5 June 2025
hona Banu still shudders when she thinks of the past few days.
The 58-year-old, a resident of Barpeta district in India’s north-eastern state of Assam, says that she was called to the local police station on 25 May and later taken to a point at the border with neighboring Bangladesh. From there, she says, she and around 13 other people were forced to cross over to Bangladesh.
She says she was not told why. But it was a scenario she had been dreading — Ms Banu says she has lived in Assam all her life but for the past few years, she has been desperately trying to prove that she is an Indian citizen and not an “illegal immigrant” from Bangladesh.
“They pushed me over at gunpoint. I spent two days without food or water in the middle of a field in knee-deep water teeming with mosquitoes and leeches,” Ms Banu said, wiping away tears. After those two days in no man’s land — between India and Bangladesh — she says she was taken to what appeared to be an old prison on the Bangladeshi side.
After two days there, she and a few others — she is not sure if all of them were from the same group sent with her — were escorted by Bangladeshi officials across the border, where Indian officials allegedly met them and sent them home.
It’s not clear why Ms Banu was abruptly sent to Bangladesh and then brought back. But her case is among a spate of recent instances where officials in Assam have rounded up people declared foreigners by tribunals in the past — on suspicion of being “illegal Bangladeshis” — and sent them across the border. The BBC found at least six cases where people said their family members had been picked up, taken to border towns and just “pushed across”.
Officials from India’s Border Security Force, the Assam police and the state government did not respond to questions from the BBC.
Crackdowns on alleged illegal immigrants from Bangladesh are not new in India — the countries are divided by a 4,096km (2,545 miles) long porous border which can make it relatively easy to cross over, even though many of the sensitive areas are heavily guarded.
But it’s still rare, lawyers working on these cases say, for people to be picked up from their homes abruptly and forced into another country without due process. These efforts seem to have intensified over the past few weeks.
The Indian government has not officially said how many people were sent across in the latest exercise. But top sources in the Bangladesh administration claim that India “illegally pushed in” more than 1,200 people into the country in May alone, not just from Assam but also other states. Out of this, they said on condition of anonymity, Bangladesh identified 100 people as Indian citizens and sent them back.
In a statement, the Border Guard Bangladesh said it had increased patrolling along the border to curb these attempts.
India has not commented on these allegations.
While media reports indicate that the recent crackdown includes Rohingya Muslims living in other states too, the situation is particularly tense and complex in Assam, where issues of citizenship and ethnic identity have long dominated politics.
The state, which shares a nearly 300km-long border with Muslim-majority Bangladesh, has seen waves of migration from the neighbouring country as people moved in search of opportunities or fled religious persecution.
This has sparked the anxieties of Assamese people, many of whom fear this is bringing in demographic change and taking away resources from locals.
The Bharatiya Janata Party — in power in Assam and nationally — has repeatedly promised to end the problem of illegal immigration, making the state’s National Register of Citizens (NRC) a priority in recent years.
The register is a list of people who can prove they came to Assam by 24 March 1971, the day before neighbouring Bangladesh declared independence from Pakistan. The list went through several iterations, with people whose names were missing given chances to prove their Indian citizenship by showing official documents to quasi-judicial forums called Foreigners Tribunals.
After a chaotic process, the final draft published in 2019 excluded nearly two million residents of Assam — many of them were put in detention camps while others have appealed in higher courts against their exclusion.
Source: Saudigazette
