The Politics Of ‘Push Back Of Illegal Immigrants’ In Assam And Bangladesh

On May 27, the Border Security Force, which patrols India’s 4,096 km border with Bangladesh, allegedly pushed Korim Ali, a resident of Jania village in Western Assam’s Barpeta district, into northern Bangladesh’s Rowmari, bordering Assam’s South Salmara-Mankachar district.

The 70-year-old Bengali-speaking Muslim man spent nearly two months in Bangladesh, parched and hungry and looking for shelter. After weeks of ordeal, he managed to find shelter in a home in Bangladesh’s Kurigam district where the owner helped him contact his family in Jania for his return. Five days later, Ali managed to return home, to Jania, which is over 200 km upstream of the transnational Brahmaputra River.

Although he is back home, he still remembers the tumultuous time spent in Bangladesh. “I would walk without a clue about where I was. I would roam from one place to the other like a beggar, without food and water, for miles,” Ali recalls.

Ali is among the 303 people, all Bengali-speaking Muslims, “pushed back” to Bangladesh. Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma had informed the state assembly of about 330 “illegal immigrants being pushed back into Bangladesh” in June. “Pushback” is an ad hoc and informal mechanism for deporting alleged immigrants and foreigners to their home countries by bypassing the diplomatic route.

The Bengal-origin Muslims in Assam, who were pushed back into Bangladesh, are from a unique category of citizens in the state called Declared Foreign National (DFNs). The DFNs are individuals declared foreigners by the quasi-judicial Foreigners Tribunals in Assam. These tribunals, according to critics and legal experts, often function like kangaroo courts, and with bias.

Like Ali, several other DFNs who had previously spent years in detention camps across Assam before being released on conditional bail were asked to report to their local police station on false pretexts and later detained in a statewide verification drive to detect illegal immigrants between May 23 and 31.

According to Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP), a Mumbai-based Human Rights movement that works for the stateless people in Assam, hundreds, including women and senior citizens, were arrested in nightly raids by the border wing of the Assam police “without warrants, memos, or explanations, amounting to a form of abduction”.

At least three of them have their cases pending in the Constitutional Courts, and four have their names on the National Register of Citizens 2019—an updated register containing the names of Indian citizens in Assam.

This crackdown followed a directive from the Union Ministry of Home Affairs in May, instructing all the states and Union Territories to detect, identify, and deport illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar, while setting a 30-day deadline for their credential verification.

Since then, several Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled governments, including in Assam, have detained “illegal Bangla­deshis” and Rohingya refugees and allegedly pushed them into no-man’s land along India’s border with Bangladesh.

Data accessed by The Washington Post from the Bangladeshi government reveals that between May 7—when India launched Operation Sindoor to “destroy the terror bases” in Pakistan—and July 3, 1,880 people were deported from India to Bangladesh. Between May 7 and June 17, border officials in Bangladesh identified 110 people as Indians who had been wrongfully deported and returned, according to another Bangladesh government document obtained by The Washington Post. 

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Khatun (name changed), a declared foreigner from a village in central Assam’s Hojai district, is now hiding after she was brought back from Bangladesh by her son. Like Ali, Khatun had spent nearly two months in Bangladesh after being allegedly pushed back to the country on May 27.

She is pale now. Her fingers and feet are crooked due to the worsening paralysis caused by the trauma and the ordeal of spending her days in a country where, apart from the Bengali language, nothing else felt like home to her. Her son, who did not want to be named, said she often wakes up from sleep screaming about what she saw on the border on May 27. “The BSF asked her to run to the other side of the border. When she said that she cannot run to the other side of no-man’s land as she cannot walk, they put her at gunpoint and said go,” he says. Out of fear, Khatun limped and crawled to the swampy no-man’s land, but collapsed from the pain in her feet.

“When I was on the ground, barely breathing, I heard men in uniform approaching me. They wanted to bury me alive in no-man’s land, thinking I was half dead,” says Khatun. She, however, could not recognise if they were personnel from the BSF or Border Guard Bangladesh forces.

The Bengali-speaking Muslims who make up the majority among the 34 per cent religious Muslim minority in the state have come under increasing scrutiny over their citizenship status and state-led actions since the BJP came to power in Assam in 2016, and all the more after Himanta Biswa Sarma became the chief minister in 2021.

Since then, his government has carried out large-scale eviction drives in the state, demolishing Madrasas and the homes of more than 50,000 people, most of whom are landless Bengali-speaking Muslims. In 2024, the border police was also instructed not to refer cases of non-Muslims to tribunals who entered India before the end of 2014.

According to a political scientist at Gauhati University, targeting Bengali Muslims is the only option left for Sarma to rally the majority of Assamese voters behind him in the upcoming Assembly election in 2026.

“He wants to project the miya (a derogatory term used against Bengali-speaking Muslims) as a civilizational threat to Assamese culture and identity,” the professor said, requesting anonymity. “But in that process, he has become morally and politically bankrupt.”

Sarma, however, has denied that his government is communally motivated to target the Bengali-speaking Muslim community.

Debabrata Saikia, the leader of the opposition from the Congress party, said Sarma is going to milk the “push back” of alleged illegal immigrants—the longstanding source of political anxiety in Assam—and the unabated eviction drives as two election planks to retain his government. “He wants to project himself as a Messiah for the indigenous Assamese,” he said. “But communal politics will fail in Assam as Assam is a secular and pluralistic society.”

Noted Assamese intellectual, Hiren Gohain, said that with Sarma ramping up attacks on the marginalised Bengali-speaking Muslims, he is creating a larger consensus among the Assamese Hindus and tribals to look at the Bengali Muslims as an enemy of the state with the help of friendly Assamese media. “Whether the Assamese people swallow it, that is another question, but at this rate, the politics of hatred and polarisation can help the BJP.” 

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Sakina Begum, 58, an Assamese Muslim from Nalbari in western Assam, is one of 21 Muslims who have gone missing after being detained by police during the crackdown between May 23 and May 26, according to an affidavit submitted in the PIL hearing filed in the Gauhati High Court by the minority students’ union, All BTC Minority Students’ Union. Assam’s advocate general, Devajit Saiki, during the hearing on July 22, said these 21 people could “either be in the holding camp or the detention camp”.

Begum was declared a foreigner by a tribunal in an ex parte proceeding in 2012, meaning the tribunal ruled against her in her absence from the hearing. Begum’s son Tajnur said the family had no inkling about the hearings at the tribunal. Such ex parte orders are rife in tribunal proceedings. Between 1985 and February 28, the tribunals in Assam passed 63,959 ex-parte orders, according to the Union Home Ministry.

Begam’s family now questions the treatment meted out to her despite being indigenous Muslims. “We voted for the BJP as it promised us that the indigenous Muslims would be protected and saved in the state. The promises made by them were a sham,” says Rasiya Begum, her daughter.

Arshad Ahmed is an independent journalist and a photographer based in Assam, covering the northeast.

Outlook Magazine’s next issue, “Guilty Until Proven Innocent”, looks at the 19 years lost of those who were in jail and those who thought justice was served, until it wasn’t. This article appears as 'Push Back' in the magazine