By Ankit Raj
New Delhi: “Eleven days from today – on the ninth [April] – elections are set to take place in Assam. The people of Assam must not view their vote merely as a means to make Himanta Biswa Sarma the chief minister or to elect their respective candidates as MLAs. Rather, this vote is to create an ‘infiltrator-free’ Assam.”
On March 29, Union home minister Amit Shah, along with a senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader, held public rallies in Sonitpur and Nalbari as part of the Assam assembly election campaign. During the rallies, he urged the voters to cast their ballots in order to “liberate” the state from “infiltrators”.
In a direct attack on the opposition Congress party, Shah remarked, “No matter how much effort Gaurav Gogoi and Rahul Gandhi put in, stringent action against infiltrators will continue, and the process of sending every single infiltrator back will be carried forward.”
It is important to note that the BJP-led coalition government has been in power in the state since 2015. Since 2019, Amit Shah himself has been at the helm of the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) – a portfolio that encompasses the responsibility for securing the country’s various borders.
Further, he said that the Union government is committed to identifying infiltrators across the country, removing them from the electoral rolls, and repatriating them to their places of origin in accordance with the law. He also claimed that the BJP government in Assam has reclaimed 1.25 lakh acres of land from ‘intruders’ over the past decade, ensuring that no intruder can now enter Assam.
Meanwhile, chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, has also been making promises to ‘drive intruders out of the state’. During an election rally on March 27, Sarma declared that if his government is re-elected, he would ‘break the back’ of the ‘Bangladeshi Miyas.’
He further claimed that 1.5 lakh bighas of land had been cleared of encroachment in the last five years, and that this figure is expected to increase to five lakh bighas during the upcoming term.
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here.
