Eight months pregnant Sunali Bibi from Birbhum, West Bengal, along with her husband and eight-year-old son, were detained in Delhi on suspicion of being illegal Bangladeshis earlier this year amid a crackdown on illegal immigrants in the national capital region.
Now, she and the family are in police custody in Chapainawabganj in northwestern Bangladesh, ironically on charges of being illegal Indian immigrants.
The fate of Sunali Bibi, whose future and that of her unborn child currently hangs in citizenship limbo, is not hers alone.
The ruling BJP government has cast a net to identify migrant workers amongst Bengali Muslims, arbitrarily detain and then forcefully push them to another country against human rights statutes and citizenship laws.
Since Operation Sindoor in May this year, at least 2,000 Bengalis, a majority of them Muslims reportedly from West Bengal and Assam, have been rounded up from BJP-ruled Indian states and pushed across the international border by Indian authorities. The deportation was the result of a Ministry of Home Affairs-driven “verification exercise”, carried out without due process. At least 100 Rohingya refugees were also sent across in the same drive.
While West Bengal, with the Trinamool Congress in power, has seen political mobilisation and pushback against the forced deportations and ethno-linguistic targeting, in BJP-ruled Assam, the situation remains dire. Caught between statecraft and violent displacement, thousands of stateless migrant workers have been thrown into the woods.
‘Civil Society’ Vigilantism à la Manipur in Assam
Following several rounds of government eviction drives, at least 20 civil society organisations in upper Assam have raised vigilante groups doing door-to-door verification of Bengali-speaking residents in areas like Sivasagar and other parts of Upper Assam.
This story was originally published in thequint.com. Read the full story here.