In February, when several of the 333 undocumented Indian migrants deported from the United States on military planes said that they had been shackled during the flights, there was an uproar. New Delhi said that it had “strongly registered its concerns” with Washington, Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi declared that “Indians deserve dignity and humanity, not handcuffs” and social media was a tsunami of indignation.

This month, though, it became clear that while Indians believe that their compatriots must be treated humanely while being repatriated, the same considerations do not apply when New Delhi is deporting people who it claims are undocumented migrants.

Scroll’s reports on four separate instances in recent weeks of people being brutally expelled from India have barely elicited comment, let alone stirring up a debate on the chilling lack of compassion evident in these actions.

On May 8, reported Rokibuz Zaman, a group of 78 people believed to be undocumented Bangladeshi migrants were herded aboard Indian boats, given life jackets and thrown into the water off Bangladesh’s Satkhira district.

These people had been detained in raids in Gujarat in the aftermath of the Pahalgam terror attack. They told the Bangladesh Police that they had been flown across India in blindfolds on a military aircraft before being put aboard a ship. En route to Bangladesh, they had been beaten and barely fed, they claimed.

The same day, reported Vineet Bhalla, 40 Rohingya refugees who had been detained in Delhi were forced off a navy vessel in the Andaman Sea with life jackets and told to head towards Myanmar. They possessed identity cards issued to them by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

The Rohingya community have been subjected to a well-documented campaign of massacres, rape and arson by the Myanmarese military since 2017. For India to send them back into the cauldron of violence is unconscionable.

On May 27, Rokibuz Zaman wrote about 14 people stranded in no-man’s land between India and Bangladesh. The Border Security Force claimed they were “infiltrators” who had been “pushed back” – a benign euphemism that aims to mask the shocking violence of the action.

As Zaman reported, these purported infiltrators had lived all their lives in this country but had been declared non-Indian by Assam’s foreigners tribunals. These quasi-judicial bodies that rule on citizenship cases in Assam reverse the principles of natural justice – anyone hauled up before them is deemed to be guilty until they prove themselves innocent.

The tribunals, Scroll has noted, have “been accused of arbitrariness and bias, and declaring people foreigners on the basis of minor spelling mistakes, a lack of documents or lapses in memory”.

On May 28, Safwat Zargar reported on a tragedy on another border. Eighty-year-old Abdul Waheed Bhat, paralysed and unable to speak, died alone in a bus at the Attari crossing to Pakistan after being deported from Srinagar shortly after the Pahalgam attack.

Bhat had been born in Srinagar but found himself stranded in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir as a child in 1965 when war broke out between the neighbours. He had travelled there with relatives on a permit, as was common at that time. He was there for 15 years, and was forced to apply for a Pakistan passport in order to cross the border to return home.

He had lived in India since then. Though a case had been filed against him for overstaying his visa, he was acquitted since the government failed to establish that he was Pakistani.

After Bhat was served a “Notice to Leave India” at the end of April, his relatives pleaded with officials not to deport him. They submitted medical reports to show that he had suffered from several strokes which “triggered a neuromuscular disability resulting in his confinement to bed”.

When Bhat died at the border crossing, the same one through which he had returned to India in 1980, “he had nothing on him, except a few medicines, some diapers, prescriptions, a blanket and a water bottle”, his relatives had told Zargar.

These cases raise a great many questions: about the rigour of the legal process to verify citizenship; about India’s refusal to become party to international refugee treaties or frame a refugee policy; about the bigotry of the current deportations which involved only Muslims, even though 20,613 of the 47,900 people declared foreigners by Assam’s tribunals between 1971 and 2014 are Hindu.

They also expose an untenable double standard. If Indians believe that their compatriots should be treated with empathy at moments at which they are vulnerable, we cannot continue to treat citizens of other nations with the cruelty that has been on display these past weeks. We deserve better of ourselves.

Here is a summary of the week’s other top stories.

Defamation suit. YouTuber Mohak Mangal told the Delhi High Court that he would remove portions in his video about Asian News International that were purportedly objectionable. His submission came after the court directed Mangal to take down some sections, observing that they contained defamatory language about the news agency.

The judge said that the YouTuber should have put out his message in a more civilised manner.

The court was hearing a defamation suit filed by ANI against Mangal for posting the allegedly defamatory video accusing the news agency of extortion and blackmail. The suit also listed comedian Kunal Kamra and AltNews co-founder Mohammed Zubair, among others, as defendants for sharing Mangal’s video on social media.

Staged gunfights? The Supreme Court ordered the Assam Human Rights Commission to investigate the alleged “fake encounters” by the state police since 2021. The court passed the direction in response to a petition claiming that more than 80 staged gunfights had taken place in Assam since May 2021, when Bharatiya Janata Party leader Himanta Biswa Sarma became the chief minister.

The bench said that while a mere compilation of cases could not lead to blanket judicial orders, allegations of staged gunfights were serious. It said that the allegations, if proven, would amount to grave violations of the right to life.

Indians deported. One thousand and eighty Indians have been deported from the United States since January, the Ministry of External Affairs said. Sixty-two percent of them had come back on commercial flights, the ministry said.

This came amid the tightening of immigration regulations under the Donald Trump administration, which took office in January. In some cases, the US government had used military aircraft to repatriate undocumented migrants.

Also on Scroll this week

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