In 2020, Mahammad Arfat, a Rohingya refugee from Myanmar, was arrested in Assam.
Arfat, who holds a refugee card attested by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, was convicted of entering India illegally and sentenced to a year in jail.
Once his jail term was over, he was sent to the Matia transit camp, the largest detention centre in India.
In 2023, his brother, who was then living in Jammu, had moved the Gauhati High Court seeking his release from the camp, according to high court orders accessed by Scroll.
On April 23, the court observed that “the matter was listed on countless occasions and yet has not been able to be resolved by the respondents”. It directed the Union government to file an affidavit by May 14.
“We make it clear that on failure to file such an affidavit, we may be constrained to have the concerned Officer present in the Court to explain the matter,” it said.
Four days ahead of the court’s deadline, however, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma announced that several inmates of the Matia detention centre in Assam, including Rohingya refugees, were “pushed back” into Bangladesh as part of a countrywide “operation” by the Indian government.
As of April 24 this year, there were 103 Rohingya refugees – 37 of them children – at the Matia camp, according to the lists maintained by the detention centre, which were accessed by Scroll. The other inmates included 64 Bangladeshis, 32 Chin refugees, an individual from Senegal and 35 residents of Assam declared foreigners by foreigners’ tribunals.
“All the Rohingyas have gone now,” an insider at the Matia transit camp told Scroll.
Since May 7, Arfat’s lawyers have not been able to contact him. “We have heard that the Rohingyas have been shifted from the detention camp but we have no information on his whereabouts,” a lawyer representing him before the high court, told Scroll.
Arfat is not alone. The appeals of at least five other Rohingya refugees housed at the Matia detention camp are pending before the Gauhati High Court, according to high court orders accessed by Scroll.
In 2021, five Rohingya residents of Rakhine state, who were at the Matia detention centre, had approached Gauhati High Court, asking the Indian government to give them refugee status and allow them to travel to Delhi or any other refugee camps within the country.
In March 2023, Scroll had met two of these at the camp: a 23-year-old Rohingya woman and a 23-year-old Rohingya man.
All five were first arrested in Manipur’s border town of Moreh in 2018 before being given bail 10 months later.
They were then re-arrested on May 14, 2019 by the railway police while trying to board a train to Delhi in an attempt to reach the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
However, the Centre told the court that it could not allow the petitioners safe passage to New Delhi for their refugee status determination at the office of the UNHCR as India is not a signatory to the United Nation Human Rights Convention procedure for declaration of refugee status.
The case was last heard on May 2. The lawyers, who represented the five, told Scroll that they do not have any contact with them since the “pushback” of refugees into Bangladesh.
Activists and lawyers, however, questioned the deportation of the Rohingyas to a third country.
“It is completely illegal as we are not citizens of Bangladesh,” said a Delhi-based Rohingya activist.
The pushback
The Assam CM’s statement came days after Bangladesh’s border force detained at least 123 persons.
The force alleged that India had pushed the 123 people into Bangladesh, through the “Kurigram and Khagrachari points”. Kurigram district borders Assam and Meghalaya, and the Khagrachhari district is adjacent to Tripura.
After this purported “pushback”, Sarma said the Matia detention camp is “almost free now with 30-40 people left.” “Now the only people in Matia are declared foreigners, whose cases are pending [before courts],” Sarma, the chief minister, said . “Except them, everyone from the camp has gone back to Bangladesh.”
An official at the camp told Scroll that 71 inmates – both declared foreigners and Chin refugees from Myanmar – remain in the camp on May 18.
In interviews to Bangladeshi media, some of the 123 people detained by Border Guard Bangladesh, recounted how they were taken from the Matia detention camp.
Take the example of the family of 44-year-old Mohammad Ullah. Along with his wife Romana Begum, 35, and their three children, Ullah was apprehended on the morning of May 7, by a border guard patrol near the Natanhat Bazar area, adjacent to the Bhawal Kuri border in Kurigram district.
The family was included in the March and April lists of inmates lodged in Assam’s Matia camp, which are maintained by the detention centre authorities and which Scroll has seen.
Ullah had fled Myanmar two years ago and sought refuge in India but ended up at the Matia detention camp.
Supreme Court push?
According to Assam government officials, the “pushback” of Rohingyas and others detained at the Matia camp was triggered by a Supreme Court order on February 4.
“I was at the hearing when the Supreme Court told us to take [the inmates of the camp] in a plane and deport them to the capital of the specified country,” a state home department official, who does not want to be named, told Scroll.
On February 4, the Supreme Court had pulled up the Assam chief secretary for the “delay” in deportation. “Are you waiting for some muhurat? … You deport them to the capital city of the country,” the court had said.
Asked why the Rohingya refugees from Myanmar were sent to a third country Bangladesh, the official reasoned: “They [Rohingyas] have not come from Myanmar but refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar. So, they were sent back to Bangladesh.”
Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar is home to the world's largest refugee camp, home to lakhs of Rohingya refugees who have fled persecution in Myanmar.
The home department official also pointed out that the Rohingya and Chin inmates had gone on a hunger strike in September, demanding that they be released. “A hundred people have gone. This is good for India as they were anyway eating up our resources,” he said.
Some of the refugees, who have cards issued by the United Nations’ refugee agency, had also demanded that they be handed over to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and sought “resettlement to any third world country or to any refugee camp within India”.
However, the Assam government official dismissed the demand. “We don’t recognize the UNHCR cards as India is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention.” he said. “Some of them also got the cards through fraudulent means with the help of touts and middlemen. How did they get the UNHCR cards without visiting Delhi or the UNHCR office?”
‘Completely illegal’
Activists argued that the forcible deportation of UNHCR-registered refugees to a third country without the consent of that country violates international law. “How can India flout international law?” said the Delhi-based Rohingya activist. “There should be a difference between a democratic country and an authoritarian country.”
Some activists and lawyers told Scroll that release from the Matia detention camp was a positive outcome for many of the Rohingya refugees.
“They were in a limbo,” a lawyer, who has been representing many Rohingyas in the high court, said. “Myanmar was not acknowledging many of them as citizens. So formal deportation was difficult. They are free now and at least can go back to Cox's Bazar refugee camp with the help of the UNHCR Bangladesh.”
Human rights lawyer Nandita Haksar pointed out that the deportations underline how vulnerable refugees are in India.
“As of today, there is no legal protection for refugees,” said Haksar.
She said India still recognizes UNHCR because the Indian Ministry of External affairs is on the executive committee of the UNHCR. “But the Home Ministry says that these refugees are all illegal migrants,” Haksar said.
Moreover, the recently passed Immigration and Foreigners Bill, 2025, does not recognize “a category of foreigners called refugees”, Haksar pointed out.
“They have said any foreigner who comes without a passport and without a valid visa will be considered an illegal migrant,” she said. “That is their stand and there is no going back. And this is the stand they have been building up to for several years. It’s not only Rohingyas, but all refugees now are going to be treated as illegal migrants.”
