Key points
- Thousands of Bengali-speaking Muslims detained or expelled in India
- Raids target language and religion, spreading fear
- Rights groups accuse BJP of oppressing Muslims without due process
- Many poor migrants forced back to Bangladesh; some flee cities
ISLAMABAD: A waste picker from a Delhi slum, who said he had been deported with his pregnant wife and son, according to the New York Times.
A rice farmer in Assam, in India’s northeastern corner, who said his mother had been detained by police for weeks.
A 60‑year‑old shrine attendant in the western state of Gujarat, who said he had been blindfolded, beaten by the police and then put on a boat, the New York Times reported. According to the newspaper, all have been caught up in a widening crackdown on migrants in India.
Rights groups say the crackdown, which intensified after an attack in Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK) in April, has become an increasingly arbitrary campaign of fear against Muslims in India, especially those whose language might mark them as outsiders, the New York Times reported.
Expelled to Bangladesh
Thousands of Indian Bengali-speakers, most of them Muslims, have been rounded up, detained, or expelled to Bangladesh. Many of them are from West Bengal, an eastern Indian state where Bengali is the main language; for decades, young people from the state have migrated to big Indian cities elsewhere for work, the newspaper reported.
Indian states have carried out raids on neighborhoods with dense concentrations of Bengali speakers, claiming they had evidence of undocumented immigrants there.
Since mid-July, authorities in Gurugram, a satellite city of the capital, New Delhi, have conducted what they call a verification drive, intended to identify illegal immigrants.
The police in Gurugram have detained hundreds of people, while hundreds of mostly poor Bengali speakers, preemptively fled the city after the drive began, worried they would be picked up by the police at any moment, according to the New York Times.
The New York Times cited Supantha Sinha, a lawyer working on detention cases in the city of Gurugram as saying the number was closer to 1,000.
Scared of being caught
In interviews with a dozen people across four Indian states, in neighborhoods that have been raided by the police, Muslim and Hindu Bengali speakers said they had become scared of being caught in the government’s crackdown, the newspaper said.
Rights groups and lawyers have criticised the government’s immigration crackdown for a lack of due process. They say that the governing Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, has used April’s attack as a pretext to deepen a systemic campaign of oppression against the country’s Muslims.
Targeting Muslim workers
Across Indian states led by the BJP, thousands of purportedly Rohingya or Bangladeshi Muslims have been rounded up since April, the New York Times reported.
The New York Times cited Bangladeshi officials as saying that roughly 2,000 people were pushed into Bangladesh from India from May to July.
The government of India’s crackdown has largely targeted Muslim migrant workers from impoverished backgrounds, The New York Times cited Meenakshi Ganguly, the deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch as saying.
