A woman from Assam’s Golaghat district was detained by the police, allegedly taken to the Bangladesh border by security forces, and told to cross — before authorities realised there had been an error in her case and brought her back.
Rahima Begum (50) is among several people to have been detained in Assam in the past few weeks as part of an ongoing crackdown on people who have been declared foreigners by the state’s Foreigners Tribunals (FTs). According to her lawyer, a Foreigners Tribunal ruled last month that Begum’s family had entered India before March 25, 1971, the cut-off date for citizenship in Assam.
On Friday, invoking a Supreme Court order, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma had confirmed that the state is pushing declared foreigners across the international border into Bangladesh.
Begum, who returned home to her family in Golaghat’s 2 Padumoni village on Friday evening, alleged she was “pushed into Bangladesh” with a group of people on Tuesday night.
“On Sunday morning (May 25) at around 4 am, when we were still sleeping, police came to our home and told me to report to the police station to answer some questions. After spending the morning there, they took me to the Golaghat Superintendent of Police’s office with some others. I took my documents, and they collected our fingerprints. We were there the whole day. At night, they took us somewhere else in a vehicle,” she said, adding that she didn’t know where she was taken.
“Two of our daughters were there, and they saw their mother taken away at night. But nobody told us where she was all these days,” said her husband, Malek Ali.
“Late Tuesday night, they put us in a few cars and took us near the border,” she alleged. “The security forces who were with us gave us some Bangladeshi currency, told us to cross and not return. It was all paddy fields with mud and water up to our knees. We didn’t know what to do; we just walked between the paddy fields until we reached a village. But the people there chased us away and their border forces called us, beat us a lot and told us to go back to where we came from.”
This story was originally published in indianexpress.com. Read the full story here.