The Citizenship Amendment Act has brought out all the sectarian rabid bigots out of their closet. The Act, which seeks to provide citizenship to persecuted minorities from the neighbouring Islamic states of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, has witnessed violent protests against it with senior leaders of political parties leading the charge.

Simultaneously, the National Register of Citizens and the National Population Register has attracted great criticism as well. One aspect of these initiatives that have garnered the most outrage from cynics is the Detention Centers for illegal immigrants. An attempt has been made to conflate Detention Centers with Nazi Concentration Camps and fuel mass hysteria even though there are mountains of differences between the two. At the head of the campaign, again, is, of course, the Congress party.

Rahul Gandhi, former president of the Congress party, has attacked the Prime Minister over the matter on Thursday. Unfortunately, he is not the only one. There has been a calumny of protesters, many of them violent, who have been creating mass hysteria around detention camps.

Congress set up Detention Centres in Assam

The Congress party and its senior leaders appear to forget that like the CAA, NPR and the NRC, the detention centres are not the brainchild of the BJP as well. In fact, detentions centres were set up by the Congress party in Assam while the UPA was in power. A statement issued by the government through the Press Information Bureau (PIB) in November 2011 confirms the same.

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The statement says, “The Government of Assam has set up three detention camps, at Goalpara, Kokrajhar and Silchar to keep the declared foreigners/illegal migrants till deportation to their place of origin. A total of 362 declared foreigners/illegal migrants have been sent to these detention camps till November 2011. The number of foreigners/illegal migrants sent to detention camps are 221 persons in Goalpara, 79 in Kokrajhar and 62 in Silchar. Of this total, 78 persons have been deported to their place of origin till November 2011.”

Read: As Congress opposes CAB, here is what Manmohan Singh had said in support of the bill in 2003

The mainstream media, consistent with its nature of serving as the propaganda wing of the anti-BJP parties, has given the Congress party a completely free pass over the matter. The Telegraph, which has turned into a Trinamool mouthpiece of sorts in recent times, gave the Congress a free pass over the issue, in the same manner, that it has largely given Mamata Banerjee a free pass over the rampant violence that was witnessed in West Bengal recently. In a recent report on detention centres, The Telegraph did not mention even once that it was the Congress party which first came up with Detention Centers.

Is the Hysteria around Detention Centers justified?

One significant aspect to the whole matter that has escaped the attention of the cynics is the fact that there’s nothing about detention centres that ought to spark mass hysteria. Germany has migrant transfer centres, the United States of America has them and nearly every European country has them. Detention Centers are a feature of every functional country.

Detention Centers are necessitated by the fact that a country requires facilities where they can hold illegal immigrants or asylum seekers before their applications are processed and following the procedures, their applications are either accepted or they are deported. In the meantime, people need to be kept somewhere before they are either sent back to their country or accepted as citizens.

Read: “NPR is the first step to NRC”: Congress, not Home Minister Amit Shah, said it first back in 2011

Japan, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Ukraine, Greece, Australia, numerous developed countries have them because they are necessary. And there’s no hysteria surrounding them anywhere apart from the United States where the Radical Far-Left compares them with Nazi Concentration Camps, despite the fact that the detention centres are nowhere close to them. Unsurprisingly, Indian liberals, desperate for approval from the Americans, are making the same comparison.

Are Detention Centers really like Nazi Concentration Camps?

No one could argue that life in a detention centre is akin to vacation at a 5-star resort, however, they are nothing like concentration camps either. The authorities try their best to provide the basic necessities to the illegal immigrants at these centres, and often fall short off their mark. Sometimes, they are overloaded with immigrants, much more than they can hold and there’s only so much resource that a country can allocate to illegal immigrants. Moreover, the first priority for any government ought to be its own citizens.

The Leftists in the USA and liberals in India clearly do not believe in national borders or even nationalism but the government of any country must always prioritize its own citizens over illegal immigrants. Furthermore, there is a very easy way to avoid detentions centres. Do not come into the country illegally.

Read: Anti-CAA protesters in Bengaluru display blatant Hinduphobia by distorting Hindu Om symbol to look like the Nazi symbol

The hysteria that is being spread has no basis in reality at all. No one is trying to gas the illegal immigrants in these centres, no one is trying to exterminate them. Most importantly, no one locks up their own citizens in these detention centres. Therefore, Indian Muslims have nothing to be worried about at all, they will never be locked up there. And if the argument is that India is fascist merely because it hs detention centres, then every single country mentioned in the previous segment s fascist as well.