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IN THE silent shadows of diplomacy and under the smoke of geopolitical cordiality, a darker truth is unfolding at the borderlands between Bangladesh and India. A truth so grotesque, so cruel and so systemic that one begins to question not only the morality of the world’s largest democracy, but also its very claim to being a civilised, law-abiding state. India, under prime minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, has unleashed a campaign of forced expulsions — what many now call a ‘push-in strategy’ — to rid the country of its most vulnerable people: Bengali-speaking Muslims, Rohingya refugees and impoverished migrant workers, many of whom are Indian citizens themselves.

Thousands have already been expelled. And yet, in Delhi, there is silence. In Dhaka, helplessness. In Geneva, indifference.

According to credible reports by BBC Bangla and Human Rights Watch, India has forcibly pushed over 1,500 people — including women and children — into Bangladesh between May and June this year alone. The victims include around 100 Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, many of whom were dumped into the Andaman Sea and ordered to swim back to a homeland that had already turned into a graveyard. The rest are Bengali-speaking Muslims, plucked from slums, labour colonies, railway stations and detention centres across Indian states — from Gujarat to Rajasthan, from Telangana to Delhi.

These people were flown across the country in Indian Air Force aircraft, transported like state secrets, and handed over to the Border Security Force, who carried out the ‘push-in’ operations — mostly at night, sometimes at gunpoint, always outside the bounds of due process. In a distressing testimony, Ravi Nair of the South Asia Human Rights Documentation Centre described it as ‘state-sponsored kidnapping.’

The Indian government has never officially acknowledged this programme. But it does not deny it either. The silence is, in itself, an admission. Assam’s chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma proudly declared in May that his state had deported 303 ‘illegal foreigners’ to Bangladesh under the 1950 Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act. He did not say whether the deportations involved the consent of the Bangladeshi government, or even a basic verification of the individuals’ nationalities. Nor did he seem bothered that the law he invoked was designed during partition-era emergency, not for orchestrating mass expulsion in 2025.

Make no mistake: this is not merely about illegal migration. This is about how a state weaponizes identity to manufacture scapegoats. This is about an ideology that reduces entire communities to ‘outsiders’ based on their language, religion and poverty. This is about the collapse of law when political expediency demands cruelty.

Human Rights Watch notes that most of the deportees are poor, daily-wage workers — men and women who clean India’s streets, build its cities, and serve its wealthy. Some were born in India. Others have lived there for decades. Many carry voter ID cards, Aadhaar numbers, and ration documents. Yet when the deportation wave began — triggered, it seems, by a militant attack in Kashmir — all of that became irrelevant. Their crime? Speaking Bengali. Practising Islam. Being voiceless.

Even Indian citizens have not been spared. In a damning revelation, Human Rights Watch confirmed that dozens of Indians were mistakenly deported and later had to be brought back after proving their citizenship. In a country of over 1.4 billion, perhaps these were seen as tolerable errors — mere ‘collateral damage.’ Former diplomat Pinakaranjan Chakraborty even dismissed it with chilling indifference: ‘One in every hundred people can make two or three such mistakes.’

So much for the world’s largest democracy.

What makes the tragedy even more grotesque is the conscious refusal of the Indian state to follow its own legal and moral obligations. As pointed out by human rights lawyer Nandita Haksar, India is bound by Article 14 (equality before law) and Article 21 (right to life) of its Constitution. These rights extend to all persons — not just citizens. Furthermore, India has pledged to uphold international human rights laws through its membership in the UN Human Rights Council, even though it is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention. But in this case, India has discarded both international norms and constitutional principles in one fell swoop.

No verification is being done. No legal proceedings are being held. No embassies are consulted. People are simply being disappeared. As Meenakshi Ganguly of Human Rights Watch put it, ‘There is not even minimum screening of detainees.’ In many cases, family members have no idea where their loved ones have gone, or whether they are dead or alive.

And yet, the Indian government is unfazed. Why? Because it knows the west will remain silent.

This point is central. The United States under Donald Trump sent planeloads of immigrants to India and Latin America. Britain is outsourcing its asylum seekers to Rwanda. Denmark is sending refugees to Uganda. The very countries that claim to be guardians of human rights have themselves abandoned those rights at their own borders. India, seeing this moral collapse, is exploiting the moment with precision. Delhi knows it won’t be sanctioned. It won’t be named. It won’t be shamed. And so, it acts with impunity.

The BJP’s calculus, however, is not just international — it is deeply political. This campaign of mass deportation and ethnic profiling is not a policy flaw; it is a strategy. It aligns perfectly with the party’s long-standing narrative of ‘infiltrators,’ especially Bengali-speaking Muslims, who are portrayed as demographic threats and security risks. The party has already used this narrative to justify the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens in Assam — both of which effectively sought to render millions of Muslims stateless.

Now, with elections approaching and anti-incumbency rising, the government needs a scapegoat. What better than an invisible enemy with no voice, no vote and no recourse?

Even domestic dissent is being bulldozed — sometimes literally. In Delhi, police and government officials carried out eviction drives in Bengali Muslim neighbourhoods, including Jai Hind Colony, cutting off water, electricity, and forcibly removing residents under the guise of ‘illegality.’ West Bengal’s chief minister Mamata Banerjee has repeatedly raised alarms about the harassment of Bengali speakers across BJP-ruled states. Her warnings have been met with mockery and counter-accusations from BJP leaders, who insist they are simply upholding the law.

But what law is this?

The Indian government and the BSF claim they are following judicial orders and court-sanctioned procedures. But if that were true, then why are people being dumped into rivers, forests, and no-man’s land without documents, trials or coordination with Bangladesh?

Why is the Indian Supreme Court dismissing serious international concerns as ‘made-up stories’ instead of probing them independently?

Why are victims — many of whom carry Indian documents — unable to access legal aid, and why are their families not even informed of their whereabouts?

And why is the Indian government so utterly indifferent to the protests, appeals and complaints lodged by Bangladesh?

These are not the signs of a rule-based democracy. These are the symptoms of a regime that sees humanity as a dispensable variable in its political equation.

It is also a betrayal of history. During the 1971 Liberation War, India gave shelter to ten million Bangladeshi refugees, many of whom were Muslim. The Indian people stood in solidarity with the oppressed, not because of race or religion, but because of shared humanity. That memory, so sacred to both nations, is now being desecrated by a new India — an India where speaking Bengali makes you a suspect, where praying as a Muslim makes you deportable, where being poor makes you disposable.

For Bangladesh, the challenge is immense. The government, despite repeated protests, has limited room for retaliation. It cannot afford to escalate tensions with a powerful neighbour. But neither can it accept the slow erosion of its dignity through repeated insults disguised as ‘border management.’

At the very least, Dhaka must take a firm diplomatic stand, demand international oversight of all deportation processes, and refuse to accept anyone not verified as a Bangladeshi citizen. It must also raise this issue forcefully at the UN, OIC, and other multilateral forums — not to punish India, but to uphold the principle that no country, however large, should be allowed to erase people at will.

The international community, too, has a moral responsibility. It cannot turn a blind eye simply because India is a major trading partner or a counterweight to China. The cost of silence, history tells us, is always paid by the vulnerable.

What India is doing today is not border control. It is not security enforcement. It is the systematic dehumanisation of minorities for political gain. It is the normalisation of statelessness as statecraft. It is, quite simply, a crime against human dignity.

And until India is held accountable — by its own citizens, its neighbours, and the world at large — there will be more planes, more midnight dumps, more faceless victims swallowed by a border they never crossed.

This is not a migration issue. This is a humanitarian catastrophe in slow motion.

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HM Nazmul Alam is Dhaka-based academic, journalist, and political analyst.