Centre told us to round up, put Bangladeshis in camps: Raje

New Delhi, May 18 : The Union Home Ministry wanted the Rajasthan Government to “collect” illegal Bangladeshi immigrants and put them in a “transit camp.”

Speaking to The Indian Express Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta on NDTV’s Walk The Talk, Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje divulged that the suggestion for the transit camp had come from the Centre in response to the state government’s letter in June 2007.

“On the deportation of the Bangladeshi nationals who are finding their way into Rajasthan, we have written letters to them, many, many times. We wrote to them in June 2007 to say, ‘Look we need to do something about this.’ We got a reply back from them to say that, well, ‘Why don’t you just collect them and put them into a transit camp somewhere?”’ revealed Raje clarifying that it was the Home Ministry that had written to her about the transit camp.

Asked whether the Home Ministry formally wrote to the state asking it to round up illegal Bangladeshis, Raje confirmed: “Kindly round them up and put them in a transit camp, which you pay for. Yes.”

Asked if the Centre’s communiqué meant the state could set up its own Guantanamo Bay, she said, “Something like that. But it’s much more serious than that.”

What happens after they are put in a transit camp? “We don’t have any idea, because we’ve been going on with this since June 2007,” she said.

Asked under what law the state could detain people in a transit camp, Raje said, “We are asking the same question. There George Bush (the federal government of the US) had done it, here you’re asking the states, ‘You please do it.’ Therefore, I keep saying I think it’s time for us to look at this in a holistic fashion.”

Asked how the state could quarantine so many thousands of people, the CM said, “This is the question that I’m asking — that it’s impossible for a state to do this without the support of the Centre. Now the problem is that if there’s a major procurement of grains to be done, the state does it. If there’s a terrorist action, then they write to you to say, take some action.”

The Chief Minister’s revelations came in the wake of the serial bomb blasts in Jaipur in which Bangladeshi Terror outfit HuJI is the prime suspect.

The state government has declared that it would identify and deport Bangladeshi immigrants...

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