New Delhi: India will hand over a dossier to the authorities of Bangladesh citing instances of the use of the porous India-Bangladesh border for massive human trafficking activities. Sources in the government told ETV Bharat on Monday that the dossier will be handed over to the Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) by the Border Security Force (BSF) during the director general level talk scheduled to start in Dhaka on Tuesday.
“Human trafficking is one of the major issues the Indian delegation led by BSF DG Nitin Agarwal will raise with his Bangladesh counterpart Maj Gen Mohammad Ashrafuzzaman Siddiqui during the five days long talk,” sources said. Interestingly, India’s premier anti-terror agency, the NIA has compiled a dossier on human trafficking, which has been handed over to the BSF.
“The dossier contains a few major instances of human trafficking that were compiled by the NIA,” sources said. Some parts of Assam, Tripura and West Bengal have become the major transit routes for human traffickers,” sources said quoting from the dossier. The NIA has already issued a red flag over the incidents of human trafficking of Bangladeshi and Rohingya people into India.
Quoting the investigation report of the NIA, sources said that the human traffickers set up bogus organisations in India where they give shelter to the families after they fall into the hands of human traffickers. In one such instance, an NIA investigation has found that two absconding Bangladeshi human traffickers identified as Sajjid Haldar and Idris set up a waste collection and segregation unit in Bengaluru where they used to give shelter to such families, who fell into their trap.
“Our investigation has revealed that the trafficked girls and women were exploited in various other forms by practising fraud and deception, with some Rohingya women also being sold to other Indian States for marriage purposes with older men,” a senior investigating official said. According to the official, the network also had linkages with facilitators and traffickers operating in other parts of the country and across the border, as part of a larger network engaged in human trafficking activities through the Indo-Bangla border.
The investigation further revealed that Rohingya women, who take refuge in Bangladesh, are pushed into India by the traffickers and later sold for forced marriages across various states, including Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Telangana, Haryana and Jammu & Kashmir. “We also suspect that several of the gullible youths, who fall victims in the hands of human traffickers, are forced into anti-India activities,” the official said.
The agency also believes that Bangladesh-based Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh and Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami (HuJI), who are active in some parts of India, might also target the victims of human trafficking to get them involved in terror activities. India shares a 4,096-km-long border with Bangladesh.
Meanwhile, during the DG-level talk between BSF and BGB, both sides are expected to deliberate on a wide number of issues, including steps to stop incidents of assault and attacks on BSF personnel and civilians by Bangladeshi criminals, joint patrolling to check crimes like smuggling of goods and fake Indian currency notes and improvement of coordinated border management plan (CBMP) among others.
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