Kolkata, Nov 24 (IANS) West Bengal Governor C.V. Ananda Bose, who is currently touring districts in the state, will visit the Indo-Bangladesh border at Hakimpur in North 24 Parganas on Monday amid reports of illegal Bangladeshi migrants returning to their country following the launch of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) by the Election Commission of India on November 4.

Currently, the Governor is in Nadia, which also shares international borders with Bangladesh. From Nadia, he will go directly to the Hakimpur border and review the situation there.

A Raj Bhavan official in Kolkata said that he would also talk to illegal infiltrators assembled there, and have first-hand experience on how they entered West Bengal illegally, how long they had been staying in West Bengal, and what they had been doing so far to earn their livelihood.

The government might also send a report based on his first-hand experience to the Union Home Ministry after coming back to Kolkata.

On Tuesday, the Governor will visit the minority-dominated Murshidabad district, which also has international borders with Bangladesh.

Since the SIR process had started, the different border outposts with Bangladesh in the state have witnessed the arrival of illegal Bangladeshi infiltrators in reverse, with the maximum pressure being witnessed at the Hakimpur border.

The state leadership of the BJP had claimed that this reverse migration corroborated why SIR was necessary to weed out the illegal Bangladeshi and Rohingya infiltrators from the voters’ list in the state.

According to the leader of the opposition in the West Bengal assembly, Suvendu Adhikari, the reverse migration also proved why the ruling Trinamool Congress had been opposing the SIR since the beginning of the process.

The Trinamool Congress, on the other hand, has maintained that the SIR is a ploy by the BJP and the Union government to bring in the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in West Bengal.

–IANS

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