In India, Immigration Raids Detain Thousands and Create a Climate of Fear

New York Times

5 hours ago

A waste picker from a Delhi slum, who said he had been deported with his pregnant wife and son. A rice farmer in Assam, in India's northeastern corner, who said his mother had been detained by police for weeks. A 60‑year‑old shrine attendant in the western state of Gujarat, who said he had been blindfolded, beaten by the police and then put on a boat.
All have been caught up in a widening crackdown on migrants that the Indian government has justified as a national security imperative. Rights groups say the crackdown, which intensified after a terrorist attack in Kashmir in April, has become an increasingly arbitrary campaign of fear against Muslims in India, especially those whose language might mark them as outsiders. Most of those detained in the raids live hundreds of miles from Pakistan, which India has blamed for the attack.
Thousands of Indian Bengali-speakers, most of them Muslims, have been rounded up, detained or expelled to Bangladesh. Many of them are from West Bengal, an eastern Indian state where Bengali is the main language; for decades, young people from the state have migrated to big Indian cities elsewhere for work.
Several million undocumented Bangladeshis are thought to live in India, entering — legally or illegally — through the porous border that divides the two nations. Indian states have carried out raids on neighborhoods with dense concentrations of Bengali speakers, saying they had evidence of undocumented immigrants there. (Bengali, an official language of both India and Bangladesh, is spoken by tens of millions of people on both sides of the border.)
Since mid-July, authorities in Gurgaon, a satellite city of the capital, New Delhi, have conducted what they call a verification drive, intended to identify illegal immigrants.
The police in Gurgaon have detained and then released hundreds of people with documents showing they lived legally in India, according to local media reports. Hundreds of mostly poor Bengali speakers, the reports said, preemptively fled the city after the drive began, worried they would be picked up by the police at any moment.
Between 200 and 250 people have been detained in the verification drive and ten were identified as illegal Bangladeshi immigrants, said Sandeep Kumar, a public relations officer for the Gurgaon police department. He said claims of people fleeing the city were 'rumors.'
In interviews with a dozen people across four Indian states, in neighborhoods that have been raided by the police, Muslim and Hindu Bengali speakers said they had become scared of being caught in the government's crackdown.
Avjit Paul, 18, who is Hindu, said he moved to Gurgaon from his home state of West Bengal to work as a cleaner. When his slum was raided, he said, he was detained for five days by the city police, despite showing the officers a state ID card. He was released from police custody only after social workers offered the police additional documents to support his Indian nationality, he said. Millions of Indians lack documentation that could prove their citizenship.
Terrified of being detained again, Mr. Paul fled Gurgaon and returned to West Bengal. 'I'm afraid to be caught again like this, because I speak Bengali,' said Mr. Paul, who is now jobless.
Rights groups and lawyers have criticized the government's immigration crackdown for a lack of due process. They say that the governing Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., has used April's act of terrorism as a pretext to deepen a systemic campaign of oppression against the country's Muslims.
Across Indian states led by the B.J.P., thousands of purportedly Rohingya or Bangladeshi Muslims have been rounded up since the attack. At least 6,500 people were detained in Gujarat, 2,000 in Kashmir and about 250 in Rajasthan, according to the police in each state. Rajasthan set up three new detention centers in May. Supantha Sinha, a lawyer working on detention cases in the city, said the number was closer to 1,000.
The exact number of people expelled from India to Bangladesh is unclear. Bangladeshi officials said that roughly 2,000 people were pushed into Bangladesh from India from May to July, but the Indian authorities have not confirmed a figure.
The Indian government has had to readmit dozens of people who proved their Indian citizenship after being expelled across the border, according to a report released in July by Human Rights Watch. The government's crackdown has largely targeted Muslim migrant workers from impoverished backgrounds, according to Meenakshi Ganguly, the deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch.
Amer Sheikh, 59, left his home in West Bengal to work in construction in the western state of Rajasthan. Police detained him in June, despite his state ID card and birth certificate, his uncle Ajmaul Sheikh said. After three days in custody, the family lost contact with him.
In late June, Danish Sheikh, a 27-year-old waste collector born in West Bengal, was detained by police, along with his pregnant wife and 8-year-old son. After five days in custody, Mr. Sheikh said, the family was deported, left in a jungle and told to walk to Bangladesh. They have been stuck there since, despite having familial land records in India that date back several decades and Indian IDs. 'We don't know when we can go home,' said Sunali Khatun, Mr. Sheikh's wife.
Imran Hossain, 60, said he was blindfolded, beaten and put on a five-day boat ride to Bangladesh after Indian police officers raided his neighborhood in the western state of Gujarat. He has struggled to sleep at night. 'I still hear people crying when I try to sleep,' Mr. Hossain said.
B.J.P. leaders at both the state and national levels have long described a crisis of 'infiltrators' from Bangladesh threatening India's identity, homing in on border states like Assam. The state's chief minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma, warned in an X post in July about an 'alarming demographic shift,' pledging his state was 'fearlessly resisting the ongoing, unchecked Muslim infiltration across the border.'
In Assam, about one-third of the population is Muslim, and the issue of Bengali-speaking identity has been a trouble point for decades. In the state's latest deportation drive, Mr. Sarma invoked a 1950 law that allows the state to deport suspected illegal immigrants, bypassing established tribunals.
'It's absolutely terrifying,' said Mohsin Bhat, a lawyer who has researched citizenship trials in Assam.
Malek Oster, a rice farmer who lives in Assam, has spent the past weeks wondering how to get his mother out of government detention. She was taken by the police in early June, he said, and the police will not disclose to him where she is.
'My mother has a voter card, Aadhar card, and the ration card, but the police did not accept that, and we don't know why,' Mr. Oster said, referring to the national ID system.
Mr. Oster said his family had never been to Bangladesh. But like many Bengali speakers in India, he increasingly feels like an outsider. 'Due to the crackdown, I fear speaking Bengali when I go outside,' he said.
Suhasini Raj contributed reporting.