By Arshad Ahmed
A team from BBC Bangla has found Sakina Begum, a 68-year-old woman, in the Mirpura locality of Dhaka, Bangladesh. The elderly woman, who struggled to reveal her address to Mirpur locals as she cannot understand Bengali and speaks a dialect of Assamese, mostly spoken by people in eastern Assam’s Nalbari district, was confirmed to be from Sonpur village in Nalbari.
“We only knew about her whereabouts after the BBC team visited our home, and made us speak to her on a video call,” Rasia Begum, her daughter, told Maktoob.
Four months ago, in May, she had gone missing after the Nalbari Police asked Begum to report to the police station for a “signature on some papers for her case,” said Rasia Begum, 45.
The same month, the state’s right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party government launched a state-wide crackdown on Declared Foreign Nationals, arresting and detaining hundreds of people like Begum in a weeklong clampdown operation.
Declared Foreign Nationals are individuals who were declared non-citizens by the state’s Foreigners Tribunals, quasi-judicial bodies adjudicating on an individual’s citizenship, often criticised for declaring people foreigners arbitrarily and with bias.
While an unspecified number of those detained were released, hundreds were taken to the Transit Camp, Matia, India’s largest detention centre in Assam’s Goalpara. They were later allegedly forced to cross into Bangladesh at gunpoint.
The Chief Minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma, on June 8, informed the assembly that 303 people were “pushed back” to Bangladesh in recent months.
This story was originally published in maktoobmedia.com. Read the full story here.