Bengali-speaking Muslims in India fear detention, deportation

“First, the police told her to bring her children if she wanted her husband back [from a police station where he was detained]. She went, showed them their documents to prove they’re Indians, but the police didn’t care,” Roshni Bibi, her cousin, who lives in New Delhi, told Nikkei Asia.

From across the border, Khatun called her Delhi home in tears, Bibi said, adding that Khatun and her husband were wandering around on the Bangladeshi side of the border with no roof or food. Back in Delhi, their 4-year-old daughter cries for her mother’s return.

In May, India’s Ministry of Home Affairs set a 30-day deadline, which expired in June, and ordered state governments to identify “suspected” undocumented immigrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar, and to detain and deport those who could not prove their citizenship. The central government also ordered states to establish a sufficient number of detention centers at the district level across India.

There is no official statement on the exact number of people deported to Bangladesh and Myanmar. However, since the ministry issued the order, India’s Border Security Force (BSF) has reportedly picked up and sent back more than 2,500 people identified as Bangladeshi nationals, while police in Delhi and Haryana, the state next to the capital, have detained dozens of Bengali-speaking individuals.

Khatun’s case hints that not all deportees are foreigners, but include Indian citizens. The removals appear to target migrants from India’s eastern state of West Bengal, as well as Bangladeshis. The region was split by the two partitions of Bengal in 1905 and 1947, creating the Hindu-majority state of West Bengal and the Muslim-majority nation of Bangladesh, which was part of Pakistan until 1971.

India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, accuses the Trinamool Congress (TMC) party, which rules West Bengal, of turning a blind eye to undocumented immigration to gain votes, while the TMC blames the government for the mistreatment of West Bengali migrant workers in Delhi, Assam and Odisha, a state in eastern India.

Amit Malviya, a BJP leader in West Bengal, accused the TMC of “flooding India with Bangladeshi infiltrators who work elsewhere but return to [West] Bengal just to vote for Mamata Banerjee,” naming West Bengal’s chief minister.

A migrant worker sits inside his makeshift shelter at Jai Hind Camp in Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, surrounded by sacks of scrap and recyclables he collects for a living. (Photo by Quratulain Rehbar)

“They target us even when we have ration cards and voter IDs,” said Bibi. “They (BJP politicians) ask for our votes during election time, but now say we’re not Indians.”

Mehbub Sheik, a man in his 30s from Murshidabad, West Bengal, was detained by the police in the western state of Maharashtra and later deported to Bangladesh in June as an “illegal infiltrator” despite his family submitting the necessary documents to prove that he is an Indian citizen.

Sheik, who worked as a mason in Mumbai, the capital of the state of Maharashtra, called his family from a Bangladeshi number, crying and exhausted. He told them he had been shipped across the border. Weeks later, after the West Bengal government intervened, he was allowed to return to and freed in Mumbai.

But more than a month later, he still has not stepped out for work. “Authorities beat him when he argued that he’s Indian,” said Mujibur Sheikh. “Now he just sits at home. I’m the only one earning. We see the crackdown on social media, and it is traumatizing.”

Analysts say the authorities’ actions are part of a sweeping campaign against Bengali-speaking Muslims carried out under the pretext of hunting “illegal Bangladeshis.”

“It is systematic, a message from the BJP to its voter base that the borders are secure,” said Angshuman Choudhary, a doctoral candidate at the National University of Singapore and King’s College London who focuses on India’s Northeastern region. “But on the ground, poor Bengali Muslims are stopped by the police. If they can’t show papers [proving their citizenship], they are branded Bangladeshis. Most are just migrant workers without documents.”

Rights activists say authorities are bypassing the country’s legal safeguards.

“It’s mostly happening in BJP-ruled states,” said Kirity Roy, a Kolkata-based human rights activist who has tracked migrant detentions for decades. “Police sidestep the courts, arrest people, keep them in custody for days, then dump them at the border with help from the BSF,” Roy told Nikkei, calling any deportation without proper administrative steps illegal, “but it’s happening.”

Roy, in late June, wrote to India’s National Human Rights Commission demanding action after Delhi Police earlier that month allegedly took seven Bengali-speaking Muslim migrant workers and their family members from a brick factory in the state of Haryana — including women and children — tortured one of them and threatened them with deportation.

Nikkei interviewed more than a dozen migrants and their families in Delhi and Assam. Many of them said they live in fear of detention and forced eviction. Others refused to speak out for fear of retaliation by the authorities.

In New Delhi, fear takes other forms. Mohammad Shamsu, 65, who migrated from Cooch Behar, West Bengal, decades ago, lives in a migrant workers camp in Vasant Kunj, a southern neighborhood of the capital. Earlier this month, authorities cut power to the camp in hot, humid weather. Hundreds of migrant families, many of whom engage in rag picking, fear their slum dwellings will be demolished.

“They say they will demolish our homes. Where will the children go? Or pregnant women, where will they stay?” Shamsu told Nikkei.

Mofizul Khan, right, stands with his son near a makeshift camp in New Delhi. (Photo by Quratulain Rehbar)

Mofizul Khan, who lives in the same camp, said that it will also impact his children’s education, as they go to a government school nearby.

Choudhary sees the crackdown as rooted in long-held suspicion of Bengali Muslims. “For decades, the figure of the ‘Bengali Muslim’ has been seen through an ethno-racial lens in India. Just speaking Bengali triggers suspicion of them being Bangladeshis. It is forgotten that millions of Bengali Muslims have deep roots here, families who were here long before Bengal was split in two.”

Bangladesh, for its part, has protested India’s actions, calling them reckless and a violation of its sovereignty.

Choudhary said that with Bangladesh’s interim government under Muhammad Yunus on shaky ground, “This new wave of forced deportations only deepens the tension, turning India’s internal citizenship dispute into a cross-border flashpoint.”