While the Indian mainstream media remained obsessed about Operation Sindoor and reported uncritically even as the Prime Minister and members of his party made political capital from the recent Indo-Pak armed clash, a quiet, more insidious episode unfolded, largely unnoticed.
The first to draw attention to it wasMaktoob Media, a digital news platform based in Kerala. Two days after the guns fell silent on the borders of India and Pakistan, it claimed on May 12 that around 40 Rohingya, who were registered with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees India and recognised as stateless, were literally pushed off a naval boat into the sea near the coast of Myanmar. TheRohingya, as is well-known, fled Myanmar in 2017 to escape persecution by its military junta.
The report alleged that, on May 8, even as the Solicitor General was assuring the Supreme Court that deportations would follow established procedures and the law, these men and women were first summoned to a police station, then flown to Port Blair in the Andamans and then blind-folded, shackled and put on a naval boat before being pushed into the sea. The group included elderly men, women and children, who had to allegedly swim ashore to safety.
This was followed up by a story in Scroll that contained more details.
Mainstream media only woke up when Tom Andrews, UN special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, said: “The idea that Rohingya refugees have been cast into the sea from naval vessels is nothing short of outrageous. I am seeking further information and testimony regarding these developments and implore the Indian government to provide a full accounting of what happened.”
The UN statement drew the attention of the international media with reports appearing in New York Times, South China Morning Post and Straits Times.
Since early May, there has been little by way of follow-up to this story or even comment on this except, predictably, in independent digital platforms. The most searing comment was this article by Harsh Mander in Scroll. He asks how India has become “a place in which exceptional cruelty, prejudice and a casual defiance of constitutional obligations and customary international law have become official state policy”.
Meanwhile, equally insidious and inhuman is the process that continues in Assam of “pushing back” suspected Bangladeshi nationals.
Once again, as in the case of the Rohingya, the early reports appeared in independent digital platforms. The stories were heart-breaking. Many of those literally pushed back across the India-Bangladesh border were married women, who had not been able to prove their citizenship.
Read the stories by Rokibuz Zaman in Scroll: Of a teacher picked up and pushed out, of two women, Shona Bhanu and Begum, who were amongst the people pushed out only to be brought back because they are Indian citizens.
These stories remind us again what was known ever since the Assam government undertook the process of the National Register of Citizens and set up quasi-judicial Foreigners’ Tribunals in 2019. Over time, lakhs of people have been declared “foreigners” by these tribunals leaving them no option but to spend time and money hiring lawyers and filing cases in higher courts.
Also, as was evident almost from the start, the process has disproportionately affected the poor and unlettered, many of them married women. Read this article by Abhishek Saha, who followed the story of one woman, Manowara Bewa. Declared “illegal” by a tribunal in 2016, detained, sent to a detention centre and finally released on bail in 2019, she was picked by the police on May 24, and “pushed back” into Bangladesh despite her pending appeal in the Supreme Court.
In 2019, at the height of the NRC process, and soon after the tribunals were set up, the media did report on what was going on. Even then, it was evident that the process was unlikely to be fair to those who do not have sufficient documents, a reality facing millions of poor people in this country.
I saw this when I visited Assam in 2019. The sight of thousands of men and women, clutching plastic bags full of documents that they wanted to show lawyers who had offered to help is one that I cannot forget. Amongst them were many women who were completely bewildered and did not understand what was happening.
Even then, those who were following the issue could see the arbitrary way in which cases were decided in the tribunals. People travelled long distances to have their cases heard only to find that the date of the hearing had changed. Those who could not make it for a hearing often found that the tribunal had made a ruling ex parte. No outsiders, including journalists were permitted to sit through proceedings as they can in a regular court. This opacity made the process even more problematic.
Today, more than five years after the renewed thrust to detect and deport suspected Bangladeshis took off in Assam, using Operation Sindoor as an excuse to prevent “infiltration”, the Assam government has stepped up its efforts by pushing out people “declared foreigner” by the tribunals despite their pending cases in other courts. As the article by Saha reminds us, “declared foreigners” are not “individuals who have been apprehended at India’s borders, attempting to enter the country without documentation on the sly. They are typically long-term residents with families and properties in Assam, who assert that they are Indian citizens.”
And he rightfully states: “The humanitarian crisis in Assam’s citizenship imbroglio begins here – neither India nor Bangladesh acknowledges the ‘declared foreigners’ as their own.”
While this story has failed to catch the interest of much of mainstream media, the one story that found prominent coverage was, not surprisingly, the official version of what happened last month. In response to reports about people being pushed back into Bangladesh, these reports quoted the Border Security Force saying they had successfully foiled “infiltration” from Bangladesh. Or this one that reports that 2000 “illegal immigrants” have been pushed back since Operation Sindoor and that officials claim some left voluntarily.
The story will not end today or tomorrow. It is incumbent on the media to follow and report it, even if the place where the actual drama is taking place is the northeastern corner of India.
For what this process shows us is how it becomes convenient for governments to pick on the weakest to show how decisive and strong they are. But physically throwing people off a boat or pushing a woman with an eight-month-old child across a physical border, leaving her and others standing through the night in a rice field, and for her family to not be told where she has disappeared, does not indicate a strong government. It only confirms one that it is indifferent to the plight of the most vulnerable.
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