A senior minister of the Government of Bangladesh has said that Bharatiya Janata Party president Amit Shah’s comment describing Bangladeshis as “termites” and accusing them of “infiltrating” India was an “unwanted remark”.
Shah, in a rally in Sawai Madhopur’s Gangapur on Saturday said that Bangladeshi citizens had infiltrated into India and that “the infiltrators have eaten our country like termites.” The same comment was reiterated by Shah in Delhi, where he added that if re-elected, the BJP would carry a country-wide exercise to identify the Bangladeshis and send them back.
Minister of Information, Hasanul Haq Inu, in an interview with The Hindu, said Shah wasn’t qualified to speak on India-Bangladesh relations and that the Union home minister Rajnath Singh had assured Dhaka that people who weren’t part of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam wouldn’t be sent to Bangladesh. Inu said that the NRC process was an internal matter of India.
