MUMBAI, India — For the past decade, Mustafa Kamal Sheikh set up a makeshift stall opposite a police station in a working-class suburb of Mumbai. His speciality was jhalmuri, a fiery snack made of puffed rice and spices. The cops often came down for a bite and small talk.
One day in June, two officers came to his house and asked for his ID. He showed them four, including a card that identified him as a voter in Indian elections. Kamal says the constables accused him of forging them and detained him. He denies the accusation.
Kamal, 52, did not get a phone call or a lawyer. Over the next five days, he says the police and a team of India’s Border Security Force flew him more than a thousand miles away, to the India-Bangladesh border.
One midnight, Kamal says, “The border guard gave us 300” in the Bangladeshi taka currency — less than $3 — “and told us to cross over.” He recalls the guard saying, “If you return, we will shoot you.’ ” He says he was part of a group that included a few dozen people — all Muslims seized from Mumbai.
He says the Indian border guards allowed him to return to India two days later, after videos went viral on Indian social media of him and two other expelled Indian Muslims sobbing near the border, and listing their Indian addresses, complete with the postcodes. The Maharashtra state police, which is accused of detaining Kamal, did not respond to NPR’s requests for an interview.
The crackdown followed attacks in Kashmir
Human Rights Watch, which has been monitoring these expulsions, says a stepped-up crackdown began in May. That’s when local media reported the Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi ordered the deportation of “illegal immigrants” after militants gunned down tourists in a meadow in Indian-administered Kashmir in April. India blamed Pakistan for the attack that killed 26 people, leading to four days of fighting in May. Pakistan denies any wrongdoing.
India has not released any figures on deportations, but the Human Rights Watch report, citing Bangladesh border guards, said that Indian authorities expelled more than 1,500 people to neighboring Bangladesh and Myanmar between May 7 and June 15. That included Indian citizens and around 100 Rohingya refugees, who are a predominantly Muslim minority who had fled ethnic cleansing in Myanmar.
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