Hannah Ellis-Petersen in Delhi and Shaikh Azizur Rahman in Kolkata
The Guardian: The Indian government has been accused of illegally deporting Indian Muslims to Bangladesh, prompting fears of an escalating campaign of persecution.
Thousands citizens, with some forced to walk miles across treacherous terrain to of people, largely Muslims suspected of being illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, have been rounded up by police across India in recent weeks, according to human rights groups, with many of them deprived of due legal process and sent over the border to neighbouring Muslim-majority Bangladesh.
Indian citizens are among those alleged to have been deported illegally, according to lawyers and accounts by deportees. Those who tried to resist being “pushed back” were threatened at gunpoint by India’s border security force, according to several accounts.
About 200 people have since been returned to India by Bangladeshi border guards after being found to be Indian get home.
“Instead of following due legal procedure, India is pushing mainly Muslims and low-income communities from their own country to Bangladesh without any consent,” said Taskin Fahmina, senior researcher at Bangladesh human rights organisation Odhikar. “This push by India is against national and international law.”
Bangladesh’s foreign ministry said it had written letters to the Indian authorities urging them to stop sending people over the border without consultation and vetting, as was previous official procedure, but they said those letters had gone unanswered.
Among those deported and returned was Hazera Khatun, 62, a physically disabled grandmother. Khatun’s daughter Jorina Begum said they had documents to prove two generations of her mother’s family had been born in India. “How can she be a Bangladeshi?” said Begum.
Khatun was picked up by police on 25 May and the next day was pushed into a van with 14 other Muslims who were then driven to the border with Bangladesh in the middle of the night. There, Khatun said officers from India’s Border Security Force (BSF) forced them to cross the border.
“They treated us like animals,” said Khatun. “We protested that we are Indians, why should we enter Bangladesh? But they threatened us with guns and said, ‘We will shoot you if you don’t go to the other side.’ After we heard four gunshots from the Indian side, we got very scared and quickly walked across the border.”
The group were taken into custody by Bangladesh’s border guards, and held in a makeshift camp in a field. However, Khatun said the authorities in Bangladesh would not allow the group to stay as their documents showed they were Indian citizens. They were driven a truck to the border and told to walk to India.
“When we returned, it was terrible,” said Khatun. “We had to walk through forests and rivers … We were so scared, we thought if the BSF officers found us coming back, they would kill us. I was sure we were going to die.” Eventually she made it back to her village on 31 May. According to her family, she was covered in bruises and deeply traumatised. The escalating crackdown against so-called “illegal Bangladeshis” by the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) government comes in the wake of an attack by Islamist militants in the Indian-administered region of Kashmir in April which killed 25 Hindu tourists and a guide, after which the BJP government vowed to expel “outsiders”.
The mass detentions increased with the launch of Operation Sindhoor in May, when India launched strikes at neighbouring Muslim-majority Pakistan, which it blamed for the Kashmir militant attack and vowed to wipe out terror groups targeting India.
Over its 11 years in power, the BJP government has been accused by rights groups and citizens of persecuting, harassing and disenfranchising the country’s 200 million Muslims as part of its Hindu nationalist agenda, charges the government denies.
The most widespread targeting and deporting of Muslims in recent weeks has been in the north-eastern state of Assam, as the BJP-run state government has escalated its long-running campaign against those it calls “infiltrators”. About 100 people who have been recently detained in the state are missing, according to activists.
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