In India’s deportation drive, Muslim men recount being tossed into the sea
Thousands of people, most of them Muslims, who have had their lives upended by the Indian government after an April attack by militants killed 26 people in the Himalayan vacation town of Pahalgam, in Indian-administered Kashmir. As sectarian tensions swelled across India, Gujarat’s home minister, Harsh Sanghavi, pledged to root out “each and every infiltrator.”
Officials ordered raids in slums populated by Muslim laborers, branding most of those detained as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh who posed a threat to national security. While some of those targeted lacked legal status, many appeared to be Indian citizens; others were legal residents after living in the country for decades, family members said.
The deportation drive targeting India’s Muslim minority was marked by mass home demolitions, arbitrary detentions, allegations of beatings and a lack of due process, according to interviews with Bangladeshi officials and more than 50 people swept up in the dragnet, as well as a Post review of government data, court documents and video footage.
The crackdown — led by police, cheered by local leaders and blessed by the courts — was most severe in the northeastern Assam state and the western state of Gujarat. Both are governed by politicians from the Bharatiya Janata Party, the right-wing Hindu nationalist party led by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Between May 7 and July 3, 1,880 people were deported from India to Bangladesh, according to private Bangladeshi government data obtained by The Post. Between May 7 and June 17, 110 people were logged by border officials in Bangladesh as Indians who were wrongly deported and sent back, a separate document showed. It is unclear how many claimed Indian citizenship or residency but lacked the documentation to prove it.
Since India achieved independence in 1947, the country’s Muslims have faced persecution, prejudice and discrimination, according to human rights groups. Now making up an estimated 15 percent of the population, Muslims have routinely been demonized by right-wing Hindu politicians during moments of domestic turmoil, labeled infiltrators, and subjected to mass arrests, property destruction and police brutality.
Ahmedabad city workers bulldozed some 12,500 homes in Chandola Lake, according to municipal officials, leaving thousands of families homeless.
“The public opinion is: ‘They are keeping Muslims in line,’” he said.
Regardless of whether or not the deportees are citizens, the methods used by India to ship them off — without an official treaty of deportation with Bangladesh or time for due process — are a violation of international law, said Rudabeh Shahid, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and an expert on South Asian immigration issues. The coordinated nature of the campaign, she added, beginning with home demolitions and arrests and culminating in beatings and forced expulsions, makes one thing clear.
“You want a whole group to disappear,” Shahid said. “I have no other ways to describe this.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/202...-pahalgam/
Thousands of people, most of them Muslims, who have had their lives upended by the Indian government after an April attack by militants killed 26 people in the Himalayan vacation town of Pahalgam, in Indian-administered Kashmir. As sectarian tensions swelled across India, Gujarat’s home minister, Harsh Sanghavi, pledged to root out “each and every infiltrator.”
Officials ordered raids in slums populated by Muslim laborers, branding most of those detained as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh who posed a threat to national security. While some of those targeted lacked legal status, many appeared to be Indian citizens; others were legal residents after living in the country for decades, family members said.
The deportation drive targeting India’s Muslim minority was marked by mass home demolitions, arbitrary detentions, allegations of beatings and a lack of due process, according to interviews with Bangladeshi officials and more than 50 people swept up in the dragnet, as well as a Post review of government data, court documents and video footage.
The crackdown — led by police, cheered by local leaders and blessed by the courts — was most severe in the northeastern Assam state and the western state of Gujarat. Both are governed by politicians from the Bharatiya Janata Party, the right-wing Hindu nationalist party led by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Between May 7 and July 3, 1,880 people were deported from India to Bangladesh, according to private Bangladeshi government data obtained by The Post. Between May 7 and June 17, 110 people were logged by border officials in Bangladesh as Indians who were wrongly deported and sent back, a separate document showed. It is unclear how many claimed Indian citizenship or residency but lacked the documentation to prove it.
Since India achieved independence in 1947, the country’s Muslims have faced persecution, prejudice and discrimination, according to human rights groups. Now making up an estimated 15 percent of the population, Muslims have routinely been demonized by right-wing Hindu politicians during moments of domestic turmoil, labeled infiltrators, and subjected to mass arrests, property destruction and police brutality.
Ahmedabad city workers bulldozed some 12,500 homes in Chandola Lake, according to municipal officials, leaving thousands of families homeless.
“The public opinion is: ‘They are keeping Muslims in line,’” he said.
Regardless of whether or not the deportees are citizens, the methods used by India to ship them off — without an official treaty of deportation with Bangladesh or time for due process — are a violation of international law, said Rudabeh Shahid, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and an expert on South Asian immigration issues. The coordinated nature of the campaign, she added, beginning with home demolitions and arrests and culminating in beatings and forced expulsions, makes one thing clear.
“You want a whole group to disappear,” Shahid said. “I have no other ways to describe this.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/202...-pahalgam/
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
