Jaipur blasts: Bangladeshis, scapegoat for cops?

Bangladesh has emerged as the new ISI for Indian intelligence agencies. Attack on train station? Defused bombs? Bicycle bombs? Bag bombs? — It must be the ultra-efficient, tentacle spreading, just in time, always there, 'terrorist organisations based in Bangladesh'.

Of course there are many Bangladeshi immigrants inside India. The real question about Jaipur is: who are these people in the 'Bangali Para'. What were they doing all this time?

Working for middle class Indian families, as house help, cleaners, sweepers, cooks, maids, taxi drivers, tailors, weavers, jewellery makers, construction workers — yesterday, they were your convenient and easy source of cheap labour. Today they are looked at with suspicion and are being told to go back to their own country.

Arif, who was arrested in connection with the Jaipur blasts, is one such immigrant. Released almost a month after the blasts, police say, he was put in the prison for concealing his presence.

But what he went through in that month is nothing compared to 30 day of hunger and uncertainty for his family. His 64-year-old mother ran herself to exhaustion to get him released, and his wife unable to forgive herself for letting their son burn himself.

“There was no milk or rice in the house. My son felt hungry and came right near the stove. His chest got burnt. There was no one at home,” Arif’s wife Roma says.

Hundreds of Bangladeshi immigrants live in Jaipur’s Bagrana Bengali Basti where most of them work as rag pickers.

Local police picked up as many as 400 of them after the blasts in the city. The immigrants allege the police and other local prisoners beat them up while they were in prison.

“Even the other prisoners in the jail would abuse us and say he's a Bengali, beat him up. They would just abuse us for no reason at all,” Mohammad Arif, a resident of Bagrana transit camp, says.

After the serial blasts, the police were instructed to identify and deport illegal Bangladeshi immigrants.

“It’s not possible to complete the whole exercise in 30 days. For several of them it just took us few hours of questioning to find out that they were Bangladeshis,” ADG Planning and Welfare, Jaipur, MK Devarajan, says.

Arif’s mother, however, says, “All my children were born here. The cops pick them up and say they are Bangladeshis. We may be Bangladeshis but they were born here. They're not Bangladeshis.”

So far, a thousand illegal migrants have been identified and will soon be sent to transit camps in Sambhar and Alwar, but civil liberties activities allege Bangladeshis are being targeted because they are Muslims.

“The blast has become an opportunity for this government to quickly take on its agenda of profiling the Muslim as a terrorist, the Bangladeshi as a terrorist, and thus creating a divide between communities,” Secretary, PUCL, Jaipur, Kavita Shrivastava, says.

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#Jaipur blasts #Bangladeshi immigrant