Naresh Fernandes

On December 5, six months after being forced across the border into Bangladesh by Indian authorities, 25-year-old Sunali Khatun was allowed to return to her home state of West Bengal. She is eight months pregnant.

Indian officials had detained Khatun, her husband and eight-year-old son in Delhi’s Rohini area on June 20, claiming that the family were “illegal migrants of Bangladesh”.

But when Scroll’s Anant Gupta travelled to Khatun’s village in Birbhum district in August, her family showed him land records going back five generations. Gupta even interviewed the midwife who had delivered Khatun.

Though Khatun is relieved that her baby, due in January, will be born in India, she is worried about her husband. She and her son were let back in after India’s Supreme Court urged the government to allow them to return on “humanitarian grounds”.  But her husband remains stranded in Bangladesh.

Khatun is just one of the many victims of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s cynical strategy of weaponising anxieties about belonging and citizenship to brutalise India’s most vulnerable citizens – especially Muslims.

The horrific cost paid by the scapegoats of this campaign has been the focus of Scroll’s journalism for much of 2025.

The BJP declared its intention to show Indian Muslims exactly where they stood in 2016, when it moved the Citizenship Amendment Bill. This discriminatory law, which was eventually passed in 2019, offered undocumented immigrants belonging to religious minorities from three neighbouring countries a fast track to Indian citizenship – except if they were Muslim.

The programme to underscore who belongs (but more expressly, who does not) is playing out especially savagely in Assam, where those pronounced non-citizens by the state’s notorious foreigners’ tribunals are “pushed” across the border into Bangladesh in the dead of the night.

Our colleague Rokibuz Zaman reported on the drive to detain Bengali-speaking Muslim migrant workers across the country,  demand that they prove that they are Indian – and sometimes expel them. Anant Gupta investigated instances in which the police had bypassed the rules that regulate deportations.

From Kashmir, Safwat Zargar wrote about 80-year-old Abdul Waheed Bhat, paralysed and incapable of speaking, who died in a bus at the Attari-Wagah border post on April 30, waiting to be deported to Pakistan.

He had little with him: a blanket, a few medicines, doctor’s prescriptions, a water bottle and some diapers.

Bhat had lived a life fractured by the vagaries and malign intransigence of bureaucracy. He had been born in India and had mostly lived in Kashmir – save for 15 years, when he was stuck in Pakistan after taking a trip with an aunt at a time when crossing the international boundary did not require a passport or visa.

But the sudden outbreak of war in 1965 left Bhat stranded. Returning home required elaborate documentation that he did not possess. Only after he had acquired a Pakistani passport was he allowed to be reunited with his family.

At the end of April, in the wake of the Pahalgam terror attack, Bhat was served notice to leave India. The authorities ignored the pleas of his relatives that Bhat was bed-ridden and unable to take care of himself – a fact to which doctors had attested.

Had Bhat not been Muslim, he would perhaps have been spared this Mantoesque tragedy.

The programme to reify Indian identity was not conducted only on the borders. It spread to the heartland in earnest in July, when the Election Commission began a “special intensive revision” to “purify” the electoral rolls in Bihar. Three months later, the commission decided to expand the exercise to 12 states and Union Territories.

This is ostensibly being done to excise duplicate entries and remove the names of voters who may have died. It also aims to stop undocumented migrants from casting their ballots. Critics fear that the names of Muslims and voters from other communities that oppose the policies of the BJP will be deleted, claiming that they – like Sunali Khatun – are “illegal migrants”.

The process reverses the principles of natural justice: rather than the state providing evidence for why it believes names should be deleted, voters are expected to prove that they belong.

It is not a coincidence that the crusade to identify undesirables has been accelerated in a year that marks the centenary of the founding of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh – the BJP’s ideological parent.

Since 1925, the Sangh has been relentless in its pursuit of a Hindu rashtra, a theocratic state that would afford supremacy to Hindus. It isn’t surprising that the Sangh’s supporters, now that they occupy the pinnacle of power, have deployed grey areas in the law to turbocharge their effort to paint India saffron.

If it weren’t so tragic, it would be amusing to remind them of the warning issued by MS Golwalkar, the second head of the RSS, in We or Our Nationhood Defined, a foundational text for the Hindutva movement.

“We have learnt to call a class of people patriots, saviours of the nation,” Golwalkar noted in 1939. “We have also learnt to dub all the rest as unnational. Really, have we thought over it well? Do we, in fact, understand what it is to be a national? Or do we merely echo a well-worn slogan without appreciating the essence thereof?”