GUWAHATI/NEW DELHI, 1 February 2003 — Hindu radicals said yesterday they would conduct a head-count of Bangladeshis staying illegally in India and deport them in a move leftists across the border denounced as bias against the Muslim country.

Acharya Giriraj Kishore, senior vice president of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), said the “survey” would begin in March in the northeastern state of Assam, amid Indian allegations of a massive illegal Bangladeshi presence here.

He said the head-count, which would take two weeks and be assisted by locals, would “find out the exact number of Bangladeshi infiltrators and then set a time frame for the central government to deport them.”

The VHP, a close ally of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s Hindu extremist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), warned of a “public revolt” if the government failed to deport the Bangladeshis within the time frame it sets.

“After Jammu and Kashmir, Assam has become a potential target for fundamentalists with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence already setting up bases in Bangladesh to carry out subversive activities in India,” Kishore charged.

“The unabated infiltration from Bangladesh is a part of a greater game plan of fundamentalists,” said Kishore, visiting Assam’s capital Guwahati. India said in January that 20 million Bangladeshis were in the country illegally and alleged they could pose a security threat.

Security forces in eastern India have stepped up arrests of illegal Bangladeshi immigrants after the Home Ministry labeled them a security threat and ordered them deported, an official said yesterday.

Border guards yesterday detained 213 Bangladeshis who were trying to sneak into India’s West Bengal state, an official said. “The border guards have detained 213 Bangladeshi nationals, including 65 women and 18 children, while they were trying to get into Mathabhanga village in Coochbehar district,” P.P. Gupta, an officer of the Border Security Force, said. “All of them are Hindus and were living near Bangladesh capital Dhaka,” Gupta added.

“We have increased our efforts after the Home Ministry’s directive,” the official said. Bangladesh’s deputy ambassador in New Delhi had been summoned to the ministry and told that Dhaka should recognize the issue as a “grave problem”.

“Bangladesh needs to recognize the gravity of the matter and address it in a pragmatic manner and in a spirit of cooperation,” spokesman Navtej Sarna told reporters.

Asked about media reports which quoted Bangladeshi officials as saying that India was pushing its own citizens across the border, Sarna said: “There is no question of any Indian citizen being pushed back into Bangladesh. Any such allegation is baseless and absurd.”

The deportation drive has soured ties with Bangladesh, which denies any of its nationals are illegally staying in India. The tensions have arose amid Bangladeshi allegations that India is trying to shove Bengali-speaking Muslims across the border.

Bangladesh’s main communist party yesterday blamed Indian fundamentalists for the deportation drive. “A section of fundamentalists in India is propagating against Bangladesh on different issues and creating pressures on our country,” the Communist Party of Bangladesh said.

The Bangladeshi Foreign Ministry has said India has tried at least 30 times without success recently to force people into Bangladesh and branded them illegal immigrants. Foreign Secretary Shamsher Mobin Chowdhury said Thursday that Dhaka was seeking an explanation from India about the “contravention of the laid-down legal rules to deport illegal people,” but has yet to receive a response.