Hundreds were forcibly taken to the Bangladesh border in an Assam government crackdown, with other BJP-ruled states soon following. The 67-year-old bicycle repairman was back at his home in India’s northeastern Assam state on May 31 after spending four terrifying days stuck in Bangladesh, the neighbouring country he says he had heard of only “as a curse” all his life.
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.
It is a tea-growing centre where Bengali-speaking immigrants from surrounding regions for over a century have resulted in ethnic conflicts with the Indigenous native population that predominantly speaks Assamese.
The strains have worsened since 2016, when Hindu majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Prime Minister Narendra Modi was in power for the first time in Assam. Over a third of the state’s 31 million people are Muslim – the highest proportion of any Indian state.
Ali is one of the over 300 Muslims in Assam “pushed back” to Bangladesh since May, State Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said. “The pushbacks will be intensified. We must be more active and proactive to save the state,” Sarma said to the state legislative assembly last month.
After being arrested on May 23 by the police, Ali was transported to a detention centre over 200km (124 miles) away in Matia, India’s largest migration detention centre, in the Goalpara district of Assam. Three days later, at dawn on May 27, troops from India’s Border Security Force (BSF) drove him and 13 others, five of them women, in a van to the India-Bangladesh border.
The BSF was compelling us to go to the other side, while BGB and locals informed us that they would not accept us since we were Indians,” Ali explained to Al Jazeera, the Border Guard Bangladesh being the border force of Bangladesh.
Stranded in open fields in no-man’s land between India and Bangladesh, Ali’s group spent the following 12 hours wading knee-deep in water with no food or shelter.
A haunting photo of Ali, crouching in the swamp, eyebrows furrowed and eyes staring back at the camera, went viral on social media “We witnessed hell beneath the blue sky and we witnessed life slipping away from us,” he explained to Al Jazeera.
