It began quietly, as things often do when states try to vanish people. One moment, a man was enjoying tea on his veranda in Morigaon. The next, he was squinting into the camera from the no-man’s land between India and Bangladesh, surrounded by rice paddies and confusion, uttering the only logical sentence one can muster when history and bureaucracy conspire to erase your existence: “I am from Assam.” Of course, no one believed him— not the Indian state that expelled him, nor the Bangladeshi border guards who promptly bounced him back like a defective parcel.
In what must be the Subcontinent’s most absurd theatre of geopolitics, India has begun unilaterally exporting its own citizens to Bangladesh under the noble banner of “pushback.” Or perhaps “push-out,” if we are being semantically honest. It’s a performance worthy of an award— equal parts horror and hilarity. Assam’s government, with the sanctimonious composure only found in officials who have mastered the art of passing the buck, has declared that those being expelled are “declared foreigners.”
But in the curious alchemy of Indian bureaucracy, this doesn’t necessarily mean they’re foreigners. It just means someone somewhere typed their grandfather’s name with one wrong vowel, or a birth certificate is missing from 1962. Which, by Indian archival standards, might as well be missing from the Indus Valley Civilization.
So, the midnight knocks begin. In one household, it was the police demanding fingerprints for an Aadhaar card— because, naturally, all fingerprinting exercises happen at 11 PM. In another, a phone call from the local thana: “Please report to the station, the Superintendent wants a word.” Entire families, already conditioned by years of harassment, oblige like clockwork.
Then silence. Phones go unanswered. Police stations feign ignorance. The person has vanished, and in the best-case scenario, reappears days later in a viral video standing on the muddy border between India and Bangladesh, proclaiming, like a Shakespearean ghost, that he is not what the world thinks him to be.
Take Khairul Islam, a former schoolteacher from Morigaon. He had appealed his “foreigner” status all the way to the Supreme Court. That appeal was still pending when he disappeared from police custody and reappeared in a field in Kurigram, Bangladesh. In that moment, the entire façade of legality that Assam’s administration so painstakingly pretends to uphold crumbled into farce. The man hadn’t lost his case, he hadn’t skipped bail, he hadn’t crossed the border— he had simply been delivered, like an uninvited gift, to a country he had never belonged to.
The stories stack up like bricks in a wall of collective disbelief. Abdul Latif, summoned to the police station with promises of a short conversation, found himself the next day not in his living room but in the sovereign territory of another nation. Shaha Ali, once already detained as a “foreigner” during the last wave of bureaucratic paranoia, re-arrested in the dead of night despite having returned home on bail
Ayesha Bibi, whose husband Abdul Sheikh was hauled away under the pretense of Aadhaar registration, now doesn’t know whether he’s in India, Bangladesh, or somewhere in the bureaucratic ether reserved for the politically inconvenient. Mothers, daughters, and wives cry outside detention camps they are not allowed to enter, peering through barred windows hoping to spot a familiar face, bringing clothes and food that go undelivered.
And what do they receive in return? Silence. Utter, bureaucratic silence. The police deny knowledge. The camps refuse confirmation. The government offers platitudes and the smug assurance that this is all legal, moral, and necessary. That the Supreme Court said so. That the 1950 Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Order allows it. That “foreigners” must be removed “by any means necessary.” It’s a script rehearsed with such deadpan detachment that one begins to suspect the real performance is not the pushback, but the act of pretending it’s all under control.
The law in question— let us pause to marvel at the tragic comedy of it— is older than Bangladesh itself. Created to handle migrants from East Pakistan, it is now being revived to evict people to a country that didn’t exist when the law was written. It’s as if someone dusted off a colonial typewriter and decided to expel people retroactively through history. But no matter, legal nuances are mere decorative flourishes in a state that has decided on guilt first, jurisdiction later.
In this upside-down world, the victims’ Bengali names become sufficient proof of their foreignness. In a country with 260 million Bengali speakers, speaking Bangla is now an invitation for suspicion. That you were born in Assam, that your father voted in Indian elections, that your house appears on land records older than the Chief Minister himself— none of this matters when the state wants to tidy up its demographic arithmetic.
The Assam administration has, with impressive creativity, rebranded a failure of documentation as a success of vigilance. Where once they merely harassed families for not possessing the right papers, now they’ve upgraded to full-scale removal. No time for courts. No need for hearings. Why wait for justice when you have an old law and a cooperative police force?
The term “pushback” is, of course, misleading. No one is being gently nudged. These are not border disputes or territorial overlaps. These are targeted removals of human beings, often at night, often without informing their families, often resulting in people being stranded in a foreign country with nothing but the clothes on their back and a vague idea that they were born somewhere they’re no longer welcome.
The victims are not absconders or criminals. They are the ones who believed in the system enough to show up at police stations, to file appeals, to carry photocopies of their great-grandfather’s land tax receipt. Their only mistake was to think that citizenship in India is a right, not a revocable license.
The real tragedy, however, is not just in the absurdity— it’s in the normalisation. This is a state behaving as if it is above the very laws it swore to uphold. It is a government that has made disappearance a policy, error a weapon, and doubt a sufficient condition for exile. What we are witnessing is not immigration control. It is citizenship cleansing, dressed in the language of legality, fueled by the politics of suspicion, and made palatable by the silence of a weary public.
And so the stories continue. A child refuses to eat because his father has vanished. A mother waits at the gate of a detention camp that won’t confirm whether her son is inside. A wife sees her husband in a viral video, lying in the no man’s land, and wonders how many borders must be crossed before someone is allowed to come home. The police say they are just following orders. The ministers say they are just implementing policy. And the judiciary? Well, it is still reading the fine print of laws written when the world was divided between radio sets and rotary phones.
If this is modern governance, then it has truly reached its most efficient form: no paperwork, no debate, just efficient erasure. Citizenship is now a matter of geography, of surname, of political climate. One day you are a teacher, the next you are a trespasser in your own country. One day you are Indian, the next you are a footnote in someone’s border policy.
And as for the rest of us, perhaps we ought to take heed. When the state learns it can get away with quietly erasing its own people, it rarely stops at the border.
