Punam Shahriar Nirjhar: Between May and July 2025, a highly critical humanitarian crisis occurred on the Bangladesh India border. With an order issued by its Ministry of Home Affairs, the Indian government embarked on a mass crackdown to arrest and deport those who were referred to as illegal immigrants. Following no kind of due process and disregarding familiar bilateral norms, more than 1,500 ethnic Bengali Muslims were expelled forcefully out of India and pushed into Bangladesh. This was an irregular immigration action that involved surprise push-ins at the border. This incident indicates a serious threat to the stability in the region and human rights. The victims are primarily Bengali Muslims who live in the state of West Bengal and Assam in India. This community has endured numerous economic and social hardships throughout decades. A great number of them are Indian born citizens but they are not always able to present proper identity documents due to sustained poverty, illiteracy and informal employment. Ever since the partition of 1947, this community has been economically and politically marginalized in West Bengal. Assam’s Bengali speaking Muslims have been subjected to hateful campaigns over many years. Most neighbors consider them as foreigners or external threats to culture and population. Due to this discriminatory background over the years, these individuals are an easy target of state intervention. They lack the ability to retaliate through the law. Their language, religion and poverty identity is criminalized now. The actions of India are violating a number of fundamental provisions of international law. First, it contravenes Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states that everyone has the right to freedom of movement and to relocate to his or her own country. It is also in violation of Article 15 that grants the right to have nationality and that no one should be deprived of it in an unfair manner. India is also not a party to the 1954 Convention on Stateless Persons but the customary international law prohibits countries from arbitrarily stripping people of their nationality and leaving them stateless. Article 33 of this convention states that no country can deport a person to an area where he or she might be harmed or where his safety might be threatened. This is also another aspect of international law that all states need to observe. India is obviously breaking this rule by deporting people to a place where they lack a legal position and security. These forced deportation are also contrary to agreements between India and Bangladesh. These agreements demand that before deportation is done, the two sides need to be sure about the nationality of a person. Ignorance of this process hurts the spirit of cooperation that is required in border management. India claims that these actions are done in the interest of national security and adopted to prevent unlawful immigration. Such an opinion can be justified by legal measures including the National Register of Citizens or NRC and the Citizenship Amendment Act or CAA. NRC in Assam saw locals doing what could only be called document harvesting in order to establish citizenship. This has left out about 19 lac people in the list despite the fact that many are actual citizens.The 2019 CAA permits swift citizenship to non Muslim minority in the neighboring states. Nevertheless, it does not benefit Muslims. Therefore, when NRC is applied nationally the excluded non Muslims can still be subjected to citizenship under the CAA. Whereas Muslims do not have such an option. They can be declared as foreigners and get arrested or deported. This is a system that brings unequal treatment on the basis of religion. It contravenes international humanitarian regulations, in addition to contravening the Indian Constitution that promotes equality. Such deportations have negatively affected the trust between India and Bangladesh. Bangladesh has strongly protested against unacceptable push ins committed by Indian Border Security Force (BSF). The Indian government has been addressed in official letters. Bangladesh has declared categorically that it is not taking back anybody who fails to prove that he /she is a Bangladesh national, through due process of law. On a number of occasions, the Bangladesh Border Guard (BGB) rejected these deported individuals.This has led to stressful circumstances and numerous individuals stranded at the border.Bangladesh is in a defensive position because of one sided decisions made by India. By doing so Bangladesh is the casualty of a crisis it never made. These deportations are not a natural crisis. Rather deliberately engineered to serve political agenda. It makes people stateless and deprives them both of legal protection and of their legal identity along with basic human rights. The ripple effects of these measures are devastating and long lasting which affects many families and children. Policies like these expose the fact that domestic law is being utilized as a weapon to get around international law. International community needs to take immediate action by using diplomatic pressure, independent investigation and implementing long term legal reforms in South Asia.

– Author is Student from Department of Law, East West University