GUWAHATI: A mentally-challenged man, pushed into Tripura by the Border Guards Bangladesh (BGB), was nabbed by the Border Security Force (BSF) which handed him over to the police.
A few days ago, the BSF had thwarted the infiltration of another mentally-challenged Bangladeshi, a woman, in the state. She had remained stuck on an islet on the border until being accepted by Bangladesh ten days later after a series of meetings at various levels between BSF and BGB.
The two back-to-back incidents made the BSF to sniff a “pattern” in pushing mentally-challenged people into India by the Bangladeshis through unfenced patches of the border.
“It’s a new trend. We don’t know why people are being pushed into our side. One reason could be that the people will get treatment here,” a senior BSF official told this newspaper.
The police said the mentally-challenged Bangladeshi man had been sent to a quarantine centre. The stranger’s appearance in South Tripura district in the time of the pandemic left the locals panic-stricken.
“We aren’t taking any chances. We have sent him to a quarantine facility and we will get his samples tested for COVID-19,” the police said.
The BSF had sought to hand the man over to the BGB but as two rounds of meetings between them yielded no breakthrough, he was handed over to Tripura police.
Currently, there are 16 Bangladeshis lodged at the Modern Psychiatric Hospital in Tripura capital Agartala. They were admitted at different times in last two years. All of them have recovered but the Centre has not been able to send them back to Bangladesh.
“We had 18 people from Bangladesh. They were basically mentally-ill people found loitering around at different places and admitted to our hospital by the police on the orders of magistrates. Two of them were taken away by their families after they had recovered. However, in the cases of the remaining others, technicality stood in the way of their repatriation,” Dr Jyotirmoy Ghosh of the hospital told this newspaper.
“All the 16 people have fully recovered. They told us their names, names of their family members and which places of Bangladesh they are from. Usually, when we take up such a case with Bangladesh and follow it up, Bangladeshi authorities will tell us they sent the details to officials in Bangladesh but they have not received anything,” Dr. Ghosh said.
It’s a burden on India, he added.