Myanmar and Bangladesh in the Union Territory within six weeks. The judgment was handed down by a bench comprising Chief Justice Pankaj Mithal and Justice Moksha Khajuria Kazmi in response to a public interest litigation (PIL) submitted by counsel Hunar Gupta demanding the expulsion of such unlawful immigrants.
According to last week’s order from the bench, “We direct the secretary home, UT of J&K to consider the matter and to evolve a mechanism for the identification of all illegal immigrants and to prepare a list after identifying them. The said exercise may be carried out, most promptly, within a period of six weeks”.
According to government statistics, more than 13,700 foreign nationals, including Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants, have relocated to Jammu and Samba districts of Jammu & Kashmir, where their population has expanded by more than 6,000 from 2008 to 2016. As a result, more than 200 Rohingya migrants, a Muslim minority from Myanmar who speak a Bengali dialect, were accommodated in a holding centre in Kathua after being discovered residing illegally in Jammu city during a verification check in March 2021.
According to the senior lawyer Sunil Sethi, who stands for the petitioner, while identifying such unlawful migrants is relatively simple, the government should develop a comprehensive procedure for identifying them and present a list of all such immigrants to the court. The court emphasized that one of the orders issued in the PIL on May 24, 2017 indicated that the government had formed a committee of ministers to explore the different concerns associated with illegal migrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh at the time.
The order noted, “The group of ministers was supposed to take up the matter, examine it and furnish a report thereof. But till date, nothing has come on record. In the meantime, the state of Jammu and Kashmir was bifurcated and the UT of J&K has been created”.
Advocate General DC Raina and Additional Advocate General Raman Sharma appeared in the court, and the matter was scheduled for hearing on July 15. Mr Gupta’s PIL seeks the expulsion of illegal immigrants and the revocation of all benefits received by them from the state exchequer, as well as from the schemes and perks available to inhabitants of J&K. According to the PIL, the real number of illegal immigrants is substantially higher than the official statistics.
