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Time for Dhaka to come
clean
By Sanjay K Jha
Tensions between India and Bangladesh have
mounted over attempts by India's Border Security Force
(BSF) to deport a number of Bangladeshis who have been
staying illegally in India. The Bangladesh government
maintains that the alleged illegal migrants are Indian
citizens, and has consistently maintained that "there
are no Bangladeshis in India". Dhaka now insists that
India is just trying to throw out Bengali-speaking
Muslims from their country by branding them Bangladeshi
migrants. At a weekly press briefing in Dhaka on January
30, Bangladesh Foreign Secretary Shamsher Mobin
Choudhary said that, since January 22, 2003, the BSF has
made 30 "push-in attempts" through several border points
into Bangladeshi territory. The Bangladesh government
also issued an aide memoire regarding repeated "push-in
attempts" to the Indian Deputy High Commissioner in
Dhaka.
The Indian government, on the other hand,
has rejected as "baseless and absurd" the allegation
that India is trying to push in Bengali-speaking Indian
Muslims into Bangladesh. Speaking to the media in Delhi
on February 1, the director general of the BSF, Ajai Raj
Sharma, rejected the charges and asserted that it was
"established practice" that, whenever police took action
against them, the migrants were taken to the borders,
and the BSF "handed them over" to Bangladesh. The Indian
government has asked Bangladesh to recognize the gravity
of the problem of illegal immigration and to cooperate
in tackling the issue. On January 30, the Indian
government summoned Bangladesh's acting deputy high
commissioner to New Delhi, Shahadat Hussain, and
conveyed to him Indian concerns over "illegal
immigration of Bangladeshi nationals into India".
Amid these allegations and counter allegations,
tension continues to mount at several border points,
particularly in the state of West Bengal. On January 31,
for instance, the BSF intercepted 213 Bangladeshis
(reportedly all snakecharmers) forcibly pushed in by the
Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) into India at Satgachi outpost
in West Bengal's Coochbehar district. Since then, these
Bangladeshis have remained on the zero line at the
Indian side, exposed to rain and the exceptional chill
of this year's winter. A BSF spokesperson at Kolkata
disclosed on February 1 that the BDR had conspired to
infiltrate Bangladeshi nationals into India, and that
such movements had been occurring along both the
southern and northern frontiers over the preceding 10
days.
The current crisis is the manifestation of
fundamental differences between the two countries over
critical issues such as illegal migration and the use of
Bangladeshi territory for terrorist and subversive
activities against India. In the recent past, there has
been a growing realization within the Indian
establishment that the threat posed by illegal migration
and terrorist and extremist Islamist groups operating
from or within Bangladesh had serious security
implications for India.
At the end of the
two-day meeting of the India-Bangladesh joint working
group in Dhaka on January 23, India conveyed its
concerns over the presence in Bangladesh of training
camps of terrorist groups operating in India's Northeast
(and had earlier identified 99 such camps and their
location). India also asked Bangladesh to hand over 88
prominent insurgent leaders currently living in
Bangladesh. Earlier on January 7, India's deputy prime
minister, L K Advani, during a conference of chief
secretaries and directors general of police in Delhi,
observed that there were approximately 15 million
Bangladeshis staying illegally in India, and that they
posed a serious threat to the country's internal
security. It was during this meeting that it was decided
that the identification and deportation of foreigners
staying in India illegally was to be assigned the
highest priority. To facilitate the process, the meeting
agreed that the government would launch the
multi-purpose identity card scheme as a pilot project in
13 states from April 1, 2003.
India's porous
4,095 kilometer border with Bangladesh is prone to
large-scale illegal immigration, smuggling, drug
trafficking, gun running and cross-filtration by
terrorists. Unofficial estimates put the number of
illegal Bangladeshi immigrants even higher than the
official figure, and there is clear evidence of the
demographic destabilization of a large swathe of
territory all along the India-Bangladesh border.
One estimate assesses the illegal influx at
about 300,000 persons per year. Demographic
transformations have been brought about in the border
belts of West Bengal, Bihar, Assam, Tripura and
Meghalaya as a result of large scale migration, and
according to one estimate, illegal immigrants are in a
position to influence the electoral outcome in 25
parliamentary and 125 assembly constituencies in the
country. Apart from illegal immigration, the porous
India-Bangladesh border also fuels smuggling, the drug
trade and proliferation of small arms. Available
evidence suggests a collusive network between smugglers,
a section of illegal migrants and terrorist groups
operating in India's Northeast. However, the most
serious threat to India's security is the increasing use
of the India-Bangladesh border by Pakistan's external
intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence
(ISI), for its larger design to destabilize India
through a range of subversive movements.
The
Indian government has, on a number of occasions, stated
that the ISI makes direct use of Bangladeshi territory
to infiltrate its agents and saboteurs across the border
into India, and that it is assisted in this task by the
directorate general of field intelligence and other
state agencies of Bangladesh. Speaking in the Lok Sabha
(the lower house of parliament), on November 27, 2002,
India's External Affairs Minister Yashwant Sinha had
explicitly stated that the Pakistani high commission in
Dhaka had become the nerve center of ISI activities in
promoting terrorism and insurgency in India. He also
asserted that "some al-Qaeda elements have taken shelter
in Bangladesh ... the foreign media has ... reported
several such instances, our own sources have also
confirmed many of these reports".
A number of
transnational Islamist terrorist groups, including
al-Qaeda, are now known to have established a presence
in Bangladesh in alliance with various militant
fundamentalist organizations there. The
Harkat-ul-Jehadi-e-Islami, Bangladesh was created with
direct aid from Osama bin Laden in 1992. The group has
linkages with Pakistan-based terrorist groups such as
the Jaish-e-Mohammed and the Lashkar-e-Toiba. It also
maintains very close links with the ISI.
Reports
also suggest that the ISI, in collaboration with the
directorate general of forces intelligence and extremist
Islamist groups, has networked and coordinates
activities with insurgent groups in India's Northeast
and Islamist extremist elements in Bangladesh. India's
list of 99 terrorist training camps in Bangladesh
includes the facilities provided to groups such as the
United Liberation Front of Asom, National Liberation
Front of Tripura, All Tripura Tiger Force and the
National Democratic Front of Bodoland.
The
current Bangladesh National Party government, led by
Begum Khaleda Zia, has insisted that her government
would not allow anti-India activities from its soil.
However, the internal political situation in the country
provides a favorable context for Islamist groups to
operate. Since the elections of October 2001, and the
installation of the new rightwing regime, backed by the
fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami, Islamist extremist
mobilization has also risen dramatically. The militant
and pro-Pakistan Jamaat-e-Islami has 17 elected members
in the Bangladesh parliament and two ministers in the
new government. It also receives support from the ISI,
which includes funding arms flows, and technical and
training support. The current regime in Bangladesh,
moreover, is regarded as being much closer to Pakistan
than its predecessor, and the linkages between the
Bangladesh army and intelligence apparatus, on the one
hand, and their Pakistani counterparts, on the other,
are known to be strong, and growing stronger.
It
is, consequently, not surprising that Bangladesh refuses
to acknowledge the presence of large numbers of its
citizens staying illegally in India, or to accept the
covert subversive activities directed against India from
Bangladeshi soil. In the past, successive Indian
governments have been slow to act decisively on these
issues due to the electoral compulsions of political
parties at the helm of affairs at the center and in the
affected states.
Although it would be premature
to say that the current engagement with Bangladesh is
part of a comprehensive strategy to deal with the issue
of illegal migration and use of Bangladeshi territory
for anti-India activities, the preliminary steps in this
direction appear now to have been taken. Policy
reversal, however, can never entirely be ruled out in
the habitual vacillation of the Indian political
leadership, and an unconfirmed media report, citing
intelligence sources, indicated on February 1 that a
truckload of illegal migrants who were being transported
to West Bengal for deportation to Bangladesh were
already on their way back to Delhi.
Sanjay
K Jha, research associate, Institute for Conflict
Management, a non-profit society set up in 1997 in New
Delhi committed to the evaluation and resolution of
problems of internal security in South Asia.
Published with permission from the South
Asia Intelligence Review of the South Asia Terrorism Portal
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