KOCHI: For the past several months, Central agencies have been keeping an eye out for interstate rackets that bring in Bangladeshis illegally to Kerala as migrant labourers from West Bengal after providing them fake IDs.
A senior police officer said a couple of months ago, that the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) had sent specific information to states, with a clear directive to track down Bangladeshis who arrived illegally.
The communique was on the illegal stay of Bangladeshis in Kerala under the guise of workers from West Bengal and the need to trace them by collecting information from the ground level.
Consequently, an operation by Kollam police on May 3, 2020, on the basis of specific inputs resulted in the arrest of four Bangladeshis from a cashew processing factory there.
According to a police probe, the four with ID papers showing them as migrant workers from West Bengal had come to Kerala with the aim of settling here.
They had arrived in the country on March 2, 2020 as per the details of their tourist visa and travelled straight to Kollam on March 9, 2020 to work as labourers in the factory.
Hari Sankar, Rural SP, Kollam, said the arrested possessed fake ID cards to ‘prove’ their Indian citizenship in the event of being caught.
“When we checked the address, we found it to be bogus,” he said, adding, Bangladeshis coming to Kerala illegally manage to get Indian ID cards with bogus address.
The Intelligence Bureau and state intelligence have been wary of the activities of the rackets that provide identification documents to illegal Bangladeshis after they unearthed details of two persons who had secured passports from the Regional Passport Office in Kochi without any valid documents in 2012 and then managed to leave the country.
The incident caused a great deal of embarrassment to the agencies when it later emerged that the address provided by the duo was bogus.