JOIN USDays after Home Minister Basavaraj Bommai talked about implementing the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Karnataka, about 60 illegal immigrants, suspected to be Bangladeshi nationals, were detained by Bengaluru Police on Saturday.
The detainees included 29 men, 22 women and nine children. They were picked up from the shanties in Ramamurthynagar, Bellandur and Marathahalli.
A police team from the Central Crime Branch (CCB) has been collecting information about the illegal immigrants in the city following instructions from the Intelligence Bureau (IB) officials, who have been camping in the city ever since the talk of NRC began.
On October 22, Bommai told DH that he had already ordered the police to start collecting data on those living in the state illegally, without documents or with fake documents.
“On Saturday morning, several teams of CCB visited the shanties at the three places and identified Bangladeshi immigrants. The immigrants work as construction labourers, garbage collectors and other menial jobs under a contractor who offers them work at different places,” said a senior police official.
“There are thousands of such illegal immigrants staying in the city and we have started this process. We have to see how it goes,” said Police Commissioner Bhaskar Rao, who supervised the questioning of detainees.
Police sources said the CCB sleuths and IB officials interacted with the detainees and identified them by their Bengali dialects, which is said to be different from those spoken in West Bengal.
Interestingly, many of the detainees had Aadhaar cards, voter IDs which the cops termed “fake”, the source added.
An official said some of the detainees were in touch with their family members in Bangladesh and authorities came to know of them after intercepting their calls, he said.
The CCB team, along with IB officials, is recording the statements of the detainees following which they will be handed over to the Foreigners Regional Registration Office (FRRO) for further procedures. “IB officials and FRRO will take a call on further modalities,” said Rao.
The city police also said they were not going to register any cases on the detainees under the Foreigner’s Act as this would allow them to stay in the country until the conclusion of legalities. The FRRO can take a call on deporting them by handing them over to the Border Security Force (BSF) who will in turn hand them over to the Bangladeshi authorities.
"Questioning of the immigrants is underway and we are trying to ascertain who trafficked these people to the city," said M N Anucheth, DCP, Whitefield division.