India is targeting Bengali-speaking Muslims for expulsion to Bangladesh, Human Rights Watch warns
The rights group, based in the US, accused Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist government of targeting Bengali-speaking Muslims from West Bengal and Assam for political gain ahead of elections in the two eastern states.
India expelled over 1,500 Muslim men, women, and children to Bangladesh between 7 May and 15 June alone, the rights group said, citing the Bangladeshi border guard.
New Delhi hasn't disclosed the number of people deported to the neighbouring country.
After the massacre of 26 people, mostly Hindu tourists, in the restive Himalayan region of Kashmir in May, the federal home ministry declared a 30-day deadline for states to round up undocumented Bangladeshi immigrants.
In the event, critics said, authorities in Uttar Pradesh, Odisha, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Haryana, and Delhi – all states ruled by Mr Modi's BJP party – rounded up mostly Bengali-speaking migrant workers from West Bengal and Assam. Bengali is one of India's 22 official languages.
'India's ruling BJP is fuelling discrimination by arbitrarily expelling Bengali Muslims from the country, including Indian citizens," Elaine Pearson, Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said.
'The government is putting thousands of vulnerable people at risk in apparent pursuit of unauthorised immigrants but their actions reflect broader discriminatory policies against Muslims."
Assam's chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, a member of the BJP, said the state had been told by the Supreme Court 'that those who are declared foreigners have to be returned [to their country of origin] by whatever means'.
This month he wrote on X that 'protecting Assam's interests is foremost', and that 'illegal infiltrators WILL NOT BE ALLOWED to stay in Assam and threaten our identity'. Senior BJP members regularly refer to undocumented immigrants from Bangladesh as 'infiltrators", a term that has also been used more broadly to vilify Indian Muslims.
Ms Pearson said the claim that the expulsions were meant to manage illegal immigration was "unconvincing" and showed the ruling party's 'disregard for due process rights, domestic guarantees, and international human rights standards'.
A 51-year-old labourer told the rights group he had "walked into Bangladesh like a dead body" after India's Border Security Force pushed him across after midnight.
"The BSF officer beat me when I refused to cross the border into Bangladesh and fired rubber bullets four times in the air,' he said.
The migrant worker, the group said, was repatriated to India two weeks later.
Authorities in West Bengal, governed by a regional party, said they repatriated dozens of residents who had been forcibly sent into Bangladesh by the Modi government.
At least 300 of the people expelled to Bangladesh were from Assam, which underwent a contentious citizenship verification process in 2019 that excluded nearly two million people.
Nazimuddin Sheikh, 34, a migrant worker from West Bengal, was detained in Mumbai and expelled to Bangladesh in June after police raided his home and allegedly "tore up his identity documents".
The BSF did not listen when he and his fellow workers protested that they were Indian, Mr Sheikh told the Human Rights Watch. 'If we spoke too much, they beat us. They hit me with sticks on my back and hands,' he said. 'They were beating us and telling us to say we are Bangladeshi.'
West Bengal's chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, one of Mr Modi's fiercest rivals, earlier called out the ruling party for the crackdown.
"Is speaking Bengali a crime?" she asked. "You should be ashamed that by doing this, you're making everyone who speaks Bengali appear to be Bangladeshi."
She said nearly 2.2m migrant workers from Bengal were working elsewhere in the country while about 15m people from outside were working in the eastern state.
The Independent has approached the BJP for comment.
In addition to Bengali workers, Indian authorities also deported around 100 Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, taking them from a detention centre in Assam and pushing them into Bangladesh. Another 40 Rohingya were forced to jump into the sea near Myanmar, handed life jackets and told to swim ashore, the UN human rights office said.
Bangladesh shares a 4,096km border with India, the fifth-longest in the world. The two countries have experienced multiple waves of undocumented migration since the British partition of the subcontinent in 1947.
Mr Modi this month accused Ms Banerjee's government in West Bengal of "encouraging' illegal immigration "for the sake of vote bank politics".
The issue of immigration from Bangladesh is expected to become a focal point of the 2026 election in West Bengal, a key target for the BJP.
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