Illegal immigrants evicted from Railways’ land in Jammu

The Railways on Tuesday evicted illegal immigrants, who had encroached upon its land near tracks in Jammu’s Trikuta Nagar, officials said.

Railways SSP Mohammad Arif Reshu said no force was used and the encroachers vacated the Railways land on their own. “They were told that it is not safe to live close to the tracks and they also understood the hazards and vacated on their own,” he added.

However, a couple, while packing their belongings, said, “Under these hot weather conditions, we don’t know where will we go? We can’t go back to Myanmar because we would be killed there. We don’t get accommodation on rent here because we don’t have Aadhaar cards, but we do have UN refugee cards. We have young children with us. We don’t know what would happen to us.”

Another woman regretted that she couldn’t observe fasting in the month of Ramzan because of the action by the authorities.

Another Rohingya, Shams ul Alam, with a UNHCR card in his hands, said, “I don’t know where to go now…They (officials) said that the land belongs to the Railways and we have to vacate it. They don’t consider UN card. We appeal to the government to rehabilitate us somewhere. How can we go back to Myanmar. We will be killed there by the army.”

On April 7, the J&K high court had directed the home secretary of the UT, RK Goyal, to evolve a mechanism for the identification of all illegal immigrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh and prepare a list after identifying them. The court directions had come on a PIL filed by lawyer Hunar Gupta, who sought directions to the J&K government for appointing a former retired judge to hold an inquiry to identify all illegal immigrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh, who have migrated and settled in J&K.

A division bench of the high court comprising Chief Justice Pankaj Mithal and Justice Moksha Khajuria Kazmi, after hearing senior advocate Sunil Sethi for the PIL and advocate general DC Raina with AAG Raman Sharma for the UT, directed the home secretary to consider the matter and evolve a mechanism for the identification of all illegal immigrants.

The entire “exercise may be carried out, most promptly, within a period of six weeks,” the court had said.

As per the government, 13,400 illegal immigrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh were living in various areas of J&K.

The petitioner had submitted that the actual figures were much more than the official statistics.