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Advani: mount diplomatic pressure on Bangladesh

Guwahati: Bharatiya Janata Party leader L.K. Advani on Friday called for exerting pressure, preferably diplomatic, on Bangladesh to ensure that its soil was not used as a base for anti-India activities.

“Yesterday’s [Thursday’s] serial blasts in Assam have confirmed once again that Bangladeshi soil is being used for anti-India activities,” he told journalists after visiting the three blast sites in the city and meeting the injured in hospitals.

Holding the “weak governments” both at the Centre and in Dispur “squarely responsible for the blasts, Mr. Advani alleged that they had not taken any measure, legal and administrative, to stop the flood of infiltrators from Bangladesh, in spite of the clear directives the Supreme Court issued after striking down the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act 1983 as “unconstitutional.”

Describing the serial blasts in the State as the worst ever he had seen over the past 20-25 years, Mr. Advani said: “I would like to ask the Prime Minister what has been his response to this challenge.”

He said: “Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Delhi, Mumbai, Jaipur — we have seen how pathetically the UPA government has performed. The UPA government lacks both political will and ability to fight terror.”

Mr. Advani pointed out that the apex court had termed the huge influx of illegal migrants a form of “external aggression” on Assam. Recently, the Gauhati High Court also pronounced harshly on the “government’s callous inaction.”

He claimed that about 1.5 crore illegal Bangladeshi migrants were in the country and described Dhaka’s repeated denial of this fact as a “blatant lie.”

The Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha promised that if the BJP-led NDA was voted back to power, it would put in place a strong legal framework including revival of the Prevention of Terrorism Act, revamping the national intelligence infrastructure and ensuring — preferably diplomatically — that Bangladesh was not used as a base for anti-India activities.

Mr. Advani said he would not say directly who was involved in Thursday’s attack but pointed to newspaper reports, based on police sources, that the blasts were the handiwork of the Harkat-ul-Jihad-e-Islami (HuJI) based in Bangladesh, the Lashkar-e-Taiba based in Pakistan and the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA). He said though the ULFA had denied its involvement he would not exonerate the outfit going by its past history of targeting innocent Hindi-speaking people. He alleged that the ULFA, whose leaders received shelter in Bangladesh, transformed itself from an insurgent group into a terrorist outfit sans objective, ideology and purpose.

Referring to the ban on the Students Islamic Movement of India, Mr. Advani said intelligence agencies should tell the country if the Muslim Students Union, Assam, and the Muslim United Liberation Tigers of Assam were only different names of the SIMI.

Earlier, a section of lawyers shouted “BJP go back” slogans when Mr. Advani visited the premises of the Chief Judicial Magistrate Court — one of the blast sites.

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