One such instance has been reported by Hazara Khatun, a 62-year-old physically disabled woman who was picked up by the police on 27th May and forcibly deported to Bangladesh. She said that the Border Security Force “treated us like animals.” She recalled that the BSF told them, “We will shoot you if you don’t go to the other side.” She added, “After we heard gunshots from the Indian side, we got very scared and quickly walked across the border.” Several other similar incidents have been reported, depicting how the police and the BSF are violating every norm of human rights and forcing people to enter Bangladesh at gunpoint. The police have been given absolute freedom to detain anyone based on mere suspicion, even if the person holds an Aadhaar card or other forms of identification, transport them to the India-Bangladesh border in West Bengal, Assam, and Tripura, and forcibly push them into Bangladesh while BSF rifles are pointed at them.
Police in BJP-ruled states such as Gujarat, Maharashtra, Haryana, Delhi, and Assam are carrying out these illegal detentions and deportations. The entire process of the pushbacks depends solely on 'suspicion' of someone being ‘Bangladeshi’ and violates every national and international legal standard. The institutionalisation of such arbitrary pushbacks represents a dangerous strategy of persecution and otherisation of Muslims, in complete violation of the principles of natural justice under the BJP regime. It violates Article 21 and Article 14 of the Indian Constitution, which guarantee the protection of the right to life to all persons and extend the right to equal protection of the law to everyone residing within Indian territory, including foreigners.
In the recent spate of pushbacks, those who are being picked up are not even produced before a magistrate or provided legal representation to defend themselves. Assam CM Himanta Biswa Sarma continues to defend the illegal pushouts, citing a February Supreme Court verdict and the legally obsolete Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act, 1950, to justify the arbitrary pushbacks being carried out through the Assam border. Sarma has even stated that District Commissioners have the authority to deport anyone based on suspicion, without undergoing any process of verifying the citizenship of the concerned individual.
Neither the Supreme Court verdict cited by Himanta Sarma—which pertains to 63 persons detained in the Matia Detention Camp—nor the invocation of the 1950 Act, can obscure the fact that no government or security personnel has the right to forcibly deport any individual without following established procedures for identity verification and formal repatriation with the consent of the country to which the individual is being deported.
India is a signatory to the UN Global Compact on Migration, which obligates countries to protect victims of trafficking and prohibits their deportation. As many of those identified as undocumented migrants are, in fact, trafficking victims, the government has no legal or moral right to deport them forcibly. The Supreme Court, in a 2021 ruling regarding the deportation of Rohingya refugees, clearly stated that deportation cannot occur unless the prescribed legal procedure is followed.
In a July 2024 verdict, restoring the citizenship of a Muslim man who had been declared a foreigner by a Tribunal in Assam, the Supreme Court ruled that the executive has no right to act on mere suspicion and declare someone a foreigner. The Court questioned whether the executive had the right to “pick a person at random, knock at his/her/their door, and say, ‘We suspect you of being a foreigner.’” The Court observed that the State cannot function in such an arbitrary manner.
The complete arbitrariness of the ‘Push Back’ process is further exposed by the fact that several individuals have been brought back to India after being forcibly pushed into Bangladesh by the Border Security Forces. It has been reported that at least five individuals, who were working in Maharashtra and were arbitrarily detained by the Maharashtra police and deported, are Indian citizens from West Bengal. Following intervention by the West Bengal government, these individuals were allowed to return. Several others, from Bengali-speaking Muslim backgrounds, who had been forcibly deported, have also returned to Assam.
The recent wave of forced deportations of Bengali Muslims is part of the RSS-BJP agenda to constantly manufacture an “other” within the population, establishing a hate-filled narrative of an “internal enemy.” The CAA-NPR-NRC strategy aimed to persecute Muslims by conducting a nationwide NRC but was decisively rebuffed by widespread mass resistance in 2019. The “chronology” explained by Amit Shah, which aimed to unleash a National Population Register followed by a nationwide NRC after passing the Citizenship Amendment Act, sought to create a system that cast suspicion on millions and left them vulnerable to disenfranchisement by a communally biased administrative machinery. This exposed the BJP’s dangerous plan to plunge the nation into communal chaos.
The BJP has frequently invoked the fear of “infiltrators” as a political tool, with Bengali-speaking Muslims being the primary target of these hate campaigns. From deploying bulldozers against Muslim homes to dehumanising Bengali-speaking migrant workers as “insects,” the BJP has consistently displayed the communal venom that drives its politics.
While ‘Operation Sindoor’ was officially aimed at targeting ‘terror infrastructure’ in Pakistan, the domestic political narrative around it vilifying muslims, even when Donald Trump claimed credit for brokering a ceasefire between India and Pakistan—demonstrates the present regime’s disregard for genuine border security and national sovereignty. Rather than addressing legitimate questions—such as the identity and whereabouts of the Pahalgam attack perpetrators—the Modi government has chosen to distract the public with illegal pushbacks, turning fellow citizens into enemies while those tasked with ensuring internal and border security remain unaccountable.
It is time we raise our voice against this illegal campaign of Push Back by the Modi regime, and demand an immediate halt to all pushbacks; free legal aid and compensation for those who were forcibly deported; and that no one, including those declared as ‘Foreign Nationals’ by Assam’s disputed Foreigners’ Tribunals, be forcibly deported without proper verification of identity and residence by Bangladeshi authorities.
