NEW DELHI, 8 January 2003 — Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani yesterday said some 11,500 Pakistanis living illegally in India should be thrown out. "There is no reason why our state should be soft toward them. Immediate steps should be taken to identify them, locate them and to throw them out," Advani said at an Internal Security Conference in the capital.
Advani yesterday warned that the estimated 20 million Bangladeshis and 11,500 Pakistanis living in India illegally posed a serious threat to the country’s security. Advani said the government was considering preparing a national register of citizens and issuing multipurpose identity cards to all citizens based on this register to provide a credible individual identification system and to act as a deterrent for future illegal entrants.
Brushing aside reservations about the practicalities of the system he said it could be made workable with high technology.
A project to test the scheme would be launched this year in selected districts of 13 states, Home Secretary N. Gopalaswami told a news conference. He said New Delhi wanted state governments to strengthen intelligence gathering to counter terrorism, insurgencies and left-wing extremism across the country. A lack of advance information about attacks by such groups was a major threat to internal security, he said.
Advani, who is also home minister, said security agencies should investigate whether there were links between "terrorists" and Pakistanis living without visas in India. India says Pakistan funnels rebels across the de facto border in Kashmir to join the 13-year insurgency against Indian rule in the province. Islamabad denies the charge. Advani also called illegal immigration from Bangladesh a serious problem that needed to be "tackled firmly" by state governments.
Last month, India announced a drive to deport Pakistanis residing illegally in India. C. Vidyasagar Rao, the state minister for home affairs, said 8,884 of more than 11,000 Pakistanis in the country illegally had overstayed their visas. The rest had gone underground.
Rao also said India had stepped up screening of Pakistanis wanting to travel to the country and would consider withdrawing certain "unilateral concessions" to Pakistani travelers.
Several officials and leaders from the northeast, including Assam Governor Lt. Gen. (retired) S.K. Sinha, have expressed concern at the illegal migration from Bangladesh, saying it has altered the demographic profile in several areas.
The government, meanwhile, will launch a drive this year to deport more than 20 million illegal Bangladeshi immigrants. The drive will be conducted between April and June.
"The presence of a large number of illegal foreign immigrants, particularly from Bangladesh, poses a serious threat to the internal security and needs to be tackled with utmost urgency and seriousness that it deserves," a statement from the Home Ministry said.
"The rough estimates indicate that there are over 20 million illegal Bangladeshi immigrants residing in the country of whom above 10 million are in Assam and West Bengal alone," it added. The meeting agreed "that the states would launch a special drive to detect and deport such foreign nationals during the period April-June 2003". (Agencies)
