GUWAHATI, Dec 4 - Twenty years have passed since the then Governor Lt Gen (Retd) SK Sinha submitted a report to the President of India highlighting the grave threat posed to Assam by illegal migration of people from Bangladesh along with a host of recommendations to deal with the problem. But unfortunately, the major recommendations are yet to be implemented and the people at the helm of affairs are not even aware of existence of such a report.
Retired Indian Police Service (IPS) officer, Hiranya Kumar Bhattacharyya , who has been dealing with the subject for a long time and penned down a book entitled Operation Lebensraum�Illegal Migration from Bangladesh , told The Assam Tribune that even the Union Home Minister, Rajnath Singh was not aware of the report of the Governor, not to speak of taking effective steps to implement the recommendations given in the report.
Bhattacharyya said that he had the opportunity to have a discussion with Rajnath Singh and during the course of it, �I asked him about the steps that would be taken to implement the recommendations given by Lt Gen Sinha. But to my surprise, Singh was not even aware of existence of such a report.� He said that he also had discussions with former Assam Governor PB Acharya (who is now the Governor of Nagaland). But Acharya was also not aware of the report of his predecessor. It is very unfortunate that the Central Government is not even aware of the report of Lt Gen Sinha not to speak of implementing his recommendations to deal with the problem of illegal migration from Bangladesh, Bhattacharyya said.
The former IPS officer expressed the view that over the years, successive Governments at Delhi were not keen on the welfare of the North East region and that is why no effective step has yet been taken to deal with the problem of infiltration. He pointed out that no step has been taken to prevent further infiltration. �Water tight measures should have been taken to check infiltration but that has not been done,� he added. He further pointed out that the Assam Accord, signed in 1985, has not yet been implemented. He expressed the view that a conspiracy was hatched to undo the accord even before the ink of signing the accord dried.
Bhattacharyya expressed the view that only constitutional safeguards with right over land and natural resources and voting rights only to indigenous people can save the indigenous people of Assam. He pointed out that no outsider can buy land and property in states like Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir etc and there is no reason why similar kind of mechanism cannot be put in place in Assam.
