Indian Citizens, Mostly Muslims, Are Bearing Brunt of Its Citizenship Screening Drive

The Diplomat

5 days ago

In India, thousands of Bengali speakers are being detained as suspected Bangladeshis and some are arbitrarily deported – without any legal process whatsoever.
On July 19, Samirul Islam, a member of Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian Parliament, posted a video of a weeping woman and her family on the social media platform X. The woman, Sweety Bibi, was appealing to Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister of the eastern Indian state of West Bengal, to help the family return to India from Bangladesh, where they are stranded. West Bengal and Bangladesh share an international border of over 2,200 kilometers.
Two minor boys, two men, and two more women stood next to her in the video as Sweety Bibi narrated how the police in Delhi, India's national capital – roughly 1,500 kilometers northwest of the India-Bangladesh border – arbitrarily picked them up from their slum residence, branded them as undocumented Bangladeshi nationals, thrashed and abused them, and handed them over to the Border Security Force (BSF).
They were forced outside the Indian territory on June 26 after all their papers and belongings, including money and phones, had been taken away.
Sweety claimed they are natives of West Bengal, where their family members live, but the police in Delhi did not listen to them. They have been living in Delhi for several years as migrant workers involved in the unorganized sector.
The video was shot at some undisclosed location in Bangladesh, where the women, the minors, and the men are now living a life without citizenship, trying not to get caught by the security forces in Bangladesh, which could see them detained for illegal entry.
This is not the first time that a video shot in Bangladesh showed people in tears claiming to be Indians who have been forcefully pushed over the Indian border.
In May, a video shared by a Bangladeshi journalist on social media showed 14 Indian nationals from the northeast Indian state of Assam stranded in the 'no-man's land' between India and Bangladesh after India's BSF pushed them out and Border Guard Bangladesh refused to let them in.
After families of these pushed-out people approached the high court in Assam, the state police brought at least 65 people back from Bangladesh, including women homemakers, government schoolteachers, and the elderly.
In June, seven West Bengal natives were brought back from Bangladesh after a video of three crying men similarly stuck in the no-man's land between India and Bangladesh went viral on social media.
None of these people had been formally 'deported,' using diplomatic channels and bilateral procedure, nor were they 'brought back' on record. None had an opportunity to be heard in any Indian court.
All these victims of arbitrary deportations are Bengali-speaking Muslims, a major ethno-religious group with over 30 million population in India's eastern and northeastern states and about 150 million in Bangladesh. Bengali speakers are the world's second largest ethnic group among Muslims after Arabs.
Upping the ante against Prime Minister Narendra Modi's federal government for harassing Bengali-speaking Indians in the name of identifying illegal Bangladeshi migrants, the West Bengal chief minister led a massive rally in the state capital of Kolkata, the largest city in eastern India, on July 16.
'Is West Bengal not a part of India? Speakers of a language can also live in other countries. Punjabi-speaking people live in other countries (Pakistan), too. Does it mean you would jail them?' Banerjee thundered.
In response, in a rally on July 18, Modi took digs at Banerjee's party, the Trinamool Congress (TMC), accusing it of encouraging illegal infiltration from Bangladesh and going to the extent of 'speaking openly in their (infiltrators') favor.'
Modi alleged the TMC had developed 'an entire ecosystem' to help undocumented migrants from Bangladesh to get fake identity documents so that these people can be used as the party's vote bank.
'Let me make it clear, those who are not citizens of India, those who have infiltrated illegally, will face action under the Constitution,' Modi said during the rally.
A day after Modi's speech, Islam, who belongs to Banerjee's party, shared Sweety's video on X. He affirmed that Sweety is a permanent resident of the state and that the Banerjee government is 'fighting a legal battle to repatriate those innocent, Bengali-speaking Indian citizens' pushed into Bangladesh.
'We want a prime minister who protects us – not one who divides us for political gains,' Islam wrote.
Speaking to The Diplomat over phone, Sweety's cousin brother, Amir Khan, a resident of Paikar village in West Bengal's Birbhum district, said that they have no objection to India driving out illegal migrants but politicians and the judiciary must step in to ensure Indians are not harassed. 'We are traumatized. There is a minor with her,' he said.
A Cross-border Community
Modi's July 18 remarks accusing the TMC of assisting undocumented migrants were his first public response to the citizenship screening drive being carried out in states ruled by Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which picked up pace in February. His message was clear: that there would be no brakes on the exercise.
The Diplomat has previously reported how Bangladesh resented India's 'push-back' policy, which bypasses formal procedures for sending undocumented migrants back.
While dozens of undocumented migrants have been detained and 'pushed back' into Bangladesh – or, 'pushed in,' in Bangladeshi parlance – the ever-increasing intensity of the drive has now become a bigger controversy at home, as India's native Bengali-speaking Muslims are bearing the brunt.
Bengali, the world's seventh-most spoken language, is the main language of Bangladesh. It's also India's second-most-spoken language, after Hindi. Apart from about 180-million Muslims, there are an estimated 100 million Bengali-speaking Hindus, who live mostly in India's eastern and northeastern states.
West Bengal and Bangladesh were once one – during the rules of the Mughal empire and the British colonial powers – but the province was bifurcated along religious lines during Partition in 1947. The Hindu-majority western part remained in India and the Muslim-majority eastern part first became East Pakistan and then, in 1971, emerged as the independent country of Bangladesh.
While India's northeastern states also had a Bengali-speaking population for a few centuries, allegations of illegal migration of Bangladeshis have frequently triggered tension and conflict in Northeast India, especially Assam, where political parties express concerns over demographic change due to migration of both Hindus and Muslims from Bangladesh.
However, Modi's 11 years of Hindu nationalist rule has tried to cement the argument that the Hindu migrants need to be accommodated in India, the homeland of all Hindus, while Muslims must be expelled.
In June, Assam's BJP Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma added fuel to the fire when he said that anyone in the state who mentions Bengali as their mother tongue in the upcoming national census exercise will be identified as a Bangladeshi.
'Not every Bengali-speaking Muslim in Assam is a Bangladeshi. The history and geography of Assam and undivided Bengal is far too complex for such lazy thinking,' said Sanjay Hegde, a politician belonging to the Congress, India's main opposition party, responding to Sarma.
While Assam has a long history of conflict with Bengali-speaking people, the recent citizenship screening drive is targeting Bengali-speaking people, especially migrant workers, almost all over India.
Recently, the Calcutta high court, the top court in West Bengal, asked the Odisha government to clarify on the detentions, especially whether the legal procedures were followed. The government has sought more time to respond.
The TMC has called the actions 'xenophobia,' 'xenophobic abuse of power,' and 'xenophobic persecution' of Bengalis, among other things.
The reason the police target predominantly Muslims is that Modi himself had introduced a new citizenship policy in India's political discourse in 2014: Hindu migrants from Bangladesh are 'refugees' who deserve Indian citizenship but Muslim migrants are 'infiltrators' who must be driven out.
This policy found a concrete shape in the form of the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019, which grants Indian citizenship to non-Muslim migrants from India's Muslim-majority neighbors – Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. The argument is that the non-Muslims have fled those Muslim-majority countries due to religious persecution, but Muslims from those countries have migrated in search of economic benefits.
However, some recent instances of detention and arrest of some Bengali-speaking Hindus have also spread fear among Bengali Hindus.
'Bengali families living in another state are now scared of speaking in Bengali in public places. Who knows who's going to report them as Bangladeshis!' Subodh Biswas told The Diplomat, adding, 'The Bengali identity itself has come under attack.'
Biswas lives in the western Indian state of Maharashtra and helms the Nikhil Bharat Bangali Samanyay Samittee (All India Bengali Coordination Committee), which mostly works with Bengali Hindus of Bangladesh origin. India has a large number of Bengali Hindus with roots in eastern Bengal, who migrated several decades ago.
'The government said they will drive out Bangladeshi Muslims, but it has left Bengali Hindus no less scared,' Biswas added.
The BJP's West Bengal unit president Samik Bhattacharya, however, assured that no Hindu will be deported and Hindus need not be concerned even if they do not have necessary papers.
A Growing Concern
In the dead of the night of July 7, a few dozen other masons were asleep in their workers' quarters near a construction site at a small town in the eastern Indian state of Odisha. Then the cops came knocking on their door.
The workers were of different ethnic and religious backgrounds. There were 13 Bengali-speaking Muslims from West Bengal's Murshidabad, the district with the highest Muslim population in India. These 13 were asked to bring out whatever identity documents they had.
Cops then took them to a police station, where more Bengali-speaking people, including some Hindus, had been brought in from other nearby neighborhoods. From there, they were transported to a building atop a hilltop being used as a temporary detention center – about 300km from where they had been detained.
There, 444 people were detained in one large conference room for three to five days. They slept on the floor.
'The cops grilled us incessantly, even in the night – why do I have Bangladeshi phone numbers in my contact list, names and addresses of all my relatives, siblings, cousins and in-laws and even both parents' siblings, cousins and in-laws. They made us sign papers we did not understand,' 36-year-old Atikul Sheikh told The Diplomat.
He was released on July 11 after his family went to the school where he studied until class 4 (after which he dropped out), obtained a certification from the school identifying Sheikh as a former student, and submitted it with the police. Some other suspects spent longer in detention.
None of the detainees was produced before any magistrate. No formal complaints were filed, and there was no inquiry under the Citizenship Act, 1955 or adjudication under the Foreigners Act, 1946. No paperwork was done at all.
Odisha's practice is not an exception, but has become the norm in this anti-Bangladeshi drive.
There are already a few thousand of people like Sheikh, predominantly Muslims, who have faced three to 15 days of detention and intense grilling as suspected Bangladeshi immigrants in the states of Gujarat, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, and Delhi – all ruled by the BJP.
Families run from one office to another for documents like birth certificates, school-leaving certificates, or land records.
'It's dangerous that the police themselves are playing the jury – bypassing legal procedures altogether,' said Mohammad Salim, a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), India's largest leftist party.
Since the police have taken the law into their hands, anyone could be secretly deported to Bangladesh if the cops were unsatisfied with the papers they presented – as evident from the secret deportation of over a dozen West Bengal natives, said Kirity Roy, secretary of Banglar Manabadhikar Suraksha Mancha, a human rights group.
Victims of such detentions who spoke to The Diplomat complained that the police in BJP-ruled states are not acknowledging three of the most common documents – voter ID, Aadhaar for social benefits, and PAN as taxpayer identity – and are asking for 'more solid proof' like a passport, birth certificate, or land records, which many of these poor migrant workers do not possess.
'Till the 1990s and even the first decade of the century, most of the rural poor were born at home. They do not have birth certificates, which one gets in the case of institutional delivery,' said Anamat Ansary, a labor contractor from Malda district of West Bengal, whose workers were detained in Odisha for four to five days.
Ansary added that many migrant workers do not have school-leaving certificates, as they studied only until class 4 or 5, and lack land records as they often do not possess land.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a minister in the West Bengal government said that, in the Indian federal system, it is difficult for one state to interfere in the actions of other states.
'However, the Constitution applies to the whole country. We are considering all legal options to protect the constitutional rights of our people,' said the minister.