A RACKET IS EXPOSED
and/or www.mantra.com/jai
By V. R. Jayaraj
The Pioneer
Op-Ed
Friday, May 28, 2010
Mangalore plane crash brings fake passports scam to fore
Kasaragod, the northernmost district of Kerala, is yet to overcome
the grief and shock caused by last Saturday's airplane crash at Bajpe
airport, Mangalore, in which 158 lives were lost. Fifty-four
Malayalees were killed when the Dubai-Mangalore Air India Express
flight jumped off the table-top runway into the 300-feet valley and
51 of them hailed from this district.
Kasaragod indeed is in Kerala, but the people who had migrated from
here to the Gulf in the past 50 years have always considered
Mangalore, just 75 km away, as their airport city. People of
Kasaragod had started migrating to the Gulf in the 1950s when
Malaysia and Singapore began to lose their charm and the Arabian
countries started to thrive on the fossil fuels. Whatever progress
this region has achieved has been founded on the fortunes these
people brought from the oil fields of those deserts.
In those years of hardship, several migrants had no time or resources
to go through the tedious tasks needed for getting proper travel
documents before they boarded the Machuas and launches that would
drop them off the Arabian coast. These people did not care whether
they were breaking the law but they began to respect it when they had
the opportunity for that. But as the rush of migrants to the treasure
land increased phenomenally in the 1970s, rackets that 'organised'
travel documents began to flourish -- in Kerala as well as in the
Gulf. And they still operate. That is how the authorities came across
at least seven victims of the Mangalore plane crash who had travelled
on forged passports or had been keeping more than one passports. As
the finding had come amidst a very shocking accident which pushed an
entire region into unimaginable pain, the authorities rightly chose
not to make a big issue out of it but they had to solve several
problems at hand.
"These passports pose cases of right names with wrong addresses and
therefore assumed identities," said a travel agent in Kasaragod.
"Since official procedures have to go through proper channels and
everything needs to be done on the basis of documents, the
authorities would now be forced to take at least some actions that
could be termed as harmless in terms of law as compensation has to be
paid to the families of the victims. But the authorities know that
these victims, who used forged passports for their fatal trip, were
also victims of avaricious rackets comprising manpower agents and
sponsors," he said. Even Ministers have already said that everything
possible would be done to ensure that compensation is paid to the
victims' families irrespective of the passport mix-ups. That the
forgery had caused a lot of delay in properly identifying the victims
but that problem has been solved to a great extent. However, the
forgery of passports used by travellers from Dubai to Kasaragod
through Mangalore has prompted the Intelligence, police and
emigration and immigration authorities to be more vigilant about the
practice.
The police in Kerala have always known of the existence of passport
manufacturing units called 'Kasaragod embassies' in the various Gulf
countries. These rackets could produce passports of any country --but
mostly Indian passports -- in virtually no time. The name, Kasaragod
embassies, was given to these rackets on the assumption (erroneously,
in several cases) that they were being run by people from this
district. The passports these 'embassies' issued were so perfect that
the regular scanning procedures like ultraviolet light analysis
usually failed to identify the manipulations. The authorities at the
three international airports in Kerala had stepped up their vigil
against forged documents recently after a chance seizure of such a
passport at the Thiruvananthapuram airport.
The Intelligence Bureau and police have always known of the existence
of these embassies but they were unable to do anything as the rackets
operated from the Gulf. Also, it would never be easy to spot these
rackets as they had no regular bases or permanent agents. "They
operate with so much professionalism," said the Kasaragod-based
travel agent. "And an ordinary low-income worker in the Gulf does not
have the authority to ask the 'embassy' he approaches for a legally
valid passport issued in his true identity when he wants to get home
in no time and when the sponsor won't return his passport. He prays
to god to keep everything fine and board the plane," he says. The
forgeries that came to light after the Mangalore crash and the
confusion it had caused have prompted the Government to see the
matter more seriously and the concerned departments would now take it
up with their counterparts in the Gulf in a determined move to end
the malpractice. It also poses a huge security concern in these times
of terror.
http://dailypioneer.com/258751/A-racket-is-exposed.html
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Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi
Om Shanti
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