Guvahati, India (Reuters) -India began to push the people he considers to be illegal immigrants in neighboring Bangladesh, but human rights activists say the authorities arbitrarily throw people out of the country.
Since May, the northeastern Indian state of Asam has “pushed back” 303 people in Bangladesh out of 30,000, declared foreigners from different tribunals over the years, a senior official said this week.
Such people in Asam are usually long -term residents with families and land in the state, which houses tens of thousands of families, tracing their roots to a Muslim majority Bangladesh.
Activists say that many of them and their families are often mistakenly classified as foreigners in the Hindu India and are too poor to challenge the decisions of the tribunals in the higher courts.
Some activists who did not want to be baptized for fear of repression have said only Muslims have been directed to expulsion. A spokesman for the ASam government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Asam, which has a 260 km (160 miles) limit with Bangladesh, started sending people back last month, who were declared foreigners from their tribunals for foreigners. A similar move is politically popular in Asam, where Bengal speakers in the language with possible roots in Bangladesh compete for jobs and resources with local Asami speakers.
“The Supreme Court has been pressured to act on the expulsion of foreigners,” Asamanta Chief Minister Himanta Sarma said at the Monday State Assembly. “We have repelled 303 people. These discounts will be strengthened. We must be more active and proactive to save the state.”
In February, he referred to the Supreme Court, who asks as an asam why he did not move with the deportment of declared foreigners.
Bangladesh Foreign Affairs Advisor, Touhid Hossain, did not immediately answer an email looking for a comment. Last week, he told reporters that people were sent to his country from India and that the government had a relationship with New Delhi because of that.
Aman Wadud, a lawyer based in Asam, who routinely struggles against citizenship cases and is now a member of the main opposition party of the Congress, said the government “arbitrarily throwing people out of the country”.
“There is a lot of panic on earth – more than ever,” he said.
Some have returned
Sarma said there were no real Indian citizens to be expelled. But he added that up to four of the deported people were returned to India as appeals were heard in court challenging their non -Indian status.
One of them was Hajirul Islam, a 51-year-old former government teacher who was named a foreigner from a tribunal in 2016. He spent two years in a Center for detention of Asam and was released on bail in August 2020.
He said the police raised him on May 23 from his home and took him to a detention center, from where he and 31 others were rounded by the Indian border guards and loaded in a van tied with their eyes and tied with their hands.
“At that time, 14 of us were put on another truck. We were taken to the border and crashed into Bangladesh,” he said. “It was horrifying. I never experienced anything like that. It was late at night. There was a right track and we all started walking on it.”
Islam said the residents of Bangladeshi village then called Bangladesh Border Guard, who then pushed the group at the age of 14 into the “land of no man between the two countries.”
“We’ve been standing there in the raw sun all day,” he said.
Later, the group was taken to a Bangladesh security camp while the wife of Islam told police in Asam that since his case is still hanging in court, he must be returned.
“After a few days, they suddenly returned me to the Indian police,” he said. “So I went home. I have no idea what happened to others who were with me or where they were.”
Not only asam acts against people who are considered illegal in the country.
Police in the western city of Ahmedabad said they had identified more than 250 people, “confirmed that they are immigrants in Bangladeshi who live illegally here.”
“The process of deportation is underway,” said senior police officer Ajit Rajian.
(Writing by Krishna N. Das; additional reporting from Paul Paul in Dhaka and Sumit Hannah in Ahmedabad; Edit by Raju Gopalakishnan)