By Team

(New York) – Indian authorities have expelled scores of ethnic Rohingya refugees to Bangladesh and Myanmar without rights protections since May 2025, Human Rights Watch said today. The authorities have arbitrarily detained several hundred more, mistreating some of them.

In May, states in India governed by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) initiated a campaign to expel Rohingya and Bengali-speaking Muslims for being “illegal immigrants.” Those expelled to Bangladesh included at least 192 Rohingya refugees despite being registered with the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR). The authorities also put 40 Rohingya refugees on a ship near the Myanmar coast and forced them to swim ashore. Dozens more have fled to Bangladesh to avoid the crackdown.

“The Indian government’s expulsion of Rohingya refugees shows an utter disregard for human life and international law,” said Elaine Pearson, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “The actions taken against these refugees, who have fled atrocities and persecution in Myanmar, reflects the ruling BJP’s policy to demonize Muslims as ‘illegal’ migrants.”

Human Rights Watch interviewed nine Rohingya men and women in the Cox’s Bazar refugee camps in Bangladesh who had recently arrived from India. Six who had been expelled in May alleged that Indian authorities assaulted them and seized their money, mobile phones, and UNHCR registration cards. The other three fled to Bangladesh, one each from Jammu and Kashmir, Andhra Pradesh, and Delhi, fearing arbitrary detention after police threatened them.

An estimated 40,000 Rohingya live in India, at least 20,000 of whom are registered with the UN refugee agency. Although India is not a party to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol, India is bound by the customary international law principle of nonrefoulement, which prohibits countries from returning or expelling people to places where they face threats to their lives or freedom.

A 37-year-old Rohingya woman who had been detained in Goalpara district in India’s Assam State, said that Indian Border Security Force officials forced her, her husband, and their three children into Bangladesh at gunpoint on the night of May 6. “When my husband asked the officials where we should go, as we had no money and didn’t know the area, they were forcing us to cross, they slapped him so hard he still can’t hear properly,” she said. “They threatened to kill us if we spoke further.”

The family had fled Myanmar in 2012 to escape the military’s ethnic cleansing campaign against the Rohingya in Rakhine State, but ended up detained for over a decade in jails in Assam.

This story was originally published in hrw.org. Read the full story here.