'Shoot Bangladeshi and Rohingya immigrants who won't leave', says Indian politician

Around 40 million people are expected to be labelled illegal immigrants after a register of citizens in the state of Assam is updated

A politician from India’s governing party has provoked outrage after he called for Rohingya and Bangladeshi immigrants to leave India or be killed.

“If these Rohingyas and Bangladeshi illegal immigrants do not leave India respectfully, then they should be shot and eliminated," said Raja Singh, a Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) member of the Telangana Legislative Assembly for an area of Hyderabad.

"Only then will our country be safe,”

He added: “How is it right to keep foreigners in our country? There is no need to keep these pests in our country.”

His comments were reported by the ANI news agency.

Mr Singh was speaking after Narendra Modi’s government caused uproar over the exclusion of 40 million people from a draft version of the controversial National Citizen Register (NRC) in Assam.

The register, which is a list of all legal citizens in the state, is being updated for the first time since 1951 and is being used to identify cases of illegal immigration into Assam from Bangladesh and other areas.

Millions of Bangladeshi people are thought to have come to Assam since the 1970s, and as many as 40 million are still staying without official documentation.

Assam is the only state in India with such a register.

However, India’s Supreme Court has ordered the government not to take any coercive action against those people unable to provide documentation to prove their citizenship.

Mr Singh has previously made inflammatory remarks about immigration and incidents of lynching, and once called Hyderabad's old city "a mini Pakistan".

In the run up to the 2014 election, Mr Modi said Bangladeshis would be deported if he came to power.