20 July 2025, NIICE Commentary 11496
Titiksha Chakraborty
The refugee and migration crisis throughout South Asia is not just about the transfer of people across borders. It has to deal with exclusion, structural violence, and the slow disappearance of whole communities out of the story of nationhood. India is perhaps the most blatant example of this collision of colonial boundaries, contemporary politics, and communal fault lines, forcing otherwise marginalized groups still further into the margins, leaving them in a state of statelessness and legality.
Indian officials have stepped up the deportation of the Bengal Muslims to Bangladesh in the past few months, and many of them are Indian nationals. And in defiance of any process, and usually of any mercy, without any kind of evidence. This mass extermination is not a new effort, as it is a horrifying intensification of an old effort of erasure, which has its origin in colonial judgments and chauvinist presentism.
Colonial Legacies, Present Consequences
A major part of citizenship wrangles in India, especially in Assam today, is directly connected to decisions that were addressed by the British colonial government. In 1874, the British rearranged the northeastern region of India, bringing Sylhet out of Bengal and into Assam. This action was not made out of fear of cultural, linguistic, or demographic realities, but the target was to make Assam economically viable. It was oblivious of the complicated histories and ethnic makeup of the region, and it imposed new political identities on the communities overnight.
The 1947 partition complicated the whole picture further. Sylhet was divided, and a major portion formed East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), leaving a whole lot of Bengali-speaking people in Assam. In the course of decades, the Assamese elite started to view this population, particularly Muslims, as a threat to their cultural and political identity. Colonialism had now sown the seeds that had grown into exclusionary nationalism.
Violence by Other Means: The NRC and Beyond
Structural violence is defined as the non-audible damage done by social political systems to communities as theorised by Johan Galtung, through which they marginalise certain communities without aggressively attacking them. This is incarnated in Assam in the form of the National Register of Citizens (NRC), which in 2019 omitted more than 1.9 million names from the final list, densely concentrated being the Bengali Muslims. This did not happen to be a bureaucratic error in judgment. This was a weaponised process, which makes people stateless on the land of their ancestors.
This is easier as a result of cultural violence. It rationalizes exclusion by stories of identity, purity, and nationalism. Bengali Muslims have always been described as outsiders, invaders, or Bangladeshis, even though they have a history of living in the area. This demonisation gives the state the authority to act impudently, to shred papers, burn houses, to imprison citizens without reason, and now to duly force citizens to be moved out of national boundaries to other nations across international borders.
Expulsions Without Evidence
According to a recent report provided by Human Rights Watch, India has deported more than 1,500 people, including women and children, to Bangladesh since May 2025. Most of them produced Indian citizenship. Others of them were in the appeal courts in India. Others were old, sick, or totally unmindful of the accusation against them. There was no due process, families were separated, and whole lives were changed overnight.
Maleka Khatun, a 67-year-old woman, was manhandled into Bangladesh at the dead of night in the Barpeta district of Assam. Then she had been detained for six years and bailed. She was yet to be acquitted in court. She was not able to walk without support. She phoned her son after two days at a village in Kurigram, sobbing and alone. Internal migrants, the Bengali Muslim migrant workers of West Bengal, were trapped, beaten up, and deported in Maharashtra and Gujarat. State governments had to intervene to get many back. Their crime was just a crime of having? Speaking Bengali.
The “Infiltrator” Myth
These crackdowns are usually justified by the unwarranted migration of people out of Bangladesh. However, in reality, the information is weak, and the story is the one told by politically charged individuals. The notion of an infiltrator has been militarised to confuse the notion of migrants, refugees, and citizens of India, more so when they are Muslims and Bengali speaking.
Those who were already ranked among the most persecuted groups in the global community, the Rohingya, have not been spared, either. In May, approximately 40 Rohingya refugees were pushed into the sea off Myanmar along with life jackets. It does not know where they are. Others were deported in Assam, although they possessed UNHCR identity documents. Dealing with the deportations, the Indian Supreme Court refused to prevent them, and the reports were referred to as fanciful, whereas human rights organizations declared that it was a breach of international law.
Decolonising the Debate
In order to see how deep this crisis is, it is necessary to comprehend it through the decolonial lens. The ferocity manifested in the violence that is playing itself out today, the surveillance, arrests, demolitions, and deportations, is not merely a phenomenon of present-day politics. It is established on a colonial basis of fluid borders and forced identities. The British did not care about cultural and ethnic realities as they dismantled the subcontinent. This violence is reproduced today in the Indian state, which does not give any given group the right to belong. Exclusion and colonialism still determine who is indeed an Indian. Similarly to the British who idealized the East as a monolithic and simplified Other, the ultranationalist rhetoric of the present day erases the rights, including the freedom of speech and expression, and takes away the citizenship of what is reduced to a mere threat community.
The Way Forward
India is not only going against its own Constitution. It is breaking up its moral tradition as a country that had opened up its doors to the persecuted. It should stop any illegitimate deportation and make sure that no one is deported without any opportunity for justice. Citizenship tribunals should be open, free, and humane. Instead of being wary and violent, refugees have to be treated with respect and care. And we must understand this crisis does not start in 2019 or 2025. It all started with colonial boundaries that have been defining lives, policies, and prejudices. The migration policy of South Asia should be decolonised, and that would involve recognising the history and trying to reverse the impact. It is about power, memory, and the issue of who can belong to a nation that still lives with its past.
Titiksha Chakraborty is a Research Intern at NIICE, currently pursuing her M.A.in Political Science at the University of Delhi. India.
