Bangladesh a source of infiltration as well as terror: Advani

Ahmedabad, Apr 7: Leader of Opposition in Parliament and senior BJP leader L K Advani today charged Bangladesh with not only being a source for illegal migration and infiltration but also ''harbouring terror outfits operating in India.'' ''Bangladesh has emerged as a source for the attacks both on Ayodhya and Varanasi temples and the arrests have proved our suspicions that terrorist infrastructure in the country has not been dismantled even after India submitted a list of 72 camps,'' he told mediapersons here on the second day of his Bharat Suraksha Yatra.

Saying that he had raised the issue with Bangladeshi Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia and her colleagues when they were in Delhi last month, Mr Advani noted that as long as they (Bangladeshi leaders) were in ''a denial mode,'' it would be difficult to expect anything good, he said.

Congress President Sonia Gandhi as well as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh should tell the nation if they had raised the Bangladeshi migration issue with Begum Khaleda Zia and also elaborate on the steps the UPA government had taken to ensure that India and its citizens did not suffer by bringing back the IMDT act through the backdoor after the Supreme Court declared the legislation as ''unconstitutional'.

''I am both surprised and troubled by their pronouncements.

It is time for these two leaders to tell the nation on the steps they had taken to ensure scrapping of the IMDT to ensure that no citizen suffered injustice,'' he said, adding that their statements that the Foreigners Tribunal order was being amended to ensure that the rights of genuine citizens are protected was ''dishonest and misleading and hypocritical.'' Mr Advani alleged that both the PM and Mrs Gandhi were trying to represent the problem as one of ''harassment and deporation of Indians'' belonging to the Muslim community. ''This is a deceptive ruse to hide government's failure to tackle the problem of infiltration,'' he said, adding that the issue was not harassment of genuine Indians in Asom but unchecked immigration from Bangladesh, which had assumed the ''dimension of a demographic invasion.''

''There should be zero per cent tolerance on the issue of infiltration. They should be identified and sent back,'' Mr Advani said, reminding that the apex court had dubbed this as ''an external aggression.'' ''Unhindered immigration from Bangladesh is threatening the very foundation of the region and the nation faced the threat of another partition,'' he cautioned.

On infiltration status in Asom, Mr Advani said the Supreme Court had said that state government's record in detection and deporation under the IMDT act was ''poor.'' ''Only 10,015 out of 3,10,759 people were declared as illegal migrants, and there were only 1481 deporations,'' he noted, adding that there could ''hardly be any bigger betrayal of the nation than just to create a captive vote bank jeopardising national unity and security.'' When asked what the NDA had done to check the migration when it was in power, he said it had to face resistance from the state government.

''The response of the NDA government to the happenings was quick and effective, which is not the case now. After the attacks on Akshardham and Raghunath Mandir, the authorities had acted quickly eliminating the culprits. During the NDA regime, the authorities had identified and eliminated 50 to 60 terror modules, whereas this had come down to 15 during 2005 under the the UPA government,'' he said.

UNI