On Wednesday, 22-year-old Barek Ali, a resident of Assam’s Darrang district, was forwarded a clip from a Bangladesh-based news channel. It showed a group of people standing in a field surrounded by armed Bangladesh border guards, with locals from the Durgapur border area saying they had been sent across the border by security forces at 3 am that day.
In that group was a woman carrying a baby in her arms. When he saw it, Ali immediately recognised them as his mother Manikjan Begum and his 8-month-old sister, who had been missing after they were taken into police custody on May 25.
“Ever since I saw (the video), I feel like I can’t breathe. All I can think about is what we can do to get them back,” he said.
Begum is among several people who have been detained by police in the past week from across Assam and whose families say that they have not been given information about their whereabouts by authorities. Like most of these people, she had been declared a foreigner by a Foreigner Tribunal in the state in 2019 and spent two years in detention until she was released on bail in 2022.
The Assam police and Border Security Force have not responded to queries about these developments. However, a senior BSF official told , “It is an ongoing process. Anyone found to be a foreigner will be either deported or pushed back.”
Ali said his mother was first taken to the Dhula police station in the early hours of May 23 and sent back home the next day. He said she was summoned to the police station again on May 25 with all her documents.
“From there, she was taken to the police reserve in Mangaldai and then to the Superintendent of Police’s office in Mangaldai. My father and I waited outside for hours with relatives of others who had also been taken there. The baby was with my father, and she started crying, so my father took her inside and handed her over to my mother. That was the last that we saw of them… No one has told us anything about where they are ever since,” he said.
The video he saw was the first clue he got of their whereabouts, and played into his fear since he saw another video a day before, which The Indian Express had reported on: One shared by a Bangladeshi journalist, in which another detained person, Khairul Islam, a resident of Assam’s Morigaon district, can be heard saying that he was pushed into Bangladesh by security forces on Monday morning.
Several such video clips have fuelled fear and confusion in Assam. Malek Ostar (37) said that his mother, Majeda Khatun (60), was also detained from Darrang district on May 24 alongside several others.
“In that video (of Manikjan Begum and her child), we can see the relatives of people we were waiting with in Mangaldoi, but we can’t see my mother, who had been taken with them. I went to see our lawyer in and to the Matia detention camp to try and find out if she’s there, but I don’t know anything about where she is,” he said.
Majeda Khatun is also a declared foreigner, and her lawyer, Muij Uddin Mahmud, said her appeal against the Foreigners’ Tribunal order is going on in the Gauhati High Court.
Habibul Bepari, a volunteer with NGO Citizens for Justice and Peace, said he is looking for information on Doyjan Bibi, a declared foreigner from Dhubri district who was released on bail from detention in 2021 and whose case he has been working on. He said there has been no information about her whereabouts since she was detained on May 25.
The family of Abdul Hanif (40) from Golaghat district said he was taken by the police on Sunday morning. With no information on his whereabouts, his brother Din Islam travelled to the Matia detention camp in Goalpara to try to find him.
“We went there on Wednesday, but we were not allowed to enter, and the police there told us that no one from Golaghat had been brought to the camp. I will try my luck with lawyers in Guwahati now,” said his brother.
