Former Chief Minister and Congress Working Committee (CWC) member Harish Rawat has claimed that Uttarakhand Government has got no data on the number of Bangladeshi infiltrators now residing in the State. He charged the State Government with merely engaging in rhetoric on the issue of illegal Bangaldeshis and Rohingya Muslims without doing any ground work. The Congress leader said this while talking to the media persons on the sidelines of a cultural programme in Dehradun on Friday.
Asked for comment on the Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat’s statement on Thursday that the Bangladeshis and Rohingyas living in the State illegally would be thrown out, the former CM said that such statement sans data was unacceptable. Notably, the issue of illegal immigrants in the State had come to fore recently when Khanpur MLA Pranav Singh claimed that many Rohingyas had sneaked into different parts of the Haridwar district.
Made in the aftermath of the political slugfest on the issue of NRC in Assam, the claim by the BJP MLA had prompted the State administration to initiate a process of identifying the illegal immigrants in the State.
Quizzed over the suspension of two officers of Indian Administrative Service (IAS) in the National Highway (NH) – 74 scam, the former CM said that the State Government must explain why the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) officials are being kept out of the purview of the investigation.
He said that it is incorrect to say that the NHAI officers have no role in scam as the compensation is disbursed by NHAI.
Harish Rawat reminded that it was the CM who had declared in the State Assembly that Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) would probe the NH scam. “But what happened is that a Special Investigation Team (SIT) has been probing instead,” he said