Washington, DC: Senior Supreme Court advocate Sanjay Hegde has condemned the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led Assam government’s deportations of Bengali-speaking Muslims as “absolutely illegal” and “inhumane,” warning that such actions dangerously redefine Indian citizenship along religious and linguistic lines. Speaking at a Congressional Briefing in Washington, DC, yesterday, Hegde said, “You cannot decide citizenship arbitrarily only on the basis of a person’s religion or on the basis of the language that you speak… this infection has carried on [from Assam] to various states in India.”
In recent months, thousands of Bengali Muslim families in Assam have been targeted through mass eviction drives. Reuters reported that in July alone, around 3,400 homes were bulldozed across five eviction operations. These demolition campaigns were accompanied by at least 18 hate speech rallies—many attended by elected BJP leaders—in which Muslims were branded “infiltrators,” according to the Center for the Study of Organized Hate.
Hegde stressed that such propaganda has created a hostile public perception: “Due to this climate of anti-Muslim and anti-Bangladeshi hatred, the average mind believes that anybody who speaks Bengali and who is a Muslim, is more likely to be Bangladeshi and less likely to be Indian.”
“All over [the country], we are in a situation where people are identified in the common mind as not being Indian; then there are people who have been, through a legal process, declared not to be Indian, but you have no other country which is willing to receive them as its own citizen,” he explained. “What the current government in Assam is doing, especially as elections come close, is to take some people who have either been declared by a judicial process not to be Indian, or any other people whom they suspect, and then try to physically push them back across the border with Bangladesh.”
Indian officials have described these actions as “pushback,” a term in international law for preventing border crossings. But Hegde rejected that characterization. “Pushback only applies at the stage of initial entry,” he said. “What we have here are large numbers of people who are born here, of people who have known no other country, of people who simply can’t document themselves to be unquestionably Indian. What is happening is not pushback, but forcible throwback. It’s almost as if human garbage is being dumped over the neighbor’s wall. That is absolutely illegal. There is no warrant in law.”
The briefing was co-sponsored by the Indian American Muslim Council, Hindus for Human Rights, World Against Genocide, New York State Council of Churches, Genocide Watch, The Religious Nationalism Project, The Humanism Project (Australia), Diaspora in Action for Human Rights and Democracy, Center for Pluralism, and Association of Indian Muslims of America, Washington DC.
