india

Updated: Sep 05, 2019 17:16 IST

The West Bengal unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party has constituted two committees to make illegal immigration a major poll issue and to take on the ruling Trinamool Congress, which has opposed National Register of Citizens (NRC) and Citizenship Amendment Bill.

The two committees will focus on the Citizenship Bill that aims to give Indian citizenship to Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Christians and Parsis from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan and the need to have Assam like NRC in West Bengal to remove illegal immigrants.

While the Jansampark Committee will brief intellectuals, Janajagaran Committee will organise street movements on the two issues, the BJP leaders, who attended party meeting on poll related issues in the last two weeks, said. A decision to form these two committees was taken on August 27.

“India was divided on religious lines. West Bengal was created in 1947 to safeguard Hindus who suffered in the riots at Calcutta and Noahkhali in 1946. Teachers and intellectuals we have contacted so far strongly believe in their roots,” said BJP state general secretary Sayantan Basu who heads the Jansampark Committee.

Debjit Sarkar, who is co-head of the Janajagaran Committee, said: “We will hit every block in every district, especially those along the India-Bangladesh border, and visit colonies that were set up for Hindu refugees after the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War.”

The Bengal BJP’s move comes at a time when the ruling TMC is all set to launch a campaign against the NRC exercise in Assam that excluded 1.9 million people from the final list published on August 31.

Mamata Banerjee will address a rally in Kolkata on September 12 on NRC. On citizenship bill, TMC Lok Sabha member Saugata Roy said: “We are opposed to the bill and will remain so.”

Introduced in 2016, the Citizenship Amendment Bill was passed by the Lok Sabha but was not tabled in the Rajya Sabha because of the opposition it faced.

The BJP had tried to make illegal immigration a poll issue even during Lok Sabha elections with BJP national president Amit Shah saying his party was determined to push back Muslim infiltrators and protect Hindus, Buddhists and members of other communities who came from Bangladesh as refugees.

In the parliamentary polls, BJP won 18 of the 42 Lok Sabha seats in Bengal, marking a jump by 16 seats over its performance in 2014.

Sarkar said as per their estimate at least 30.5 million “Muslim infiltrators” have entered West Bengal since 1971. “Most of them were provided with proof of identity by Marxist leaders who came to power in 1977,” he claimed. As per 2011 census report, West Bengal had 24.2 million Muslims.

Kolkata based political commentator Suvashsis Maitra said that he was not very sure what citizenship screening at this scale will achieve. “Even if the government identifies all illegal Muslim migrants, will any country take them back? Can we lock them up forever?” he asked.

“Although the NRC exercise failed miserably, the BJP wants to turn Bengal into another Assam only to divide the electorate on religious lines,” said Md Salim, member of the politburo of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Lok Sabha.