Woman ‘pushed into Bangladesh’ during Assam crackdown, brought back after officials found ‘mismatch’

A woman in Assam’s Golaghat district was arrested by the police, reportedly taken to the Bangladesh border by security personnel, and instructed to cross — until officials realized a mistake had occurred in her case and returned her.

Rahima Begum (50) is one of many individuals who have been arrested in Assam recently as part of a continuing crackdown on those deemed foreigners by the state’s Foreigners Tribunals (FTs). Her lawyer stated that a Foreigners Tribunal determined last month that Begum’s family arrived in India prior to March 25, 1971, which is the deadline for citizenship in Assam.

On Friday, citing a Supreme Court directive, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma confirmed that the state is sending declared foreigners across the international boundary into Bangladesh.

Begum, who returned home to her family in Golaghat’s 2 Padumoni village on Friday evening, alleged she was “pushed into Bangladesh” with a group of people on Tuesday night.

“On Sunday morning (May 25) at around 4 am, when we were still sleeping, police came to our home and told me to report to the police station to answer some questions. After spending the morning there, they took me to the Golaghat Superintendent of Police’s office with some others. I took my documents, and they collected our fingerprints. We were there the whole day. At night, they took us somewhere else in a vehicle,” she said, adding that she didn’t know where she was taken.

“Two of our daughters were there, and they saw their mother taken away at night. But nobody told us where she was all these days,” said her husband, Malek Ali.

“Late Tuesday night, they put us in a few cars and took us near the border,” she alleged. “The security forces who were with us gave us some Bangladeshi currency, told us to cross and not return. It was all paddy fields with mud and water up to our knees. We didn’t know what to do; we just walked between the paddy fields until we reached a village. But the people there chased us away and their border forces called us, beat us a lot and told us to go back to where we came from.”

“We spent the whole day standing in a paddy field and drinking the water from it because we could not go to either side,” she said. “(On Thursday evening), the forces on the Indian side called us back, took the Bangladesh currency, put us in vehicles and took us to Kokrajhar. I don’t know about what happened to the rest of the people, but I was brought to Golaghat. I don’t know why this happened to me; I have all my papers. I completed my FT case after fighting it for more than two years.”

Her husband got a call on Friday afternoon to pick her up from Golaghat town. Advocate Lipika Deb, who represented Begum in the Jorhat FT, stated that the family contacted her on Sunday, reporting that she had been removed along with others believed to be foreigners. Deb was declared ‘post-stream’, qualifying for citizenship under specific conditions outlined in the Citizenship Act regarding residency.