Assam crackdown on ‘foreigners’ triggers frantic search by family members to trace their whereabouts

Arecent summon to their 58-year-old widowed mother to appear before the police in Assam's Barpeta with citizenship-related documents has turned into a nightmare for her four daughters, who claim they have no information of her whereabouts, and that and she may been deported to Bangladesh.

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Their uncle Ashraf Ali, who had accompanied Shona Banu to the police station on May 24, said his sister was deciared a ‘foreigner’ in 2017 by the Foreigners’ Tribunal, and had already spent over three years in the detention centre, before being released in 2020 following a Supreme Court directive. ‘Shona Banu had been appearing before the authorities every Monday and when she received the call to appear before the police again with her documents, we thought it was a routine matter. “However, she was detained inside the police station for the whole day and we were not allowed to go inside,’ Ali told PTI over phone from his h