On May 10, 2025, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma told reporters at a press briefing in Guwahati that the Indian government had now adopted a “push-back” policy for undocumented immigrants from Bangladesh and Rohingya refugees. The announcement came amid reports in the Bangladeshi media that the Assam government and the Border Security Force (BSF) had “pushed” hundreds of undocumented people into Bangladesh, including 78 in the Sundarbans area. Sarma also revealed that inmates designated as convicted foreign nationals (CFN) in the Matia transit camp in Assam’s Goalpara district were among those pushed back into Bangladesh. CFNs are convicted under the Foreigners Act, 1946, for either entering India without travel documents or for overstaying visas.
The Assam Chief Minister’s claims suggest that two groups of undocumented individuals were deported or sent back to Bangladesh: one, those trying to enter India through the border, and two, those already inside India, including CFNs housed at the detention facility in the State. The second group also purportedly includes undocumented Bengali-speaking individuals and Rohingya refugees in different Indian States, including Delhi and Gujarat, who are being rounded up as part of a larger crackdown on so-called “illegal infiltrators”.
These developments have been accompanied by a more sinister report that the Indian government apprehended some 40 Rohingya refugees from Delhi, flew them to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and dropped them in the sea near the coast of south-eastern Myanmar. These forced returns were reportedly undertaken in a Trump-like manner, with the deportees handcuffed and blindfolded through their journey.
While the Supreme Court, in the course of hearing a petition against the forced deportations at sea, has questioned the veracity of the reports, the UN-appointed Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Myanmar, Tom Andrews, has announced an inquiry into the “unconscionable, unacceptable acts”. He has also urged the Indian government to refrain from inhumane and life-threatening treatment of Rohingya refugees, including their repatriation to perilous conditions in Myanmar.
A dangerous policy
During the press briefing, Sarma categorically asserted that the Indian government would now completely bypass the legal system while dealing with undocumented migrants and asylum seekers and directly deport them to their countries of origin. He termed the exercise an “operation”, adding a militaristic veneer to rationalise its existence outside civil law. This is a dangerous approach that violates Article 14 of the Indian Constitution, which extends the right to equal protection of the law to everyone residing within Indian territory, including foreigners. Even undocumented migrants and asylum seekers deserve the benefit of due process to ensure that they are not unfairly treated by the host government, such as being arbitrarily detained or deported without formal procedure.
The process is designed to not just create space for humanitarian considerations, especially for asylum seekers, but also to ensure that no genuine Indian citizen is mistakenly detained or deported to a foreign country. By skirting the legal framework, the government is formalising a system that might end up creating illegal foreigners out of thin air and, worse, forcibly deporting citizens. In fact, media reports suggest that among those recently deported to Bangladesh were three Indian citizens. So far, such arbitrariness has been writ large under Assam’s quasi-judicial Foreigners Tribunal regime. Now, it may see a countrywide application.
Contrary to Sarma’s assertion that pushback is a “new innovation”, the practice has a much longer history in Indian state practice. As the scholar Rizwana Shamshad observes in her book Bangladeshi Migrants in India: Foreigners, Refugees or Infiltrators?, the term “pushback” first appeared in official records in 1989 when the then Union Home Minister under the Congress government, P. Chidambaram, told Parliament that the BSF had pushed back 35,131 “Bangladeshi infiltrators” through the Assam, Tripura, and West Bengal borders. However, scrutiny of parliamentary records show that the term appeared even earlier: in 1979, when the then Minister of State for Home Affairs, Dhanik Lal Mandal, told Parliament that the BSF had pushed back “members of the minority community as also majority community who infiltrated in [sic] India”.
In 1992, the P.V. Narasimha Rao-led Congress government at the Centre, under pressure from an ascendant BJP, rounded up hundreds of so-called illegal Bangladeshis from Delhi and forcibly sent them to Bangladesh through the West Bengal border. The drive was named “Operation Pushback”, leaving no room for misinterpretation. Official records and statements show that the policy continued in different forms sporadically through the following decades under different governments. In 2011, for example, the then Minister of State for Home Affairs under the Manmohan Singh-led United Progressive Alliance government, Mullapally Ramachandran, told Parliament that the BSF undertook deportations through the “‘pushback mode” if the identities of the “illegal Bangladeshis” could not be verified within 30 days. More recently, in 2017, months after anti-Rohingya violence hit Myanmar’s Rakhine State, the BSF said it was raising five additional battalions to “push back” Rohingya refugees from India’s borders.
According to Smruti S. Pattanaik, a Bangladesh expert at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, India adopted the pushback policy “in the absence of [a] bilateral agreement which lays down the procedure for deportation and given the position of the Bangladesh government on the issue”. While Bangladesh has persistently refused to acknowledge the presence of undocumented Bangladeshis in India, both sides mutually agreed to shove the issue under the table for the better part of the last decade to maintain warm bilateral relations. In fact, in 2019, the then Bangladesh Foreign Minister, A.K. Abdul Momen, categorically denied the existence of a “pushback” policy on India’s part, despite official records indicating otherwise. This allowed India to quietly continue pushing back people without much political ballyhoo.
However, with the dramatic change in government in Dhaka in 2024, this mutual understanding may be fraying at the edges. India’s renewed pushback policy, which appears to be more forceful and systematic than before, could antagonise the new administration, which is not exactly India-friendly. It could create conditions for Bangladeshi border guards to use lethal force against border-crossers to deter what they see as “push-ins”.
Sarma’s latest announcement, by giving a formal edge to the pushback policy and bringing it to the forefront of the political discourse, does not help. It gives Bangladesh grounds to accuse India of subterfuge at the borders and violating Bangladesh’s sovereignty by sending people across without authorisation or verification. In fact, recent comments by senior Bangladeshi officials, including Foreign Adviser Touhid Hossain, indicate that Bangladesh is unhappy with India’s latest pushbacks.
Legal transgressions
The moot question here is, what is the legal basis of India’s pushback policy? While India, as a sovereign state, has the right to remove undocumented foreigners from its territory, it must follow due process. For undocumented migrants convicted under the Foreigners Act, returns must be undertaken in close consultation with the country of origin. This means the origin country would have to first verify and approve the return list relayed by the host country through official diplomatic channels.
India and Bangladesh share an extradition treaty that lays down operational guidelines for the transfer of individuals accused of crimes in either territory. But they do not have a formal deportation treaty with specific guidelines and norms on the transfer of large groups of undocumented migrants. Therefore, bilateral consultations become even more crucial. Notably, Bangladeshi authorities have shown a willingness to coordinate the repatriation of legitimate Bangladeshi citizens through the border. But, India’s latest pushbacks have been unilateral.
Such unilateral and forced deportations risk putting the lives of the deportees at risk. The origin country, in this case Bangladesh, may refuse to accept them as their citizens, thus leaving them stateless and at the mercy of law enforcement authorities. In fact, once deported, they may be detained again by Bangladesh on charges of crossing the border illegally. Many undocumented migrants are also victims of human trafficking, and forced returns could throw them back into the hands of traffickers.
The UN Global Compact on Migration, which India signed in 2018, stipulates that countries protect such victims of trafficking and refrain from deporting them “regardless of their migration status”. India’s pushback policy violates this norm. It also arguably dilutes India’s own constitutional guarantee of “right to life”, which applies to everyone residing in Indian territory.
Even for asylum seekers, such as the Rohingyas, India must undertake deportations only after bilateral consultations. In a 2021 order on the deportation of Rohingya refugees, the Supreme Court of India asserted that deportations cannot happen “unless the procedure prescribed for such deportation is followed”. The latest pushbacks, let alone the reported abandonment of Rohingya refugees in the sea near Myanmar, do not seem to have followed any formal procedure.
Repatriation of asylm seekers, as per the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), must be voluntary, safe, and dignified. One may argue that as a non-signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Optional Protocol, India is not obligated to follow these norms. But, the principle of non-refoulement, which is the obligation of a state to not return a person to a territory where they may be exposed to persecution, is part of customary international law. This means that India must uphold the principle as a member of the UN General Assembly, which is the parent body of the UNHCR.
The principle is also enshrined in Article III of the “Bangkok Principles on Status and Treatment of Refugees 2001”, which India has signed without any reservation regarding that particular provision. It also appears clearly in Clause 87 of the UN Global Compact on Refugees, a global instrument that India signed in 2018. While the Rohingyas face the most persecution and violence in Myanmar, they are increasingly at risk of xenophobic discrimination, gang violence, and state-imposed restrictions in Bangladesh.
Rohingya refugees in south-eastern Bangladesh’s camps are also being reportedly forced to join armed groups fighting the junta and Arakan Army in Myanmar’s Rakhine State. Many of them are choosing instead to flee to South-East Asian countries by embarking on deadly sea voyages arranged by human traffickers. By callously pushing them back to Bangladesh, India may be sending them into harm’s way.
Amid the politics, diplomatese, and legality of these forced returns, we must not lose sight of a more fundamental pathology that they represent: a tragic perversion of India’s humanitarian ethos and legacy of hospitality towards the weak and marginalised.
The distortion must be placed within the ideological remit of a Hindutva state, which constantly seeks to sanitise the social landscape by getting rid of undesirable others. The Union Home Minister’s labelling of undocumented Bangladeshis as “termites” in 2018 reflects how this process may be akin to pest control, meant to keep the house clean, hygienic, and orderly. Here, the body of the Muslim outsider, particularly the Bengali-speaking Muslim outsider, emerges as the pest. Here, the body of the Muslim outsider, particularly the Bengali-speaking Muslim outsider, emerges as the pest.
In Agambenian terms, this body is the homo sacer, a figure that may not be killed but is also not worthy of saving. The sovereign has absolute power over this body, which is why it can pluck it out of its home at whim, shackle it, blindfold it, put it into a military transport aircraft, and drop it in the sea or in a mangrove inhabited by man-eating tigers.
Alternatively, the sovereign can just leave it at the border and direct it to walk past the no man’s land into a highly militarised frontier. This is precisely the case at the India-Bangladesh border, where forced returns could wreak havoc. Not only would the deportees be at risk of unwarranted aggression by Bangladeshi border guards, even if by misunderstanding, some of them could also end up homeless and pauperised if their residential addresses cannot be verified. Worse, if there are genuine Indian citizens among the deportees, they would effectively end up in an alien land with no family, friends, or support networks. Some of the deportees, especially those sent back from Assam’s transit camp, may also be suffering from serious mental health problems, including memory loss. Once deported to Bangladesh, they could slip into an even darker existential abyss, without anyone to support them or look for them.
It is this human fallout that lies at the core of the belligerent forced return policy of the Narendra Modi government at the Centre and the Sarma government in Assam. This cruelty-as-state-policy approach earns a political premium for the ruling party, even as it prepares the ground for crucial State elections in Bihar and Assam.
It serves to reinvigorate its Hindutva social base and its ethnonationalist fantasies of creating the perfect Hindu nation with airtight borders and a racially pure demography. This sociopolitical project is transformative but in the most macabre way: it transforms India into a nation that disposes of live human bodies at remote and perilous frontiers without the slightest care for their well-being.
(Angshuman Choudhury is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Asian Studies jointly at the National University of Singapore and King’s College London. Courtesy: Frontline magazine, a fortnightly English language magazine published by The Hindu Group of publications headquartered in Chennai, India.)
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As Assam’s Declared Foreigners Go ‘Missing’ in Police Crackdown, Panicked Families Seek Answers
Rokibuz Zaman
At 3 am on May 24, the police arrived at 42-year-old Manikjan Begum’s home in Assam’s Darrang district.
They took her along, and asked her family to report to the Dhula police station during the day. About 12 hours later, she was let go, after the police verified her documents.
The next day, Begum, who was declared a foreigner by a foreigners’ tribunal in 2018, was summoned to the police station again, her son said. Foreigner tribunals are quasi-judicial bodies unique to Assam, which rule on citizenship cases.
On her second visit to the police station, Begum’s husband accompanied her, along with her eight-month-old daughter.
“From the Dhula police station, she was taken to the police reserve in Mangaldai. She was made to sit there till 1 pm and again taken to the office of the superintendent of police,” said Barek Ali, the 22-year-old eldest son.
Ali claims that the family members last saw her, with her baby, on the afternoon of May 25 at the office of the superintendent of border police. “We waited at the SP’s office till 8 pm, but she did not come out,” he said.
For the next two days, Begum’s family members kept visiting the Dhula police station and Darrang SP’s office. “We kept going back to the police for two days, but they said they did not know where she or her child was,” Ali said.
Darrang superintendent of police Prakash Sonowal told Scroll that he is unaware of Begum’s whereabouts. “The family members will know. Talk to them,” he said, before hanging up.
Begum’s family is not alone. Days after the Assam police’s crackdown on alleged undocumented migrants, several residents from Dhubri, Chirang, Barpeta, Darrang, Morigaon, Kokrajhar, among other districts, have alleged that their family members – declared foreigners by the state’s foreigners’ tribunals – had gone “missing”, after being arrested or detained by the police.
Many fear that their family members have been forced out of Indian territory as part of what the Assam chief minister has described as “push-back” operations. On Tuesday, Scroll had reported that a former teacher from Morigaon district, Khairul Islam, whose citizenship case was still being heard in the Supreme Court, had been picked up from the Matia detention centre and forced out along the Bangladesh border near Assam’s South Salmara district in the early hours of May 27.
On Thursday, the nephew of two men from Kamrup district moved Gauhati High Court, seeking information about his uncles. The two men, Abu Bakkar Siddique and Akbar Ali, were summoned to the Nagarbera police station on May 25. “Since then, the authorities have refused to give details of their whereabouts,” Aman Wadud, one of the advocates representing them in the court, told Scroll.
The petitioner, Torap Ali, said he was “apprehensive that his uncles will be pushed back into Bangladesh, in light of recent reports”. The court has issued a notice to the state government, seeking its response.
Spotted in Bangladesh
On Wednesday, the worst fears of Begum’s family members were confirmed. Her son, Ali, was alerted about a news report from Bangladesh’s Lalmonirhat, a video of which was posted on Facebook.
Citing local residents, the report by DBC News alleged that 13 people – including six women and a baby – had been “pushed into” Bangladesh territory by India’s Border Security Force on the morning of May 28.
The story was filmed at the no man’s land between India and Bangladesh – near the Chawratari border in Bangladesh’s Lalmonirhat, which shares a border with West Bengal.
Ali claimed that he saw his mother standing in a field, with her eight-month-old infant, in the video. “My mother has been taken away across the border. Are they human or animals? ” he said in disbelief.
Mohhammad Ali Akbar, officer in charge of the Aditmari police station in Bangladesh’s Lalmonirhat, told Scroll that 13 people – six men, six women and a baby were pushed in by the BSF on early Wednesday. “I was informed at 7 am that the BSF had [pushed in] 13 people but they are not our citizens. So, they remained in the no man’s land in the afternoon,” Akbar said.
A report in the Bangladesh newspaper, The Daily Star, on May 28 said “all 13 individuals remained stranded at the zero line – unable to cross into Bangladesh and denied re-entry into India”.
“They said they were from Darrang district,” the report added.
A commanding officer of the Border Guard Bangladesh told another Bangladesh news outlet, The Financial Express, that “they have told the BSF that the 13 people are not Bangladeshi citizens”. “It’s very inhumane trying to push in people at [sic] dead of night,” Lt Colonel Mehedi Imam, was quoted as saying.
Scroll emailed the BSF spokesperson for a response to the news reports. The story will be updated if they respond.
“How can my mother be a Bangladeshi?” asked Ali. “All her sisters and family members are Indians. She has been voting here for years.”
Begum was declared a “foreigner from Bangladesh” on February 22, 2018 by a foreigners’ tribunal in Darrang in an ex parte order – a ruling pronounced in her absence – after she and her lawyer did not appear before the tribunal.
Foreigner tribunals have been accused of arbitrariness and bias, and declaring people foreigners on the basis of minor spelling mistakes, a lack of documents or lapses in memory.
In 2019, all of Begum’s family members, barring her, made it to the National Register of Citizens, a list of Indian citizens in Assam, compiled after several rounds of documentary and physical verification.
Similarly, the family members of Shona Bhanu, a 59-year-old resident of Barpeta, claim that they have seen her in videos from Kurigram district in Bangladesh.
They allege that she was among the 14 people, including the teacher Khairul Islam, who were forced out of Indian territory on May 27. “We saw her in the video of the 14 people who were stranded in no man’s land,” her brother Ashraf Ali said. “Later, there was another video where she was seen walking with Bangladeshi police.”
Bhanu had been summoned to the Barpeta SP’s office on May 25, from where she was taken to the Matia detention centre.
Bhanu had been declared a foreigner in 2013 by the foreigners’ tribunal in Barpeta. The decision was upheld by the Gauhati High Court in 2016.
However, in 2018, the Supreme Court stayed the high court’s order, Guwahati-based advocate Sauradeep Dey, who was associated with her challenge to the tribunal ruling, told Scroll. “The stay will automatically apply till the end of the case,” he said.
“How can they send her to Bangladesh when the case is still pending?” Ali told Scroll. “Our parents are Indian. We are Indian. How come she became a foreigner?”
‘Midnight arrest’
On May 24, Manowara Bewa, a 51-year-old woman from Dhubri district, was called to the Gauripur police station “on a false pretext of making a statement”, her lawyer Aman Wadud said.
Bewa had been declared a foreigner in March, 2016 by a foreigners’ tribunal, and its order was upheld by the Gauhati High Court in February, 2017.
She spent three years in detention and was subsequently released on the basis of a 2019 Supreme Court directive, allowing bail to declared foreigners imprisoned for more than three years. Her case is now pending at the Supreme Court, as per the court records seen by Scroll.
From the police station, Bewa was taken to the office of the superintendent of border police, Dhubri, at midnight, said Wadud.
“She obviously trusted the police, but they misused that trust to completely make her vanish,” he alleged.
Since then, Bewa’s 27-year- old son and other family members have been regularly visiting the SP’s office, but have received no answers about her whereabouts, Wadud said. “The state is behaving like non-state rogue actors.”
Scroll called and texted the Dhubri SP, seeking a response to the charges. Scroll also sent questions to the director-general of Assam Police and Assam chief secretary. The story will be updated if they respond.
On May 27, Wadud sent a contempt notice to the Dhubri superintendent of police (border), asking them to ensure strict compliance with the Supreme Court’s directions, which formed the basis of the bail granted to Bewa by the Gauhati High Court in 2020. “Should there be any transgression or non-compliance with the said order, I shall be compelled to initiate appropriate legal proceedings, including but not limited to, invoking the contempt jurisdiction of the Supreme Court at your cost and risk,” the letter, which Scroll has seen, said.
‘Absolute panic’
Since the drive to re-arrest declared foreigners started on Saturday, anxious families have tried and failed to make contact with their relatives.
Amin Hussain, a resident of Dhubri town, went to the Matia detention centre on Monday to meet his 36-year-brother, Aminur Ali, but was turned away. Ali, a declared foreigner out on bail on a Gauhati High Court order, was detained on Saturday evening by the Dhubri border police.
“They did not allow me to meet him,” Hussain told Scroll.
Hussain said they belong to the Deshi community, a group designated by the Bharatiya Janata Party government as indigenous to Assam.
Zamsher Ali, a journalist-turned politician who has worked on citizenship issues over the years, alleged that at least five declared foreigners from Chirang district have similarly gone missing. They had been picked up from their homes and detained by the police on May 25. “Their family members visited the Matia detention camp but came away without any update. The district administration is also not taking responsibility,” Ali, who visited their homes, told Scroll.
Dildar Hussain, a Barpeta-based lawyer, told Scroll that at least 10 people, who are out on bail from the courts in citizenship trials, have contacted him, fearing that they might be picked up and forced out of India.
“People are terrified because the police are picking up people even when their cases are pending in courts, without verifying their status,” Hussian said. “There is absolute panic. Many have fled their homes.”
At least five persons in Barpeta told Scroll that they fear for their relatives, who are designated D-voters, and have asked them to stay away from their homes.
Like foreigners’ tribunals, D-voter is a category unique to Assam. It was created in 1997, when the Election Commission of India carried out an “intensive revision” of the state’s electoral rolls and termed 3.13 lakh voters as “doubtful” or D-voters.
“We fear that the police will come to pick up my mother,” said a 28-year-old Barpeta-based pharmacist, whose mother is a D-voter. “Four people were picked up from their homes on Thursday night in our area. The lawyers have advised my mother to stay away from home.”
(Courtesy: Scroll.in, an Indian digital news publication, whose English edition is edited by Naresh Fernandes.)