Immigration raids in India detain thousands and create a climate of fear
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Police officers escorting men they believe to be undocumented Bangladeshi nationals after they were detained during raids in Ahmedabad, India, on April 26.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Saif Hasnat and Pranav Baskar
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DHAKA, Bangladesh – Thousands of people have been caught up in a widening crackdown on migrants that the Indian government has justified as a national security imperative.
Rights groups say the crackdown, which intensified after a terrorist attack in Kashmir in April, has become an increasingly arbitrary campaign of fear against Muslims in India,
Most of those detained in the raids live hundreds of miles from Pakistan, which India has blamed for the attack.
Indian Bengali-speakers, most of them Muslims, have been rounded up, detained or expelled to Bangladesh. Many are from West Bengal, an eastern Indian state where Bengali is the main language. For decades, young people from the state have migrated to big Indian cities elsewhere for work.
Several million Bangladeshis are thought to live in India, entering – legally or illegally – through the porous border that divides the two nations.
Indian states have carried out raids on neighbourhoods with dense concentrations of Bengali speakers, saying they had evidence of illegal immigrants there. Bengali, an official language of both India and Bangladesh, is spoken by tens of millions of people on both sides of the border.
Since mid-July, the authorities in Gurugram, a satellite city of the capital, New Delhi, have conducted what they call a verification drive, intended to identify immigrants lacking legal status.
The police in Gurugram have detained and then released hundreds of people with documents showing they lived legally in India, according to local media reports. Hundreds of mostly poor Bengali speakers, the reports said, pre-emptively fled the city after the drive began, worried they would be picked up by the police at any moment.
Between 200 and 250 people have been detained in the verification drive and 10 were identified as illegal Bangladeshi immigrants, said Mr Sandeep Kumar, a public relations officer for the Gurugram police department.
He said claims of people fleeing the city were “rumours”. Mr Supantha Sinha, a lawyer working on detention cases in the city of Gurugram, said the number was closer to 1,000.
In interviews with a dozen people across four Indian states, in neighbourhoods that have been raided by the police, Muslim and Hindu Bengali speakers said they had become scared of being caught in the government’s crackdown. NYTIMES
