TURA: The A’chik Indigenous Justice Initiative Forum (AIJIF) has apprised Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the need to implement the Inner Line Permit (ILP) in Meghalaya.
In its letter addressed to the prime minister, the forum recalled the release of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) recently in Assam where around 40 lakh citizens were left out from the final list. The forum expressed apprehension that those who did not figure in the final list would try to illegally enter Meghalaya as the state shares a 900 km long open border with its neighbour.
Referring to the recent passing of the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) in the Lok Sabha, the forum said, “Adding insult to injury, the government passed the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill 2016 in Lok Sabha, amending the Citizenship Act of 1955.If this Bill is passed in Parliament, illegal migrants from certain minority communities coming from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan will then be eligible for Indian citizenship. In short, illegal migrants belonging to the Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi or Christian religious communities from other countries would not be imprisoned or deported”.
The forum cautioned that Meghalaya would be one of the worst affected states because while a large number of Bangladeshis have already illegally entered the state in the past several decades, more would come and seek to stay here, in the process causing a further damage to the state’s demography and reduce the indigenous communities into a minority.
“The proposed act also violates a tenet of India’s long-standing refugee policy, which mentions that refugees should return to their homeland, once things turned normal again. The proposed law not only provides citizenship rights to such refugees, but also greatly relaxes the procedure of availing them. This Bill will endanger the language and culture of Meghalaya and change its demography once and for all,” it said.
The forum is of the view that the last resort to mitigate the menace of illegal immigration in Meghalaya and to preserve the demography of the state is the introduction of the ILP system and urged the prime minister as well as the State Government to look into the matter on mission mode to ensure that the North East region does not have to suffer the wrath of an immigrant population boom.
