Woman ‘pushed into Bangladesh’ during Assam crackdown, brought back after officials found ‘mismatch’

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.”

“We spent the whole day standing in a paddy field and drinking the water from it because we could not go to either side,” she said. “(On Thursday evening), the forces on the Indian side called us back, took the Bangladesh currency, put us in vehicles and took us to Kokrajhar. I don’t know about what happened to the rest of the people, but I was brought to Golaghat. I don’t know why this happened to me; I have all my papers. I completed my FT case after fighting it for more than two years.”

Her husband got a call on Friday afternoon to pick her up from Golaghat town.

The BSF Guwahati Frontier and the Golaghat SP Rajen Singh did not respond to calls and messages seeking a comment.

Advocate Lipika Deb, who handled Begum’s case in the Jorhat FT, said the family called her on Sunday, saying that she had been taken away along with others suspected to be foreigners.

According to Deb, the tribunal declared her as ‘post-stream’, which is used to refer to cases in which entry into India is said to be between January 1, 1966 and March 25, 1971, after which the person has been an ordinary resident of Assam, where in line with Section 6A(3) of the Citizenship Act, the person has to be registered within 30 days with the relevant Foreigners Registration Office (FRRO). According to the Act, such a person will have their name struck from electoral rolls for 10 years, but during that time they will have “the same rights and obligations as a citizen of India.” At the end of the period, they “shall be deemed to be a citizen of India for all purposes.”

“After checking with the police and the FRRO office in Jorhat, where we had registered her, we found that there was a mismatch in a digit in the registration number in her certificate. We approached the SP about the mismatch, and now she has returned. But it’s unfortunate that the verification was not thorough. If there was a mismatch, the authorities should have called the registration office to cross-check,” she said.