On the evening of July 19, Sahida Fakir headed to a market near her home in Navi Mumbai to buy food for dinner, leaving her 10-year-old son at home. She has not returned home since.
A few hours later, her husband Jumman Fakir got a call from the Mumbai police’s Chembur crime branch. Sahida had been detained on “suspicion of being an illegal immigrant”.
Fakir rushed to the police station.
Sahida told him that the police personnel had forcibly dragged her to a building where persons suspected to be “illegal immigrants” were reportedly being detained. “They took away the food she bought, her phone and Aadhaar card,” Fakir said. “She was detained because she was a Bengali.”
For four days, Fakir visited the police station with his wife’s identity documents, including her birth certificate. “The police said that was not enough. They asked for the birth certificates of Sahida’s parents,” Fakir said. “But in their time, no one got birth certificates.”
On the fifth day, July 23, he was told that Sahida was “not there”. “They told me she had been sent to Bangladesh,” he told Scroll. “I told them you have made a great mistake. She is an Indian. Where will she go? How will she fend for herself?”
A few days later, Sahida called him from Bangladesh. A family in Satkhira district has given her shelter, he said.
Scroll emailed the Mumbai police commissioner and the Navi Mumbai police commissioner, asking about the grounds on which Sahida was detained. Fakir said he was not given any documents relating to his wife’s arrest and detention.
They did not respond to our queries. They forwarded the mail to the joint police commissioner (law and order), Manoj Kumar Sharma, who later forwarded the mail to the additional police commissioner (east region). The story will be updated if they respond.
On July 23, before Fakir was informed about Sahida’s forcible deportation, a human rights organisation wrote to the Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court, flagging the “illegal arrest, arbitrary detention, denial of constitutional safeguards, and unlawful” branding of Sahida as a “Bangladeshi”.
This story was originally published in scroll.in. Read the full story here.