The Hindu : Harassment of Bengalis: CPI(M) for Centre's intervention

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Mar 02, 2003

National

National

Harassment of Bengalis: CPI(M) for Centre's intervention

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI MARCH 1. The CPI (M) has sought the Centre's intervention to stop the "harassment of innocent Indian citizens" living in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, who were being taken into custody by authorities on charges of being Bangladeshi citizens.

Two MPs of the CPI (M), Somnath Chatterjee and Hannan Mollah, said in a letter to the Deputy Prime Minister, L.K. Advani, that a large number of incidents had occurred and were still taking place in Noida, where the local administration and police were ``wrongfully harassing, arresting and victimising the Bengali-speaking residents" of Sectors 18, 37, 44 and 58 of Noida, a city adjoining the capital. "It seems there is now a repetition of the incidents that happened in April 1999 and June 2000, when a large number of Bengali-speaking people were arrested on the false plea that they were nationals of Bangladesh and harassed in an inhuman manner,'' they said. Citing many incidents to drive home the seriousness of the issue, the MPs said that a majority of the people arrested were from West Bengal, but there were also people from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Uttaranchal and Maharashtra.

``Most of the people belong to the majority community and their only crime is that they are Bengali-speaking. You are aware that the issues of providing protection to Bengali-speaking poor people residing in and around Delhi and neighbouring Uttar Pradesh have been raised for several years and the recent incidents have identical patterns of arrest, destruction of documents, extortion of money and what is recently taking place is that surnames of Bengali Hindus are being changed to Muslim surnames and mentioned in the FIRs to provide pretended justification for arrest,'' they said.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

National