GUWAHATI, April 24 - Illegal flow of substantial amounts of money from the Middle East countries to Assam has become a major cause of concern for the security agencies and efforts are now on to track down the recipients of such money so that the actual reasons for the phenomenon can be found out.
Highly placed security sources told The Assam Tribune that according to inputs available with the security agencies, the major sources of money were the countries like UAE, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. But interestingly, the money is not sent directly to Assam and it is routed mostly through Kerala.
Sources pointed out that there is a huge number of people from Kerala working in the Middle East countries and hawala transfer of money to India from those countries is very common. The unscrupulous elements have now started to use the hawala channels to transfer money illegally to Assam through Kerala. Sources revealed that those involved in such illegal transfer of money are not from Assam and the report of such huge transfer of funds caused major apprehension as the reasons are still unknown. However, sources pointed out that the recently concluded elections to the Assam Legislative Assembly had nothing to do with such transfer of money as there was no indication of use of such illegally transferred funds during the elections.
Security sources said that the efforts to track down the recipients of such money might yield some results soon as it is believed that a few religious organizations in the districts of Morigaon and Nagaon might have received such illegally transferred money. �The security agencies have identified some such organizations, but it is too early to divulge the names. Moreover, similar organizations in other parts of the State must also be receiving such money,� sources added.
Though the reasons for such huge transfer of funds are yet to be ascertained, security agencies are apprehensive that some unscrupulous persons might be using the money for indoctrination of the youths of a particular religious community, which might lead to radicalization of the society in the days to come. Traditionally, the Indian youths normally do not hold radical views and that is why there were only a few youths from the country who went to join hands with organizations like the Al Qaeda and Islamic State (IS). There was a time when a large number of Muslim youths from different parts of the world went to Afghanistan to fight what they called �holy jihad�, but there was no report of any Indian going to take part in the battle. Similarly, Muslim youths from all over the globe joined the IS but only a few Indians joined them. As per reports, more than 3,000 youths from Britain joined the IS but there are reports of only around 30-odd from India joining the outfit. This happened mainly because the Indians, irrespective of their religion, are not too radical in their minds. But the illegal transfer of money is a cause of concern as there may be attempts for indoctrination of the youths, sources pointed out.
