Bengaluru: History reminded me this week that physical barometers of segregation and discrimination are less insidious than the mental dehumanisation of an entire community. In an essay called Notes on Nationalism written 80 years ago, George Orwell—that prophet of the coming era of the “unperson”—wrote how human beings can be reduced to the status of insects “and that whole blocks of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad.’”
Sunali Khatun, 26, is among the millions that India’s majoritarian process is trying to move into the category of “unpersons”, those to be labelled bad and erased from existence and memory and denied legal protection. Khatun’s case gained nationwide prominence only because it appeared to be not only a blatant violation of the law, but was perpetrated by those meant to be its custodians in a country where the dehumanising terminology of “termites” and “infiltrators” flows from the home minister and Prime Minister. Her case provided a link between the government’s actions and the larger ideological project to reclassify or invisibilise India’s largest minority.
On 3 December 2025 the Supreme Court ordered the return of a heavily pregnant Khatun, a Bengali, and her nine-year-old from Bangladesh, a country foreign to her and to which she had been deported in June, after being detained from a Delhi slum during a police sweep. When Khatun could not immediately produce papers, she was bundled into a plane, flown to the border and, as they say, “pushed back”, meaning forced across the border along with another Bengali woman and her two little sons.
Even a government notorious for denying straws and spectacles to aged political prisoners in jail had to reluctantly agree with the Supreme Court—before whom it was contesting a Calcutta High Court order to bring the deportees home—that Khatun and her child could be brought back on “humanitarian grounds”. Even though it sounded like it, there was little magnanimity involved. The Chief Justice mildly noted that Khatun’s father was Indian, which meant she and her son were too.
(We also found that this week that the Chief Justice was no advocate of humane treatment to refugees: “Do we roll out a red carpet?” he said of Rohingyas who had disappeared from state custody. He might want to take inspiration from a movie I saw recently, Jolly LLB 3, where a smarmy, somewhat greasy district judge had something useful to say: “In our constitution, two things are very important. One letter and one spirit. Meaning what’s written in the law and the sentiment behind it. Everybody focuses on the letter. Follow what’s written. Close the files and go home, right? Is chakkar mein na, the spirit is left far behind. Sometimes, I try to hold on to the sentiment”).
This story was originally published in article-14.com. Read the full story here.