HAKIMPUR, June 10: Raisul Islam stands under the scorching sun near a checkpoint in Hakimpur village along the border with neighbouring Bangladesh in the North 24 Parganas district of India’s West Bengal state.
His wife, Rebeka Khatun, 36, and their two sons, Riad, 14, and Jubair, 16, are sitting nearby at an unfinished building erected with raw bricks and cement, as the brutal heat and humidity, coupled with an absence of potable water, turn the cramped waiting room into a furnace.
The people crammed into the building are Muslim migrants from Bangladesh, who have been branded “illegal infiltrators” and brought to the border village as part of a “detect, delete and deport” policy launched by the state government headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which stormed to power in West Bengal for the first time only a month ago.
India shares a 4,096km (2,545-mile) land border, the world’s fifth-longest, with Bangladesh, a Muslim-majority nation with historical and cultural ties to India, including a common language spoken by millions of Muslims and Hindus on both sides of the border, and a century-long history of migration of mainly impoverished workers between what is now Bangladesh and West Bengal, Assam and other Indian states.
But after its sweeping victory in West Bengal, home to nearly 100 million people, the state’s BJP government ordered a crackdown to trace undocumented Muslim migrants, while it also announced the construction of “holding centres” to detain and eventually deport them back to Bangladesh.
That drive has sparked fears not just among Bangladeshi migrants, but also among sections of Indian Muslims in West Bengal that they too could find themselves victims of a campaign that the government has made clear is driven as much by the religious identity of its targets as by their legal status.
In the summer of 2025, Indian security agencies in the neighbouring state of Assam " also ruled by Modi’s BJP " forcible sent dozens of Indian Muslims across the border into Bangladesh, accusing them of being undocumented immigrants. Bangladesh sent them back, leaving them temporarily stranded in no-man’s land. They were eventually admitted back into India " but never received any explanation, leave along justice, for the ordeal they were put through.
Now, a year later, fears are growing that the same could happen in West Bengal.
Like many at the Hakimpur border checkpost, 38-year-old Islam, who hails from Satkhira district in Khulna division of Bangladesh, had come to India in search of a better livelihood.
“We had come here two years ago for the treatment of my wife, who is suffering from a skin disease, but decided to settle down after finding better wages here as compared to Bangladesh,” he told Al Jazeera.
Islam said he paid nearly $250 " a substantial amount for him " to a tout who arranged the border crossing for him and his family. They arrived in state capital Kolkata, where they rented a room on the city’s outskirts. The couple worked as masons, earning about $10 a day between them.
But their lives changed late last month after West Bengal state’s newly elected Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari ordered the deportation of undocumented Bangladeshi migrants, an exercise his party, the BJP, has already conducted in several states in the past decade.
Adhikari’s threat came with a caveat, though: The eviction would only target Muslim Bangladeshis, with Hindus and migrants from other faiths exempt under a controversial constitutional amendment that imposed a religious test on asylum seekers for the first time.
The Bengal chief minister also made clear that authorities would not bother to take those detained to court before deporting them. In December 2025, India’s Supreme Court had declared that foreign nationals have almost no rights under the Indian constitution. In effect, under the West Bengal government’s approach, the onus is on those about to be deported to prove why they should not be sent to Bangladesh.
As a result, thousands of people have been rounded up across West Bengal in the past two weeks and either sent to detention centres or driven to the border by security forces to be “pushed back” into Bangladesh.
Islam said he did not wait for the authorities to find him and his family.
“We decided to surrender voluntarily, fearing harassment by the locals and the police for being an immigrant settled illegally here,” he told Al Jazeera.
Several other migrants gathered at the Hakimpur border post narrated similar stories of economic hardships in Bangladesh that forced them to hire touts and cross the border " many without legal documents." AL JAZEERA
