On Wednesday, 22-year-old Barek Ali, a resident of Assam’s Darrang district, was forwarded a clip from a Bangladesh-based news channel. It showed a group of people standing in a field surrounded by armed Bangladesh border guards, with locals from the Durgapur border area saying they had been sent across the border by security forces at 3 am that day.
In that group was a woman carrying a baby in her arms. When he saw it, Ali immediately recognised them as his mother Manikjan Begum and his 8-month-old sister, who had been missing after they were taken into police custody on May 25.
“Ever since I saw (the video), I feel like I can’t breathe. All I can think about is what we can do to get them back,” he said.
Begum is among several people who have been detained by police in the past week from across Assam and whose families say that they have not been given information about their whereabouts by authorities. Like most of these people, she had been declared a foreigner by a Foreigner Tribunal in the state in 2019 and spent two years in detention until she was released on bail in 2022.
The Assam police and Border Security Force have not responded to queries about these developments. However, a senior BSF official told The Indian Express, “It is an ongoing process. Anyone found to be a foreigner will be either deported or pushed back.”
Ali said his mother was first taken to the Dhula police station in the early hours of May 23 and sent back home the next day. He said she was summoned to the police station again on May 25 with all her documents.
“From there, she was taken to the police reserve in Mangaldai and then to the Superintendent of Police’s office in Mangaldai. My father and I waited outside for hours with relatives of others who had also been taken there. The baby was with my father, and she started crying, so my father took her inside and handed her over to my mother. That was the last that we saw of them… No one has told us anything about where they are ever since,” he said.
This story was originally published in indianexpress.com. Read the full story here.