Promise to free country of infiltrators will be kept: Shah

PTI

Guwahati

Home Minister Amit Shah on Friday said the BJP will keep its promise to make Assam and the rest of the country free of infiltrators.

Addressing a programme in Guwahati on the birth centenary of the state’s first non-Congress CM Golap Borbora, he said the high-powered demography mission, announced by PM Narendra Modi on Independence Day, is a definitive step towards studying the demographic pattern of the country and
identifying infiltrators.

“We had made a promise to Assam, but we have not been able to fulfil it in 10 years. We will keep our promise and make Assam and the entire country free of illegal foreigners,” he said.

Shah said the high-powered demography mission is based on Borbora’s ideology, and it is befitting that it was announced in the same year the socialist leader’s birth centenary is being celebrated.

“This mission will study the demographic pattern change in the country and also identify infiltrators… I am confident that it will be a major step towards freeing the country of infiltrators,” he said. “I am among those people who believe that not a single infiltrator should stay in our country,” he said.

Shah recounted how Borbora, who led a Janata Party government from March 1978 to September 1979 in the state, had undertaken a drive to cleanse the voters’ list when by-elections were necessitated for the Mangaldai Lok Sabha seat.

“In Assam, awareness against infiltrators was created for the first time through this voters’ list cleansing during Borbora’s tenure. In that age, without computerised electoral rolls and technology, Borbora’s government deleted the names of 36,780 illegal voters. If someone looks for the roots of the Assam Agitation, it will be in this cleansing exercise,” he said.

The six-year-long Assam Agitation, which culminated with the signing of the Assam Accord in August 1985, was against illegal Bangladeshis living in the state.

Shah said the Election Commission is also undertaking a cleansing of the voters’ list through Special Intensive Revision (SIR), but some parties are opposing it through the ‘Ghuspetiya Bachao Yatra’, in an apparent reference to the ‘Voter Adhikar Yatra’.

Maintaining that the voters’ list is the “heart” of any democratic country, he said, “This campaign was started in 1978 by Borbora and such is the moral degradation in society today that in order to strengthen their own vote bank, grab power, the move to delete names of infiltrators from the voters’ list is being opposed.” “If Borbora was alive today, he would have come out on the road to protest against these parties,” Shah said.