Ram Madhav on Rohingya, NRC at India Today Conclave East: BJP committed to make India free of infiltrators

Ram Madhav said that the Rohingya problem was being dealt with in accordance with the law of the land A day after India repatriated seven Rohingya men to Myanmar for staying in the country illegally, BJP general secretary Ram Madhav said today that his party was committed to deporting every infiltrator. Ram Madhav was speaking at India Today Conclave East 2018 in Kolkata on Friday. He said that the Rohingya problem was being dealt with in accordance with the law of the land. "The problem is faced even more acutely by our neighbour Bangladesh. Bangladesh is actively engaging with Myanmar to find ways to repatriate them to the areas, the Rakhine province in Myanmar. This is the process every country undertakes." "What we are doing with illegal infiltrators is not what only we are doing. It is happening the world over," Ram Madhav said citing the comments made by US President Donald Trump in connection with illegal immigration from Mexico. Ram Madhav said, "Why is Donald Trump building a fence across the America-Mexico border? It is not for anybody else but because they want to secure their own border. They want security from infiltration." Responding to a question about the National Register of Citizens for Assam, Ram Madhav said that the government was following the three-step process of "detect, delete and deport". The formulation entails detection of an Indian citizen, deletion of the names of illegal entries in the voters' list and deportation of those identified to be living in the country illegally. "We are following a constitutional process. There are several bridges to cross. We are right at the beginning. You are talking about the endpoint. We will discuss that when we reach there," Ram Madhav said. He also dismissed criticism that the BJP leaders misled the people in Assam and elsewhere by suggesting that the deportation of illegal immigrants will happen immediately. He said, "The chief minister of Assam gave a press statement. They ran advertisements in newspapers that there is a process. Nobody is going to be picked and dumped somewhere else." "In elections, we have always said that we will not allow infiltrators to remain on our soil. That is our commitment. It remains. But it doesn't mean that we will follow an unconstitutional method to implement that. We will use constitutional methods to ensure that India is free of infiltrators," he said. "Infiltrators have to go. It is a general rule for every country," Ram Madhav said. Is the Modi government discriminating against Muslim immigrants? Ram Madhav said that the Narendra Modi government was following the law. He said, "Immigrants are guided by different laws. In 1950 when the Nehru government first promulgated the Immigrants (Expulsion From Assam) Act, there was a provision in the law that the minority especially, not only Hindus alone but also Buddhists, Jains, Christians or any other community comes to India as persecuted minority, this 1950 Act would not apply to them." "This is what [Jawaharlal] Nehru had said. Nehru was not playing any discriminatory politics at that time. India as a nation has always allowed space for victims of various kinds of exploitation related to persecution. That is guided by certain laws," he said. "Nothing will be done by us, which is against the law of the land," Ram Madhav said while rebutting the charge against the Modi government that it was selectively targeting Muslim immigrants. "In the NRC process, there is no religion column at all," he said. "The Citizenship Amendment Bill is a separate law applicable to the whole country. The citizenship law is not for Assam. It has nothing to do with NRC. It is a separate law because we have the issue of minority coming to India from Afghanistan," he said. "Many Sikhs come to India because of persecution in Afghanistan. Many Sikhs come from Pakistan, many from Bangladesh. It is not happening now as much as it used to happen in the past. It is a different law, which is being framed for the whole country. NRC process is a different exercise. The country's people are guided by different laws. You may be at disadvantage under one law but you get benefits from another law." Why not give the same treatment to those coming from Myanmar? Ram Madhav said, "The law that is being made can be extended to the whole world. Right now the existing law applies only to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. It doesn't apply to Myanmar." "The law that we have today is applicable to erstwhile British India. We are only giving it extensively to immigrants from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh from where minorities out of persecution come to India," Ram Madhav said. What is the larger game plan of the BJP? Will every illegal citizen be ousted or will only illegal Muslims be deported? Why is a different set of rules for different groups of immigrants? If the Dalai Lama and Tibetan refugees could be allowed to live in India, why can't others? "I am surprised that you are calling the Dalai Lama an illegal immigrant. The conventional sense is that the Dalai Lama is not an illegal immigrant. When the Dalai Lama came to India from Tibet where he was persecuted, he was welcomed not by the BJP government but by the then Prime Minister Nehru. We accorded him the status of the guest of our country and they are not given any citizenship," Ram Madhav said. Will the NRC be implemented in West Bengal? Ram Madhav said, "The issue of infiltrators coming to West Bengal was not raised by us. In 2005, in the Lok Sabha, the great Mamata Banerjee, who has suddenly become the champion of infiltrators today she was in the well of the Lok Sabha throwing her shawl at the Speaker shouting that the Left Front government was using infiltrators as a vote bank. I want infiltrators to be thrown out." "The current NRC is for Assam. It is a long process," he said.