'DON'T BE SEEN IN INDIA AGAIN'

Indian nationals pushed into Bangladesh at gunpoint

- Debarshi Dasgupta

MURSHIDABAD/NORTH 24 PARGANAS DISTRICTS, West Bengal - Mrs Taslima Mandal had always wanted to fly in an aeroplane. As a child growing up in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal, she had marvelled at them. But when the 19-year-old finally boarded one on June 13, the experience was nightmarish.

She and her husband, Mr Fajar Mandal, 21, had allegedly been forced onto an Indian military aircraft in Pune with their hands tied, along with 150-odd others detained by the police in the western state of Maharashtra as undocumented Bangladeshi citizens.

With no idea of where they were flying to, fear hung heavily in the cabin. "We did not want to get on this plane at all. I was so scared that I can't describe it," Mrs Mandal, who worked as a domestic helper in Thane, a Mumbai suburb, told The Straits Times.

The Mandals' ordeal came amid a crackdown by the Indian government on undocumented Bangladeshi migrants, who have been described as a demographic and security threat to India.

Indian states governed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have intensified efforts to detain undocumented immigrants since the terror attack in Pahalgam, in the northern Kashmir region, on April 22.

According to Indian media reports, several thousand alleged Bangladeshi citizens have since been detained in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Odisha and Delhi — all governed by the BJP.

Over 2,000 of them have reportedly been pushed into Bangladesh, allegedly forced by India's Border Security Force (BSF) personnel.

Caught in the dragnet were also many Indian Bengali Muslim citizens such as the Mandals, from poor working-class backgrounds, who have been pushed across the border into Bangladesh by their government, raising fears of persecution among the few million such migrant workers spread around the country.