Hundreds taken to Bangladesh border at gunpoint in a crackdown by Assam government, with some other BJP-governed states following suit.
Assam and West Bengal, India – Ufa Ali could barely stand.
On May 31, the 67-year-old bicycle mechanic returned to his home in India’s northeastern state of Assam after spending four harrowing days stranded in Bangladesh, the neighbouring country he claims he had only heard of “as a slur” since birth.
Ali’s weeklong ordeal began on May 23 when he was picked up by the police from his rented house in Kuyadal, a small village in Assam’s Morigaon district, during a government crackdown on “declared foreign nationals” – a category of people unique to Assam. The state is a tea-producing hub where the migration and settlement of Bengali-speaking people from neighbouring areas for more than a century has led to ethnic tensions with the Indigenous natives, who mainly speak Assamese.
The tensions have gotten worse since 2016, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power for the first time in Assam. More than a third of the state’s 31 million population is Muslim – the highest percentage among Indian states.
