Rape in Bengaluru: Time to wake up to the grave threat of illegal Bangladeshi crime syndicates in India

New Delhi, May 29: The horror in Bengaluru where a woman was stripped and raped is once again a grim reminder of what problems the illegal Bangladeshi immigrants have been causing.

On Thursday, the Bengaluru police said that five illegal Bangladeshi immigrants were arrested for allegedly brutalising a woman by stripping and raping her, a video of which has gone viral. "Based on a video clip, wherein one woman was subjected to physical abuse and torture by a group of people, five culprits including a woman, visible in the clip were immediately traced and secured by Bengaluru City police," the Bengaluru police said in a release.

The initial influxes were seen in West Bengal. Many came in search of jobs and livelihood and over the years, weak politics backed them so much that they started turning aggressive in nature. They continue to run crime syndicates which involve cattle smuggling, land grabbing, drug trafficking and counterfieting.

In raids that were conducted in Bengaluru in 2019, 30 Bangladeshis staying illegally were arrested. This only showed that their numbers are large. In this context one must revisit the speech at the Indian Institute of Science delivered in 2006 by former Intelligence Bureau director, the late Maloy Krishna Dhar. He had spoken about how Karnataka and Kerala had become the hotbeds for illegal immigrants.

"It would be wrong to think that Kashmir is the only dispute that divides India and Pakistan, though undoubtedly the most significant. One at least is nearly as important as the Kashmir dispute, that of Assam and some districts of India adjacent to East Pakistan. To these Pakistan has very good claims," Pakistan's late Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had said in his book.

The illegal Bangladeshis have run amok an Intelligence Bureau officer tells OneIndia. It is not just a crime syndicate, but if takes the case of Zahidul Islam alias Munna it becomes clear that they were also setting up terror modules. Islam was arrested by the NIA from a hide-out in Bengaluru in August 2018.

The NIA said that the mastermind of the Bodhgaya incident, Islam was also in the process of setting up camps in Bengaluru and Mallapuram in Kerala. In Bengal, he set up several modules in Burdwan, Nadia and Murshidabad. These were very active modules. Over the past year, he decided to spread his operations down south, the NIA probe found.

This is a long drawn plan which was busted by the Research and Analysis Wing in the early 1990s.

Former officer with the R&AW Amar Bhushan says that in the early 1990s, the Research and Analysis Wing carried out a daredevil operation in Bangladesh against the activities of the Jamaat-e-Islami. The intention behind the operation was a larger one and India was clearly worried about the rise of illegal immigration which the Jamaat was carrying out at the behest of the ISI.

In the year 2012, the Intelligence Bureau had reported that the issue of illegal Bangladeshis was catching up fast in West Bengal, Kerala, Karnataka and Telangana (then AP).

The report stated that there are all sorts of people. Many are here in search of a livelihood, but then there are many who indulge in illegal activities such as smuggling as drugs and sometimes arms. They come into the country through West Bengal and gradually move into other parts of the country. While touts and middlemen help them with documents, there are others who take advantage of their poor living conditions and lure them with money in order to carry out illegal activities.