Neither West Bengal state nor India will be safe until the border is secured, India’s Union Home Minister Amit Shah has said. Speaking Friday, he said former West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had failed, despite repeated requests, to provide the land needed to complete fencing along the India-Bangladesh border.
Amit Shah made the remarks on the second day of his tour of northern West Bengal.
Attacking Mamata, Amit Shah said: “I desperately, repeatedly requested Mamata Banerjee to provide land for the BSF to build a border fence, but she never responded. I had been asking for 1,129 acres of land since 2014 to strengthen border security. It was only after the [Suvendu] Adhikari government was formed in the state that we received that land.”
West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari said more than 1,000 acres of land have been handed over to India’s Border Security Force (BSF) for fencing the India-Bangladesh border since his government took power in the state last May.
Of the districts where land has been given to the BSF, the most has been provided in Murshidabad, Suvendu said. Murshidabad is a district in West Bengal where Muslims form the majority of the population.
Earlier, in a Facebook post last Tuesday, Suvendu Adhikari wrote: “Ensuring national security and strengthening the border are among our government’s top priorities. To honor our commitment to secure the India-Bangladesh border, we have swiftly completed the process of transferring land to the Border Security Force (BSF) for the necessary fencing. As of today, a total of 1,024.75 acres of land spanning 172.6 kilometers has been formally handed over.”
Armed BSF personnel guard the barbed-wire border fence
In the past, the state government had been somewhat reluctant to hand West Bengal land over to the federal government. A section of West Bengal’s civil society had also long argued that the state’s land should not be handed over to the center, particularly in a state where population density is far higher than in other states.
Various civic organizations issued statements and held protests over this in the past. In 2015, when India and Bangladesh signed their land boundary agreement and India gave Bangladesh just over 10,000 acres of land, West Bengal’s civil society had also raised questions about it. But no such questions have been raised this time over handing West Bengal land to India’s Border Security Force.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report