Indian Muslim woman missing for months found in Bangladesh after deportation
Discovery of 68-year-old Sakina Begum exposes India’s illegal deportations of Muslims under Assam’s anti-immigrant crackdown
NEW DELHI, India (MNTV) — A 68-year-old Indian Muslim woman who disappeared from India’s northeastern state of Assam during a police crackdown earlier this year has been found in Bangladesh, raising serious concerns over alleged cross-border expulsions of Indian citizens.
According to Maktoob Media, the woman, Sakina Begum, was discovered by a BBC Bangla team in Dhaka’s Mirpur neighborhood — more than 350 kilometers southwest of her hometown, Sonpur village in Assam’s Nalbari district.
Begum, who speaks an Assamese dialect and cannot understand Bengali, went missing in May after police summoned her to the Nalbari station for what they described as a routine signature related to her citizenship case.
Her daughter, Rasia Begum, said that the family learned of her mother’s whereabouts only after BBC journalists facilitated a video call from Dhaka. “She kept crying and begging us to bring her back home,” Rasia said. “Now she’s stranded in another country for no fault of her own.”
Sakina’s disappearance coincided with a state-wide crackdown ordered by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in Assam, targeting so-called “Declared Foreign Nationals.” These are individuals marked as non-citizens by Foreigners Tribunals — quasi-judicial bodies often accused of bias and arbitrary rulings.
Many of those detained were sent to the Matia Transit Camp in Goalpara, about 130 kilometers west of Guwahati, India’s largest immigration detention facility, before reportedly being forced across the border into Bangladesh.
Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma told the state assembly on June 8 that 303 people had been “pushed back” into Bangladesh in recent months. The informal method, known as a “pushback,” involves forcing individuals across borders without any legal deportation process — a practice Sarma previously called a “new phenomenon” to avoid judicial scrutiny.
Sakina had been declared a foreigner by a Nalbari tribunal in 2012 and detained for five years in the Kokrajhar detention center before her release in 2019, following a Supreme Court ruling that allowed conditional bail for long-term detainees. Since then, she had been regularly reporting to police — until her disappearance in May.
Her family maintains she was born and raised in Assam, and her documents include voter registration records from 2005, 2011, and 2018, along with her father’s name on the 1970 voter rolls.
“She doesn’t even know where Mymensingh is,” Rasia said, referring to the Bangladeshi district authorities falsely claimed as her origin.
Bangladeshi authorities said that nearly 1,900 people were pushed into Bangladesh between May and July this year — 110 of whom identified themselves as Indian citizens.
For seven days, Sakina reportedly wandered the streets of Dhaka before a local teenager took her in and sheltered her for four months until the BBC team found her. “Seeing her again gave us hope,” said Rasia, “but now we are separated by a border — and two countries that have both failed her.”
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