India Quietly Starts Long-Overdue Deportation Of Illegal Bangladeshi Muslim Migrants

It is not just on the western front with Pakistan that India has taken resolute action since May 6. 

Coinciding with ‘Operation Sindoor’, India also quietly initiated the long-overdue process of pushing in illegal Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants arrested from various parts of the country into Bangladesh through the Indo-Bangladesh border. 

Since May 6, a large number of Bangladeshi Muslims who had entered India illegally and had been residing in various parts of the country were secretly transported by road and air to various points along the international border in Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya and Tripura and pushed back into their country. 

This is the first time that India has started to unilaterally push back Bangladeshi Muslims who entered India illegally back to their country of origin. The Union Government, for understandable reasons, has refused to acknowledge this silent and unofficial push-back.

All these years, India has been following established protocols--the 1975 India-Bangladesh joint guidelines for border authorities, the 2011 Coordinated Border Management Plan and decisions taken by the chiefs of the Border Security Force (BSF) and Border Guards Bangladesh (BGB)--to try to deport Bangladeshi nationals who entered India illegally. 

But the formal process proved to be not only a long-winded one, it was also dependent on Bangladesh accepting the illegal immigrants as its own and agreeing to take them back. 

Bangladesh has consistently denied that its nationals enter India illegally and has, more often than not, refused to acknowledge illegal Bangladeshi immigrants detected by Indian authorities as its own. 

As a result, very few Bangladeshi infiltrators have been deported from India over the past few decades. 

“Bangladesh’s repeated refusals to acknowledge these illegal immigrants as its citizens and take them back has been extremely frustrating,” a senior officer of the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) told Swarajya. 

After the terror attacks in Kashmir’s Pahalgam, the Union Government issued orders to all states to detect and arrest Pakistanis and Bangladeshis residing illegally in India. 

This led to the detection and arrest of hundreds of Bangladeshis as well as Rohingyas living illegally in various Indian states like Assam, Gujarat, Delhi, Haryana, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Odisha. 

The illegal Bangladeshi immigrants who had been arrested needed to be deported. But the MHA realised that doing so through the proper channels and as per established protocols would be impossible because Bangladeshi would refuse to acknowledge them as its citizens and take them back. 

A decision was then taken to proactively push back these illegal immigrants through the Indo-Bangladesh border. 

The BSF top brass were asked to identify stretches of the border through which the push-backs could be carried out. 

The BSF zeroed in on a number of remote and uninhabited stretches along the Indo-Bangladesh border which are not patrolled frequently by the BGB.

The MHA narrowed down the list and approved the push-backs from a few stretches of the international border in Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Bengal, including the Sundarbans in Bengal. 

Coinciding with the launch of ‘Operation Sindoor’ on the western front, ‘Operation Push-Back’ (not the official name, though) started on the eastern border as well. 

On May 6, 66 Bangladeshi Muslims were pushed back through various points of the border in Tripura into the Khagrachari district of Chittagong division in southeastern Bangladesh. 

According to sources in Bangladesh, 15 illegal Bangladeshi immigrants (IBIs) were pushed back through the Taidong border of Matiranga, 27 through the Shantipur border of Gomti and 24 through the Rupsen Para border in Panchhari. All these are in Khagrachari district. 

Many of the IBIs pushed back that day had been arrested in Gujarat. They were reportedly transported by air to Tripura and handed over to the BSF which pushed them back into Bangladesh. 

All the 66 IBIs were taken into custody by the BGB which verified their credentials and found them to be Bangladeshi citizens who had entered India illegally in the past. The 66 have been sent back to their respective homes in Bangladesh. 

The next day (May 7), the BGB detected 15 IBIs who were pushed back into Kamalganj in Moulvibazar district of Sylhet division in southeastern Bangladesh. The group comprised nine men, three women and three children. 

The BGB, once again, checked their credentials and found them to be originally residents of areas in Narail and Chittagong districts of that country. 

This group of IBIs has been staying illegally in Assam for the past several years and had even obtained Indian citizenship documents. 

The Assam Police arrested them two weeks ago and demolished their homes. This group was reportedly transported by a helicopter to Manik Bhandar along the international border in Tripura and handed over to the BSF which pushed them back into their country. 

The 15 IBIs who were detained by the BGB were part of a much larger group of around 300 IBIs who had been arrested in Assam and sent to Tripura. 

It is learnt that the other IBIs, after being pushed into Bangladesh, went back to their own villages in various parts of the country on their own. 

Since then, a huge number of IBIs have been pushed back into Bangladesh through various stretches on the Indo-Bangladesh border. 

One of the most dramatic episodes of ‘Operation Push-Back’ happened in the wee hours of May 9 when 78 IBIs were taken in boats and left on a remote island called Mandarbaria in the Satkhira range of Sundarbans in southwestern Bangladesh. 

They were taken into custody by the Bangladesh Coast Guard and handed over to the police who found out that they were indeed Bangladeshi nationals who had infiltrated illegally into India. 

Some of the IBIs who had been transported to the Mandarbaria island were arrested from Gujarat and Delhi and had fraudulently obtained Indian documents. Some of them had married Indian women and had children as well. 

The push-back, said MHA sources, is an ongoing operation and will continue. “No country will accept the presence of such a large number of foreigners who have entered and are staying in the country illegally. If their country of origin refuses to acknowledge them as its citizens and refuses to take them back, other measures need to be taken,” the MHA official clarified. 

He referred to Prime Minister Modi’s brief meeting with the head of Bangladesh’s interim government, Mohammad Yunus, on the sidelines of the BIMSTEC summit in Bangkok in early April. 

“Prime Minister Modi told Yunus very clearly and firmly that the Indo-Bangladesh border is inviolable and cannot be breached. India will not accept cross border crimes and infiltration and will take firm measures to tackle them. Operation Push-Back is a form articulation of this new policy of dealing firmly with illegal immigrants and criminals who violate the border,” the MHA official said. 

The operation has, expectedly, elicited howls of protest from Bangladesh. Bangladesh’s National Security Advisor (NSA) Khalilur Rahman said that the deportations should be carried out “through formal channels”. 

BGB director general--Major General Mohammad Asrafuzzaman Siddiqui--deprecated the push-backs and termed them “disgraceful” and “violation of human rights”. 

The BGB chief said more than 200 people have been detained by the border force between May 6 and 8 from various places along the border. 

But Bangladesh suspects that India has already departed a few thousand people very silently over the past one week and they have all returned to their original homes in that country. 

The BGB chief said that India is “taking advantage” of lack of BGB patrols in some very remote and uninhabited stretches of the border to deport people. 

He said that the BGB has stepped up patrolling along such stretches. However, the BGB is stretched very thinly along the border and it will be impossible for the force to prevent such deportations at all times, he acknowledged. 

Bangladesh also says that many of the Rohingyas who have been deported had been registered as refugees by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in India. “As per UN norms, a refugee registered in one country should remain in that country and cannot be deported to another country. We will take this up formally with the UN,” he said. 

However, in the same breath, he acknowledged that the Rohingyas has escaped from their camps in Bangladesh and entered India illegally.

India is not a signatory to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention or its 1967 protocol and is thus under no obligation to provide refuge to Rohingyas.  

“It is Bangladesh’s responsibility to ensure that the Rohingyas housed in the camps in that country stay within those camps and do not enter India. It is also Bangladesh’s responsibility to ensure its citizens respect the sanctity of the international border and do not enter India illegally,” the MHA official asserted. 

The BGB chief also lamented that the BSF is refusing to acknowledge that it had pushed back people into Bangladesh. “The BSF is claiming it has no knowledge of such push-backs and is telling us that people who entered India illegally in the past are returning to Bangladesh on their own,” Major General Siddiqui said. 

Bangladesh’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs wrote to India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) last week urging New Delhi to “follow due process and established mechanisms” governing deportations of Bangladeshi nationals from India. 

Dhaka has warned that such ‘forcible deportations’ “fuel negative public sentiments” and can hamper bilateral relations. 

New Delhi has not acknowledged receipt of the letter. But sources in the MHA indicated that ‘Operation Push-Back’ will continue. 

MHA sources said that while detecting and deporting the millions of Bangladeshi Muslims living illegally in India will be quite a herculean task, the ongoing operation will act as a firm deterrence to further infiltration.