'Foreigners for both nations': India pushing Muslims 'back' to Bangladesh

India's continuing crackdown on Bengali speaking Indians has escalated as hundreds of Indian nationals have been branded as "declared foreign nationals" and pushed into the no-man's land between India and Bangladesh, often at gunpoint.

On May 31, the 67-year-old bicycle mechanic Ufa Ali returned to his home in India's northeastern state of Assam after spending four harrowing days stranded in Bangladesh, the neighbouring country he claims he had only heard of "as a slur" since birth, reports Al Jazeera.

Ali's weeklong ordeal began on May 23 when he was picked up by the police from his rented house in Kuyadal, a small village in Assam's Morigaon district, during a government crackdown on "declared foreign nationals" – a category of people unique to Assam. The state is a tea-producing hub where the migration and settlement of Bengali-speaking people from neighbouring areas for more than a century has led to ethnic tensions with the Indigenous natives, who mainly speak Assamese.

The tensions have gotten worse since 2016, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu majority Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power for the first time in Assam. More than a third of the state's 31 million population is Muslim – the highest percentage among Indian states.

Ali is among the more than 300 Muslims in Assam "pushed back" into Bangladesh since May, according to state Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma. "These pushbacks will be intensified. We have to be more active and proactive to save the state," Sarma told the state's legislative assembly earlier this month.

'Hell underneath the blue sky'

After he was picked up by the police on May 23, Ali was taken to a detention centre more than 200km (124 miles) away in Matia, India's largest facility for undocumented migrants, in Assam's Goalpara district.

Three days later, at the crack of dawn on May 27, soldiers belonging to India's Border Security Force (BSF) took him and 13 others, including five women, in a van to the India-Bangladesh border.

"The BSF was forcing us to cross over to the other side, whereas BGB and [Bangladeshi] locals said they would not take us as we were Indians," Ali told Al Jazeera, referring to Bangladesh's border force, the Border Guard Bangladesh.

Stranded in open fields at the no-man's land between India and Bangladesh, Ali's group spent the next 12 hours in knee-deep water with no access to food or shelter.

A haunting image of Ali, squatting in the swamp, brows raised and eyes looking back at the viewer, went viral on social media "We saw hell underneath the blue sky and we saw life fading away from us," he told Al Jazeera.

If they tried to move to the Indian side, the BSF soldiers threatened them with violence, Ali said.

"They shot at us with rubber bullets when we begged them not to push us into the other side. It was no no-man's land for us. It was as if there was no country for us."

Rahima Begum, 50, who was picked up in a similar manner from eastern Assam's Golaghat district, says she is haunted by the memories of her time spent in the no-man's land.

"I was beaten by the BGB when I tried to run across to the Bangladeshi side," she said. "I had no escape. The BSF said they would shoot us dead if we did not move to the other side."

Jiten Chandra Das, a journalist from the border town of Rowmari in Bangladesh who reported on the incident for a Bangladeshi newspaper, told Al Jazeera he saw BSF officers firing rubber bullets at the stranded "Indian nationals", adding that they also "fired four rounds of ammunition in the air" to force them into the other side.

In a statement on May 27, the BSF denied the allegation, saying it only tried to stop Bangladeshi nationals from "unauthorised entry into India".

After a standoff that included angry interventions by Bangladeshi villagers and senior BGB officials, Ali was dropped by BGB soldiers at a border point in India's Meghalaya state, from where he made his 10-hour journey back home through dense forests.

A May 31 report by Assam-based The Sentinel newspaper said the BSF received 65 purported Indian citizens from the BGB.

Several Muslims who had been pushed towards Bangladesh told Al Jazeera that at least 100 of them returned home on their own after the BGB left them at the international border. Their claims could not be verified independently, but most returnees said "men in civil dresses" received them from the international line on the Indian side and "deserted them" on a highway.

The drive to expel "illegal" Bangladeshis gained momentum in India after April 22, when gunmen allegedly linked to Pakistan killed 26 people in Indian-administered Kashmir's town of Pahalgam, triggering renewed anti-Muslim sentiments across the country.

Apoorvanand, a professor of Hindi at the University of Delhi, told Al Jazeera the Pahalgam attack gave the BJP – which runs both the federal and Assam governments – an excuse to expel vulnerable Muslim groups, such as the Rohingya or the Bengali-speaking Muslim migrants.

"Muslim identities in any form are synonymous with terrorism in India under the BJP government," he said. "The government treats Bengali Muslims as illegal Bangladeshis."

Opposition parties and rights groups in Assam also allege that the government's ongoing drive only targets Muslims. "They have selectively pushed out Muslims from Matia," Debabrata Saikia of the Congress party told Al Jazeera, referring to the detention centre.

BJP spokesman Manoj Barauh denied the exercise was religion-based, saying that undocumented Hindus were not pushed to Bangladesh because they "could face religious persecution" in a Muslim-majority country.

The Assam situation

Assam has seen ethnic and religious tensions for decades, the roots of which lie in the British colonial past.

In the 19th century, British colonisers developed tea gardens across the hilly areas of Assam, sparking large-scale migration of Bengali-speaking workers – both Muslim and Hindu, many from the region presently known as Bangladesh.

When the British left in 1947, the Indian subcontinent was partitioned to create India and Pakistan, whose territory included East Pakistan, where most residents spoke Bengali and not Urdu, Pakistan's national language. After more than two decades of a popular movement over language, an India-backed rebellion in 1971 saw East Pakistan emerge as an independent nation, Bangladesh.

Today, Muslim-majority Bangladesh shares a 4,096km (2,545-mile) border with India, nearly 260km (160 miles) of it with Assam.

Meanwhile, authorities in Assam set a cut-off date of March 24, 1971 – the day before Bangladesh declared independence from Pakistan – for tens of thousands of Bengali-speaking residents to prove they entered Assam before that date to claim Indian citizenship.

Such citizenship cases are handled by Assam's special Foreigners Tribunals set up across the state. The tribunals act as quasi-judicial courts, empowered with declaring people "foreigners" over minor spelling mistakes or inconsistencies in government documents. In a 2019 report, rights group Amnesty International said the Assam tribunals were "riddled with bias" and work in "arbitrary ways".

In the same year, Assam published a final National Register of Citizens (NRC), a list the government had been working on for decades to identify "illegal" residents. The list excluded nearly 2 million Assam residents, about 700,000 of them Muslims. Hundreds of these Muslims were put in detention camps after the NRC was published to be forcibly deported.

Ali's name appears in the NRC, but he was still declared a foreigner in 2013 by a tribunal in Morigaon over alleged discrepancies in his father's name, Samat Ali, which appeared as "Chamat Ali" and "Chahmat Ali" in different legal documents.

He spent two years in a detention centre after he was stripped of his citizenship, a decision upheld by the state's High Court in 2014. He says he is too poor to challenge the decision in the Supreme Court.

'They made me a Bangladeshi'

Many Muslims pushed towards the Bangladesh border have their citizenship cases pending before the courts. Therefore, they say that the government crackdown against them was illegal and arbitrary. Chief Minister Sarma has admitted that his government brought back from Bangladesh "some of the people through diplomatic channels who had pending petitions in courts".

Among them was Shona Banu, a resident of the Barpeta district's Burikhamar village, who was pushed towards Bangladesh on May 27, reports Al Jazeera.

"I never thought the country I was born into, and the country my parents and grandparents took birth in, would send me to Bangladesh border," the 59-year-old told Al Jazeera. "They made me a Bangladeshi, but the only time I saw Bangladesh was when it was 10 metres [33 feet] away from the no-man's land."

Khairul Islam, a primary school teacher in Morigaon's Mikirbheta village, said his "forced deportation to Bangladesh felt like a death sentence".

Islam was declared a foreigner in 2016, despite his family presenting documents, such as land deeds from the British colonial times, registered under his grandfather's name. He has challenged the tribunal's decision in the Supreme Court.

Islam said he was "scarred" by the time he spent in the no-man's land. "We were treated worse than refugees. Our pain and sufferings were on full display for everyone to see," he said. "We were foreigners for both India and Bangladesh."

But Nijam Ahmed, 50, was no foreigner, according to India's official records. A truck driver in Golaghat's Jamuguri tea estate area, Ahmed's name appears in the NRC. Still, he was dumped in no-man's land.

Ahmed's son, Zahid, said he came to know about his father's detention only after a viral video purportedly showed him with BGB officials.

"[We are] Indians. My grandfather was in the Second Assam Police Battalion," Zahid said. Al Jazeera has confirmed the claim, having found that Nijam's father, Salim Uddin Ahmed, served in the state police from the 1960s to 2001.

"Had my grandfather been alive, it would have hurt him the most," Zahid said. "A policeman's son was pushed to the Bangladesh border."

'Do not return or we will shoot you'

In recent days, however, the drive to expel alleged "illegal" Bangladeshis has spread to other states governed by the BJP.

Police in Ahmedabad, the main city in Modi's home state of Gujarat, said they have identified more than 250 people "confirmed to be Bangladeshi immigrants living illegally here".

"The process to deport them is in progress," said police officer Ajit Rajian, according to local media reports.

In neighbouring Maharashtra, India's richest state, police last month detained seven Muslims accused of being foreigners and handed them to the BSF for expulsion to Bangladesh.

However, they were brought back from the borders on June 15 after authorities in West Bengal, their home state, intervened, said Samirul Islam, a parliamentarian belonging to the All India Trinamool Congress (AITC) party, which governs West Bengal. The AITC is a part of the national opposition to Modi's BJP.

"The West Bengal police and other state authorities informed the Maharashtra police that these people were Indian nationals from West Bengal," Samirul Islam, who is also the chairman of the West Bengal Migrant Welfare Board, told Al Jazeera. "But they were given to the BSF without informing the West Bengal police or government."

Referring to the actions of the Maharashtra police, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said in a news conference in Kolkata on June 16, "Just because they speak Bengali, they were labelled Bangladeshis and sent to Bangladesh."

Three of those Muslims Al Jazeera talked to said that while they were in Maharashtra police's custody, their families and West Bengal authorities submitted documents verifying their nationality as Indians.

Miranul Sheikh and Nizamuddin Sheikh, residents of West Bengal's Murshidabad district, were seen in another viral video from no-man's land.

"The BSF kept beating us on our way to the border despite us saying we were from Murshidabad," 32-year-old Miranul Sheikh told Al Jazeera. "But they abused us, saying: 'Do not return or we will shoot you.'"

Al Jazeera sent an email to the BSF on June 19, seeking their comments on the allegations. They have not responded yet.

Assam's 'miya' Muslims

During their sweeping crackdown, police in Assam also detained Abdul Hanif, a Bengali-speaking Muslim, from his home in Golaghat's Noajan village on May 25. They gave no reason for the detention.

"The police said they will return him after two days," Hanif's elder brother, Din Islam, told Al Jazeera.

For Bengali-speaking Muslims in eastern Assam, nightly raids by police are not uncommon, given the prevalent anti-migrant sentiments in the state's tea belt. But a routine verification drive, as the police put it, led to a desperate search for Hanif.

"We have gone from one police station to another, asking for his whereabouts," Din told Al Jazeera. "But the police are not telling us anything."

According to Din, Hanif was last seen at the office of Rajen Singh, Golaghat's superintendent of police, with a group of people who were later sent to the Bangladesh border.

Hanif's family insists he is not a foreigner. "He has no tribunal proceeding against him," said Din. "He was picked up on mere suspicions because we are 'miyas'."

"Miya", a pejorative term synonymous with being a Bangladeshi, is used by Indigenous Assamese to refer to Bengali-speaking Muslims.

Al Jazeera asked Singh about Hanif's whereabouts. "These things cannot be discussed," he replied.

A local resident who was seen with Hanif at Singh's office and taken to the Bangladesh border said their group was split into two and that Hanif had most likely been pushed into Bangladesh.

"People have disappeared overnight," he said, requesting anonymity over fears of reprisals by the government. "He could be lost in Bangladesh like many."

Al Jazeera independently confirmed that the whereabouts of at least 10 people forced into no-man's land last month are unknown.

At least four families in Assam have filed petitions in the Assam High Court over the disappearance of their family members. At least two of these families belong to the Deshi community, considered Indigenous Muslims by the state government.

"We thought we were Indigenous Muslims, and therefore safe," said Bakkar Ali, the son of Samsul Ali, who had gone missing. "But it seems that no Muslim is safe here."

Bakkar said his father is in the custody of the Bangladesh police. Amirul Islam, a jailor in Bangladesh's Mymensingh district, told Al Jazeera on June 16 that another Deshi individual, Doyjan Bibi, is in their custody.

"The Bangladesh government has sent a diplomatic note to the Indian government, telling New Delhi that the way the BSF is pushing people into the Bangladeshi border is being done without due process," Faisal Mahmud, the spokesperson for the Bangladesh High Commission in New Delhi, told Al Jazeera.

Al Jazeera reached out to India's Ministry for External Affairs for comment on allegations of Indian forces pushing Muslims into Bangladesh, but has received no response.

'Selectively pushed out Muslims'

Angshuman Choudhury, a joint doctoral fellow at the National University of Singapore and King's College London, and an analyst of northeast India, said the Assam government's claim of the "pushback" of allegedly illegal migrants was "actually a forced expulsion".

"Pushback means you are pushing back immigrants who are trying to enter your borders," Choudhury told Al Jazeera. "What the government is doing in this case is plucking out people and throwing them into another country."

Chief Minister Sarma has justified the government's actions by citing a 1950 law, which empowers the district commissioners to expel certain undocumented migrants.

But Oliullah Laskar, a High Court lawyer and human rights activist in Assam, says the law is only meant for migrants caught "illegally" entering the Indian territory or those who overstay their visas.

"This act is not meant for people who have been living in Assam for generations and have documents given by the state government to prove their citizenship," Laskar told Al Jazeera.

Another local lawyer, requesting anonymity over fears of reprisal by the government, said the state of Assam itself, during a Supreme Court hearing in February this year on the detention of "declared foreigners", said that people whose addresses in Bangladesh were not known cannot be deported.

The government said in its affidavit: "It is also humbly requested that, without the nationality verification and travel permits from the foreign country concerned, these inmates cannot be deported."

Last year, the Assam government instructed the police not to report to the tribunals cases of non-Muslims, mainly Hindus, who entered the state before December 31, 2014 the cutoff date laid out in India's controversial Citizenship Amendment Act.

The 2019 law allows expedited Indian citizenship to non-Muslims "facing religious persecution" in Muslim-majority neighbouring countries if they entered India before that date. The law triggered deadly protests across India for allegedly violating India's secular constitution, and the United Nations calls it "fundamentally discriminatory".

"We have to show as many as 20-30 documents to prove our nationality," says an exasperated Ali. "But Hindus from Bangladesh only have to say they are Hindus" to get fast-tracked Indian citizenship.

Sitting outside her home in Golaghat, Begum, the 50-year-old who was also taken by the BSF, said she feels let down by the country she calls her own, and where she was born.

"This country is mine, but I am not of it."