Pushback: Purge sans process?

Shona Banu had just finished her lunch on May 25 when a cop came to her home at Burikhamar, Barpeta in western Assam and asked her to go to the office of the district’s Superintendent of Police. The 59-year-old was not surprised. She had received many such summons ever since she had been declared a foreigner by the Foreigners Tribunal, a quasi-judicial body set up under the Foreigners Act, 1946, to detect illegal immigrants only in Assam. But it was not like any other day. Banu and a few others were huddled into a bus and taken to the foreigner detention camp at Matia in Goalpara. On May 27, she and 13 other “declared foreigners” like her were taken to South Salmara near the India-Bangladesh border.

“The BSF (Border Security Force) personnel asked us to run towards Bangladesh. We were scared, but we ran, as they had guns,” said Banu. Her family in Assam informed the police and the BSF that the tribunal’s order declaring her a foreigner had been stayed by the Supreme Court in 2018. She finally returned to her home on June 1.

On June 9, after working hard at a construction site, Mustafa Kamal, a mason from Bardhaman in West Bengal, had just returned to his rented home at Mira Road in Mumbai, when the cops came and detained him and a few other Bengali-speaking Muslim migrant workers, on suspicion of being Bangladeshis. “We showed our Aadhar Cards and Pan Cards, but the police were not ready to accept us as citizens of India,” said Kamal. He and several other suspected illegal migrants were flown to North Bengal and taken to the India-Bangladesh border, where the BSF personnel “pushed back” them into Bangladesh. “They told us to run and not to look back, or they will fire at us,” said Minarul Sheikh, a resident of Murshidabad in West Bengal, who was also detained from Mumbai.

Kamal and Minarul returned home a few days later after the West Bengal government intervened. So did at least five other migrant workers, who were pushed back into Bangladesh despite being genuine citizens of India.

The Centre and the governments of the BJP-ruled states of late have resorted to ‘pushback’ to expeditiously deport Bangladeshi illegal migrants, avoiding the legal process, which may appear lengthy, but provides safeguards to genuine citizens against harassment.

After the April 22 terrorist attack in J&K, the Gujarat Police detained nearly 1500 people, suspected to be illegal migrants from Bangladesh. The second phase of the crackdown started on June 19, with nearly 200 more people being detained. In Maharashtra, around 300 allegedly illegal migrants from Bangladesh were detained in the past two months.

The police crackdown on suspected illegal migrants continued even in Delhi, where one of the detainees even gave birth to a baby boy, and the mother and the newborn child were sent to a detention centre.

Hundreds of illegal migrants detained from Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Delhi were taken to Assam, West Bengal and Tripura and pushed back to Bangladesh. Dhaka lodged protests with New Delhi over sidestepping the due process of deportation. New Delhi refrained from making any official comment on the pushback, but the spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs said that Dhaka had not been doing its bit to verify and accept the 2369 illegal migrants caught in India and confirmed to be Bangladeshis.

Nearly 300 allegedly illegal migrants living in Assam were pushed back to Bangladesh, the state’s chief minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma, said. He told reporters that the Centre adopted a "push back" policy to deport the people already declared foreigners by the Foreigners Tribunals or the ones caught while crossing the border. “Earlier, we used to arrest them, produce them in courts and follow the legal procedure. But now, we are pushing them back right from the border,” he said. Sarma said that the illegal migrants, who were being pushed back into the neighbouring country, had been declared foreigners by Foreigner Tribunals earlier and had been lodged in the detention camp in the past. “The drive will continue,” said the chief minister.

The ruling BJP in the northeastern state have been under pressure from the organisations representing the indigenous communities for the full implementation of the Assam Accord, which was signed after the six-year-long Assam Agitation and which had identified March 24, 1971, as the cut-off date for detection and deportation of migrants. They say that indigenous people face serious threats to their identity and culture due to illegal migration from Bangladesh since the Partition in 1947.

Lawyer Aman Wadud said that most of the people, who were being pushed back, had, in the past, remained lodged in the detention camp after being declared foreigners, but had been released on conditions as per an order of the Supreme Court in 2020. “What is happening in Assam is against the government's own stand. During the deportation of the Indian nationals from the US, our external affairs minister, S Jaishankar, in a response in Parliament, said that unambiguous verification of nationality is essential for deportation. But the Assam government is resorting to illegal means as they know very well that declared foreigners can't be deported without verification of their addresses by Bangladesh."

Sarma also said that his government would implement the Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act 1950, which had empowered the state to remove any person whom the district commissioners "prima facie" find to be foreigners, even if their cases were pending in Foreigner Tribunals.

The Assam CM cited a judgment of the Supreme Court in October 2024, in which the apex court upheld the cut-off date of March 24, 1971, for detection and deportation of foreigners in Assam. Sarma said that the apex court observed that the Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act (IEAA) 1950 was still in force. Sarma said that the apex court observed that the Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act (IEAA) 1950 was still in force. The Act was passed by the Centre following demands by leaders in Assam in view of large-scale infiltration from East Pakistan (present Bangladesh) post-Partition and growing concerns about an identity crisis among local "indigenous" communities.

Wadud, however, said neither the 1950 Act nor the Supreme Court gave sweeping power to the Assam government to evict any person. He said any procedure established by law should be fair, just and reasonable. “Any procedure which does not meet this standard would be oppressive, fanciful and arbitrary, and no one would be safe then!”

Another lawyer in Guwahati said the FTs were set up following complaints of arbitrariness during the removal of foreigners under the 1950 Act. "If we go back to the 1950 Act now, we are also trying to go back to similar arbitrariness," he said.

Opposition Congress and other parties alleged that the BJP was resorting to arbitrariness as it failed to fulfil its pre-poll promise of solving Assam's foreigners problem by updating the National Register of Citizens (NRC), an exercise taken following the Assam Accord of 1985. "People of Assam understand their tactics to fool them and so they will give a fitting reply in the Assembly elections in 2026," Congress leader Gaurav Gogoi said soon after he was made president of the party's state unit. BJP, on the other hand, said the Congress was opposing the decisions in order to protect its Muslim vote bank.

(With inputs from Mrityunjay Bose, Satish Jha and Anirban Bhaumik, DHNS)