. Ramesh said that of the nineteen Bangladeshi migrants detained in the centre, all of them want to go back. "But Bangladesh is not going to accept them", he said, adding that the people stuck on the wrong side of the border find themselves the victims of the legal mechanism, which stops them from going back to their homeland.

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Ramesh also lamented the poor socio-economic condition of the people of the detention Centres, and said that the Government's solution to the 'foreigner' problem has been setting up detention centres. "The detention centres are not the answer", Ramesh said.

Ramesh cited the example of the demonization of the former Coordinator Prateek Hajela to prove that the NRC "Six months ago Prateek Hajela was the hero of the country

Ramesh said that this is a systematic process by the political establishment to 'debunk' the NRC process, because it did not live upto the hype built around it.

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