Indian Supreme Court orders repatriation of pregnant woman deported as a foreigner
Sunali Khatun, who is nine months pregnant, was deported with her family to Bangladesh where they were detained as "illegal immigrants”. India’s Supreme Court slams the central government for ignoring evidence proving her Indian citizenship. New Delhi ultimately accepted her return on humanitarian grounds. This is an aberrant example of arbitrary expulsions of ethnic Bengali Muslims, especially from the state of Assam.
New Delhi (AsiaNews) – India deported a pregnant woman along with her family after accusing her of being a “Bangladeshi” migrant. Yesterday, the Supreme Court of India ordered the Indian government to let her back into the country along with her underage child on "humanitarian grounds” but without her husband.
Sunali Khatun, 26, “can go into labour at any moment,” her lawyer said. She hails from the Indian State of West Bengal but has been a resident of Delhi for years. Last June, she was stopped by police and charged with illegally entering India from Bangladesh.
Along with her husband, Danish Sheikh, their son, and another family from their village, she was taken to the border with Bangladesh and pushed across where she was arrested as an "infiltrator” by local authorities.
Sunali and Danish worked as ragpickers. They were reportedly expelled from the northeastern state of Assam, where they were beaten and abused by Indian border guards.
Their legal case has been complicated by tensions between the central government in New Delhi, led by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's extremist Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and the Government of West Bengal, which is led by the Trinamool Congress under Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.
On 26 September, the Calcutta High Court had already ordered the Union government to return Sunali and five other Bangladeshi workers who had been forced to cross the border without due process.
Two days before the deadline set by the court, the government lawyers approached the Supreme Court to challenge the order, while the West Bengal government filed a contempt of court action against the central government for failing to comply.
The Supreme Court harshly criticised the central government, accusing it of deporting the woman and other alleged "illegals" without verifying their Indian citizenship.
Sunali Khatun and her family submitted extensive documentation, including school certificates, property deeds dating back to 1952, and even the 2002 electoral rolls, which show her parents' names as registered voters in the Murarai District of West Bengal. Sunali was accused of entering India illegally in 1998 even though she had not yet been born.
“If someone says they were born in India, grew up here, they have rights. Their version must be heard,” said the Court, which called on the government to provide clearer procedures and pay greater attention to the most sensitive cases, such as that of a woman about to give birth.
As the case progressed through the courts, Sunali Khatun and her family were detained for over three months in Chapai Nawabganj, a district in Bangladesh, first in a correctional centre and then in a rented house until a local court granted them bail.
“What was our crime that we were pushed into Bangladesh?” Sunali said speaking to The Wire, an Indian news website, in a video call. I don’t have much time left. I am in my ninth month of pregnancy. Through you, I fold my hands and beg – I want to go back to my country.”
The Indian government finally announced that it was going to let Sunali come back to India along with her eight-year-old son, but not her husband, a decision that has been widely criticised because it risks imposing further trauma on the woman, that of separation from her husband.
Sunail Khatun’s case is not isolated.
In recent months, many ethnic Bengali Muslim migrants (primarily in West Bengal, but also in other Indian states, as well as Bangladesh and Pakistan) have been summarily deported due process, especially from Assam, which is ruled by the BJP.
Since May of this year, hundreds of Muslims have been sent back to Bangladesh labelled as "infiltrators" or irregular workers, even when they have been living in India for decades, owned property, and had children born in the country.
This wave of expulsions is the work of the Foreigners Tribunals (FTs), which are empowered to determine if someone is a foreigner or not.
In the past few years, FTs have gained increasing decision-making power, overriding the authority of the National Register of Citizens (NRC), which is supposed to document all legal citizens of India.
After the law was amended in 2019, approximately two million people were excluded, setting in motion a process of mass expulsions and litigation before FTs. What is more, the burden of proof falls entirely on the individual who must demonstrate that they are not a “foreigner”.
For many people, this is hard to do because they may have documents that are outdated, hard to get, or with minor discrepancies.
Several humanitarian organisations have denounced this process, emphasising that it especially exposes the poorest and most illiterate to the risk of losing their citizenship despite having been born and raised in India.
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01/08/2018 15:23
