“The Indian government should stop unlawfully deporting people without due process and instead ensure everyone’s access to procedural safeguards to protect against arbitrary detention and expulsion,” said HRW.
NEW YORK — Indian authorities have expelled hundreds of ethnic Bengali Muslims to Bangladesh in recent weeks without due process, claiming they are “illegal immigrants,” Human Rights Watch said on Thursday. Many of them are Indian citizens from states bordering Bangladesh.
Since May 2025, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government has intensified operations to expel ethnic Bengali Muslims to Bangladesh, ostensibly to deter people from entering India without legal authorization. The government should stop unlawfully deporting people without due process and instead ensure everyone’s access to procedural safeguards to protect against arbitrary detention and expulsion.
“India’s ruling BJP is fueling discrimination by arbitrarily expelling Bengali Muslims from the country, including Indian citizens,” said Elaine Pearson, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “The authorities’ claims that they are managing irregular immigration are unconvincing given their disregard for due process rights, domestic guarantees, and international human rights standards.”
Human Rights Watch interviewed 18 people in June, including affected individuals and family members in 9 cases. Those interviewed include Indian citizens who returned to India after being expelled to Bangladesh and family members of those who were detained and are still missing. On July 8, Human Rights Watch wrote to India’s Ministry of Home Affairs with our findings but received no response.
The Indian government has provided no official data on the number of people expelled, but Border Guard Bangladesh has reported that India expelled more than 1,500 Muslim men, women, and children to Bangladesh between May 7 and June 15, including about 100 Rohingya refugees from Myanmar. The expulsions have continued.
Authorities in the BJP-run states of Assam, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Odisha, and Rajasthan have rounded up Muslims, mostly impoverished migrant workers, and turned them over to Indian border guards. In some cases, the border guards allegedly threatened and beat the detainees to force them to cross into Bangladesh without adequately verifying their citizenship claims. The Indian government has had to readmit dozens of people who eventually proved their Indian citizenship.
The crackdown followed a deadly attack by gunmen against Hindu tourists in Jammu and Kashmir in April. Police started harassing Muslims, refused to accept their citizenship claims, and seized their phones, documents, and personal belongings, leaving them unable to contact family members. Some of those apprehended said Indian Border Security Force (BSF) officials threatened and assaulted them, and in a few cases, forced them to cross the border at gunpoint.
Khairul Islam, 51, an Indian citizen and former schoolteacher from Assam state, said that on May 26, Indian border officials tied his hands, gagged him, and forced him into Bangladesh, along with 14 others. “The BSF officer beat me when I refused to cross the border into Bangladesh and fired rubber bullets four times in the air,” he said. He managed to return two weeks later.
Irregular migration from Muslim-majority Bangladesh to India has gone on for decades, but there is no accurate data and figures are often inflated for political purposes. Senior BJP officials have repeatedly labeled irregular immigrants from Bangladesh as “infiltrators” and used the term more broadly to demonize Indian Muslims to gain Hindu political support.
Several BJP-run state governments started rounding up Bengali-speaking Muslim migrant workers after the Ministry of Home Affairs in May set a 30-day deadline for states to “detect, identify, and deport illegal immigrants” and told local authorities to “establish adequate holding centers in each district to detain” them. The Ministry of External Affairs said it had sent the names of over 2,360 people to Bangladeshi authorities to verify their nationality.
On May 8, Bangladesh’s Foreign Ministry wrote to the Indian government calling these “push-ins” – an apparent reference to collective expulsions – “unacceptable,” and saying that they would “only accept individuals confirmed as Bangladeshi citizens and repatriated through proper channels.”
In May, Indian authorities also expelled about 100 Rohingya refugees from a detention center in Assam across the Bangladesh border. The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) reported that the authorities forced another 40 Rohingya refugees into the sea near Myanmar, giving them life jackets and making them swim to shore in what the UN special rapporteur on Myanmar, Tom Andrews, called “an affront to human decency.”
Andrews said the incident was also “a serious violation” of the principle of nonrefoulement, the international legal prohibition against returning people to a territory where they face threats to their lives or freedom.
The Indian Supreme Court refused in early May to block deportations of Rohingya refugees, saying that if they are found to be foreigners under Indian law, they must be deported. On May 16, in response to the account of Rohingya forced into the sea, the court said there was no evidence to support these allegations, claiming this was a “beautifully crafted story.” However, the Indian government has not denied the allegations.
India is obligated under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination to ensure the protection of everyone’s rights and to prevent deprivation of citizenship on the basis of race, color, descent, or national or ethnic origin.
India’s detention and expulsion of anyone without due process violates fundamental human rights, Human Rights Watch said. The Indian government should ensure access to fundamental procedural safeguards for anyone subject to expulsion. This includes access to full information about the grounds for deportation, competent legal representation, and an opportunity to appeal a decision to expel.
The authorities should ensure that security forces and border guards do not use excessive force and should impartially investigate alleged misuse of force. Those responsible for abuses should be appropriately disciplined or prosecuted. People detained for expulsion should have access to adequate food, shelter, and medical facilities, and authorities should address the specific needs of marginalized groups, including women, children, older people, and people with disabilities.
“The Indian government is putting thousands of vulnerable people at risk in apparent pursuit of unauthorized immigrants, but their actions reflect broader discriminatory policies against Muslims,” Pearson said. “The government is undercutting India’s long history of providing refuge to the persecuted as it tries to generate political support.”
Unlawful and discriminatory expulsions of refugees, migrants
Indian authorities claim they are expelling people who entered India illegally from Bangladesh. While dozens of people expelled have indicated that they are Bangladeshi nationals, many have said they are not. Lack of due process has meant that many Indian nationals – mostly Bengali-speaking Muslims – have been unlawfully expelled.
Bangladesh authorities have repeatedly said that the Indian government’s unilateral actions violate established repatriation procedures and urged Indian authorities to “follow transparent, verifiable processes to address these cases in line with international standards.”
At least 300 of those expelled come from Assam state, which underwent a contentious citizenship verification process in 2019 that was arbitrary and flawed, and excluded nearly two million people.
Many of the others are Bengali Muslims who migrated from India’s West Bengal state to Gujarat, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha, and Delhi in search of work.
Assam’s Flawed Citizenship Verification Process
In Assam, Bengalis suspected of being “non-original” inhabitants have long been subjected to biased citizenship verification processes. Since 1964, Foreigners Tribunals – quasi-judicial courts – have decided citizenship matters. According to state government data, as of January 2025, these tribunals have declared 165,992 people to be irregular immigrants.
Human Rights Watch research has found these bodies lack transparency, are often discriminatory against Bengali Muslims, and violate due process rights. Once a person is cleared by one tribunal, they can still be brought again before the same or different tribunals. People can be denied citizenship claims if there is a mismatch in the spelling of their names on different documents, for not mentioning certain facts in the written statements, or for minor contradictions in deposition testimony.
In many cases, people do not even get a chance to present their claims, which are decided ex parte (in their absence). Lawyers in Assam say this is largely because border police fail to carry out proper investigations and serve timely notices on affected people. Between 1985 and February 2019, 63,959 people were declared foreigners through such proceedings.
In August 2019, the National Register of Citizens, a flawed and discriminatory citizenship verification process in Assam, left out over 1.9 million people, including many who had lived in India for years, in some cases for their entire lives. Those excluded have to prove their citizenship through the Foreigners Tribunals.
In May, Assam’s BJP chief minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma, confirmed that the authorities had “pushed back” 330 alleged illegal immigrants into Bangladesh. In the future, he said, the state would also expel people without involving Foreigners Tribunals and even if their name was in the National Register of Citizens:
Pushbacks will continue and the process of identifying foreigners, which had been paused because of the NRC [National Register of Citizens], will be sped up again. And this time, if someone is identified as a foreigner, we won’t send them to a tribunal; we will just keep pushing them back. Preparations for this are going on.
Although he assured people that those with pending appeals on their citizenship status in tribunals or courts will not be expelled, Human Rights Watch found that several people with pending appeals had been detained and expelled to Bangladesh.
A 51-year-old daily wage worker living in Barpeta district had been declared an irregular immigrant in an ex parte judgment in 2014, though the rest of his family was not. His appeal is pending in the Supreme Court, but on May 24 the authorities arbitrarily detained him. Two days later, Border Security Force officials took him to the Bangladesh border after midnight and forcibly pushed him into Bangladesh. He said: “I walked into Bangladesh like a dead body. I thought they [the BSF] would kill me because they were holding guns and no one from my family would know.”
After he and five others had walked for hours, Bangladeshi villagers directed them to a river island where they managed to cross back into India. He asserted that they entered in the presence of two Indian BSF soldiers but were not stopped. His lawyer said the expulsion was a clear violation of the Supreme Court’s orders. “There was no systematic checking of court orders,” the lawyer said. “He has not violated any of the bail conditions.”
Khairul Islam was also unlawfully expelled to Bangladesh despite having a citizenship claim pending before the Supreme Court. A Foreigners Tribunal had declared him an irregular immigrant in 2016. On the night of May 23, local police officials picked him up at his home in Morigaon district and detained him. He said he spent two days in the no-man’s-land between India and Bangladesh. His wife said she only found out he was in Bangladesh after a local journalist showed her a video shot by a journalist in Bangladesh featuring her husband.
The lack of due process has left many families in Assam without any redress. In Karbi Anglong district, police detained a 45-year-old man on the night of May 23. His family said that officials provided no information about why. The family said a Foreigners Tribunal had ruled in his favor in January 2024, but when they visited the local tribunal after his arrest, they found that he had been declared an irregular immigrant through a new ex parte order in April. The family said they did not know his whereabouts and filed a petition in the Guwahati High Court in June.
Police detained Maleka Khatun, 67, in Barpeta district on May 24. “I have no idea how to bring her back,” said her son, Imran Ali Khan. Khan said that his mother, who cannot walk unassisted and has weak eyesight, was alone when BSF authorities pushed her into Bangladesh around 3 a.m. on May 27. On May 29, she called him using a phone she had borrowed from some villagers in Kurigram district in Bangladesh, where she had managed to find shelter. Khan said his mother had spent nearly six years in Kokrajhar detention facility before being released on bail in 2024. Khatun was the only one among nine siblings declared an irregular immigrant. Khatun’s case is also pending in Guwahati High Court.
Authorities detained a 44-year-old man in Barpeta district on May 25 and pushed him into Bangladesh a day later. His son said his father called them from Jamalpur district in Bangladesh on May 30. “BSF authorities told him if he walked back from the border they would shoot him,” the son said. The son said his father had walked for three days and slept by the side of the road before he found shelter in a mosque. He was the only member of his family to have been declared an irregular immigrant and has an appeal pending in the Guwahati High Court.
Lawyers in Assam said that many people had been detained arbitrarily in recent weeks. “There is a proper legal process for deportation wherein the country of origin should confirm their nationality,” said Aman Wadud, a lawyer based in Assam. On May 27, Wadud filed a complaint with India’s National Human Rights Commission against the expulsions but has yet to receive a response. “They are picking people up and there is no information about their whereabouts.”
In an open letter on June 5, more than 100 activists, lawyers, and academics urged the Indian government to stop the expulsions from Assam, saying they violate the rights to life and equality of those expelled. “Pushbacks also risk putting the people into grave peril by putting them in the line of fire of Bangladeshi border guards or at risk of being detained by Bangladeshi authorities for illegal border crossing,” the people who signed the letter said.
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Cover photo by HRW: Police officers detain alleged undocumented Bangladeshi nationals after they were arrested during raids in Ahmedabad, on April 26, 2025.
