On November 27 last year, the Odisha police picked up 12 members of a family from a village in Kendrapara district on the suspicion that they were Bangladeshis.
Barring three elderly people, all were released after nine days of detention. Since then, Mukhtar Khan said he has no information about his 65-year-old father, Muntaz Khan, his uncle Insaan Khan, 59, and aunt Ameena Bibi, 70.
Unknown to the family, Khan’s father had been forced out of Indian territory and into Bangladesh, along with his uncle and aunt. This was confirmed to Scroll by the Kendrapara police superintendent on January 14.
The police official said the three had “confessed” to being Bangladeshis. Mukhtar was let go because he was an Indian by birth, he said.
Khan was incredulous when we told him what the official had said. “How could they send them to Bangladesh?” he asked. “Did they find any Bangladeshi documents on my father and uncle? What is the proof and confirmation that they are Bangladeshi? What is the official proof or confirmation that my father was indeed sent to Bangladesh?”
The official said that the three were expelled after the Odisha police contacted the authorities in Bengal – a process laid down by the Union ministry of home affairs in a May 2 notification, which said that a suspected illegal immigrant had to be given 30 days to prove their citizenship and that their home state should be asked to verify their claims.
The Bengal authorities failed to verify their claims of being Indian citizens, the Odisha police official told Scroll. But this was denied by the district police chief of Purba Medinipur, who said the Odisha police had not contacted them for any such verification. “I completely rule out the claim of Odisha police,” Mitun Kumar Dey, superintendent of police, Purba Medinipur, told Scroll.
The Odisha police also claimed that Mukhtar Khan’s father Muntaz Khan was a Bangladeshi because his father, Yasin Khan, had arrived in India from Bangladesh in the 1970s. But land records with the family, seen by Scroll, show that Yasin Khan owned land in Bengal’s Purba Medinipur district in 1956.
This story was originally published in scroll.in. Read the full story here.
