By Dr. Gyan Pathak
Guwahati High Court’s September 3, 2026 order to bring the woman pushed into Bangladesh as infiltrator back to India and to give interim compensation of ₹2 lakh to her husband has brought the BJP’s infiltrator politics on test for accountability. The order has already made the BJP led Government of Assam accountable. Further, its order to the Union Ministry of External Affairs to locate the woman in Bangladesh and bring her to India has complicated the matter since it involves the cooperation of the Government of Bangladesh. Outcome of the next hearing on September 24, is also keenly watched in terms of accountability of the police, detention centres, foreign tribunals, government officials and the BSF personnels who are involved in pushing the people believed to be infiltrators into Bangladesh.
Thus, the entire infiltrator politics will be on test not by the number of people pushed out of India into Bangladesh, but by the state’s ability to demonstrate that every person pushed out was, in fact, lawfully determined to be a foreign national and had been given every remedy available under India law.
The High Court order passed in the Mujammel Hoque vs State of Assam is a significant moment in the controversy over Assam’s “push-back” politics and the human predicaments of the people who were pushed out of India, without giving them enough opportunity to prove their citizenship. Now there is much harder constitution question – what happens when the government machinery designed to remove foreigners wrongly or prematurely catches an India citizen?
The case of Mumtaz Begum is especially troubling because the High Court did not merely order compensation. It found that the procedure followed had deprived her of the opportunity to challenge the Foreigners Tribunal’s decision, ordered an inquiry, and brought the Ministry of External Affairs into the case to try to locate her in Bangladesh and bring her back to India.
Mumtaz Begum, a Bengali-speaking Muslim woman from Nagaon, had been contesting a Foreigners Tribunal determination regarding her citizenship. The Gauhati High Court had earlier remanded her case for a fresh decision. On May 30, she appeared before the Foreigners Tribunal as directed. The tribunal again declared her a foreigner. But, according to the High Court’s subsequent findings, she was taken into custody almost immediately, moved through police custody and detention/holding centres, and ultimately handed over to the BSF. She was sent across the Bangladesh border in the mid-night around 00:10 on June 14, 2026. Her husband was not informed of her detention or removal. Indeed, he had to approach the High Court to discover where she had gone.
The High Court went so far as to describe the conduct of the Foreigners Tribunal as showing “malice in law”, finding that the certified copy of its opinion had been deliberately/wilfully delayed in circumstances that enabled her removal before she could approach the High Court.
The High Court ordered interim compensation of ₹2 lakh to her husband, with the husband retains the right to pursue further compensation. It is significant but, the more consequential part is its direction to the Ministry of External Affairs to locate her in Bangladesh, secure her return to India, and give her an opportunity to challenge the Foreigners Tribunal’s decision. The court obviously tried to restore the legal position that existed before the unlawful shortcut occurred. It exposed the fundamental weakness in a “speedy push-back” strategy of the BJP led Assam government.
It is to be noted that in January 2026, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma had said that Assam would seek to push people into Bangladesh within a week of their being declared foreigners, specifically referring to the desire to avoid the process being prolonged by people approaching High Court and Supreme Court. He had also said that about 2000 people had been pushed back during preceding three months.
Ironically, Assam’s October 29, 2025 Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) contains safeguards, and contemplates removal after available legal remedies have been exhausted. However, the Mumtaz case demonstrates the danger of compressing these stages into an administrative conveyor belt. The High Court found that a so-called 24-hour self-removal order was effectively meaningless because the woman had already been arrested and placed in a holding centre. The court called that order “farcical” in the circumstances.
It is clear that in spite of the deportation framework and safeguards, the officials actually worked under great political pressure and did not observe the rules of the safeguards provided under the framework.
Under the BJP government’s pushback operations, hundreds were pushed into Bangladesh in large scale in 2025, including people whose citizenship proceedings were allegedly pending or who had not gone through the complete nationality-verification process. In an earlier High Court case concerning Doyjan Bibi, another disappeared woman was reported by the government sent to Bangladesh, and with great difficulty, families and courts construct what actually happened.
There is also a huge human cost of the BJP’s pushback politics. In 2025, Sunali Khatun, a woman from Birbhum in West Bengal who was pregnant, was detained in Delhi along with her husband and child and sent to Bangladesh as suspected illegal immigrants. Later a Bangladeshi court reportedly directed the Indian authorities to facilitate their repatriation after finding them to be Indian nationals.
BJP’s Bangladeshi infiltrator politics creates dangerous situation when Bengal speaking Indian citizens are treated as Bangladesh nationals. The danger is greatest in Assam and parts of eastern India because language, ethnicity, religion, migration history and citizenship documentation overlap in complicated ways.
Natural justice demands that every citizen should get fair opportunity to prove their citizenship and for appeals. High court order has opened the gate for other petitioners whose relatives were pushed into Bangladesh without giving them enough legal opportunities. Judiciary is set to establish a more rigorous chain of accountability, and BJP’s infiltrator politics will be on test. It is to be seen whether their stronger rhetoric would have greater pressure on administrative machinery to produce higher deportation numbers, or the officials would yield under judicial scrutiny of their accountability. (IPA Service)
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