India's Modi Is Even More Barbaric Toward 'Migrants' Than Trump
Prime Minister Modi’s Hindu nationalist regime is using the presence of 'Bangladeshi immigrants' as a pretext to remake the citizenry
Shock and outrage erupted in India when the newly elected Donald Trump administration started returning illegal Indian immigrants in handcuffs and leg chains stuffed in U.S. military planes earlier this year. Horrified Indians demanded to know why their government wasn’t protesting the treatment of its migrants like Mexico was. Deportees’ accounts of how they were forced to endure the shackles throughout the long, 40-hour flights, even during bathroom breaks, animated opposition protests in Parliament. Outside, protesters burned effigies of Trump.
An embarrassed government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi rushed to calm nerves with the assurance that it was “engaging” the Trump administration to ensure humane treatment for the returning migrants. The foreign minister told Parliament that his ministry was verifying the details of the immigrants that ICE had shared with India; Modi promised to take back all verified illegal immigrants.
Barbarism Unleashed
But the brutality and the sheer lawlessness with which India itself is treating the people it calls illegal immigrants on its land undercuts its protests against Trump’s treatment of Indian migrants. In the past couple of months, impoverished migrant workers in rich megacities like Gurgaon, Bangalore, and Mumbai have been subjected to midnight raids, random ID checks, detentions, custodial torture—their homes demolished on charges of being “Bangladeshi infiltrators.”
Despite providing all Indian IDs, they have been detained for failing “tests” like singing the national anthem correctly. Many have then been taken to the border with Bangladesh and simply thrown out of Indian territory without any verification and judicial or diplomatic procedures. Demands by global human rights organizations to follow due process have fallen on deaf ears.
The Indian government has provided no official data on the number of people it has expelled, but the Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) puts the figure at more than 1,500 between May 7 and June 15 alone, including about 100 Rohingya refugees from Myanmar. The United Nations has launched an inquiry into “credible reports” of dozens of Rohingya refugees thrown into the Andaman Sea from Indian navy vessels.
A woman identified as Selina Begum told the Bangladeshi media that her family was picked up from the northern Indian state of Haryana, driven to the border, and robbed of their money and phones. India’s Border Security Force (BSF) then tied empty plastic bottles to her and her three daughters to keep them afloat and pushed them into a border river under the cloak of darkness. Frightened and freezing, they were rescued from the water by locals and handed over to the BGB the next morning.
Amir Sheikh, 20, was arrested from another northern Indian state, Rajasthan, and taken to the Bangladesh border, where Indian border guards forced him to walk across the Bangladesh border or he would be shot. He was arrested by Bangladesh authorities on entering Bangladeshi territory. He is finally home after his family waged a legal battle to rescue him when it saw his pleas on a social media video.
This process of expelling suspected Bangladeshis—generally known as “pushback” or “push out”—literally involves border guards pushing out people by force into the no man’s land between India and Bangladesh. Modi’s Hindu supremacist government has been doing this a lot lately, as part of its elaborate campaign to otherize Muslims, who account for about 14% of India’s population.
The crackdown intensified since Indian tourists were killed in a terror strike in Kashmir in April. But even before that, political messaging and propaganda had turned “Rohingya” and “illegal Bangladeshi infiltrator,” or simply “ghuspetiya” (infiltrator), into potent codes for Indian Muslims—unwanted outsiders who have to be expunged to protect what Hindu supremacist politics considers the exclusive homeland of the Hindus. No election in India is now fought without invoking the fear of the ghuspetiya.
Modi gramophoned this infiltrator bogeyman again from the pulpit of his annual Independence Day speech on Aug. 15. He claimed illegal immigrants are snatching the livelihoods of young people, taking away land, and targeting “our mothers and sisters” to alter the demography. He declared that he is forming a “high-powered demographic mission” to address these challenges.
Scripting the National Demography
Changing “demography” is a perennial Hindu supremacist dog whistle on the dangers of Muslims growing in numbers to threaten the majority Hindu. Modi has now repackaged this old whine with the “illegal Bangladeshi” label and a dash of “national security” respectability to mitigate its raw religious bigotry against Indian Muslims.
Bengali-speaking migrant workers, particularly Muslims, are the prime targets of this campaign. But reports of hate crimes from across the nation point to a trend of “Bangladeshi” and “Rohingya” being increasingly used to persecute even non-Bengali-speaking Muslims. In Delhi, the nation’s capital, the minister of commerce and industry has shut down a booming garments hub staffed mainly with Muslim tailors from the northern state of Uttar Pradesh because, he says, “Bangladeshis” were waging “jeans jihad.”
Bangladesh and the adjoining Indian state of West Bengal share the same Bengali language and ethnicity, both having been part of the Bengal province in colonial India. The British divided Bengal into a Hindu-majority West Bengal and Muslim-majority East Bengal. The latter went to Muslim-majority Pakistan at the time of the Partition of India in 1947 and was renamed East Pakistan. In 1971, East Pakistan seceded as the independent nation of Bangladesh after a liberation war against Pakistan.
But Muslims still constitute about 28% of India’s West Bengal, which, as a poor state, is a major source of migrant workers within India. Muslim Indian Bengali speakers making a meager living outside Bengal are thus easy prey in this new hunt for “Bangladeshis” because the two are indistinguishable.
Hindu supremacist groups affiliated with Modi’s party regularly harass and lynch Bengalis in BJP-ruled states. With police joining the vigilantes, terrified Bengali migrants are now fleeing Indian cities in droves and returning to their villages in West Bengal. Many have had family members pushed out to Bangladesh at gunpoint, whose fates remain uncertain. In other words, Bengali Muslims who are Indian citizens are being stripped of their citizenship and facing forcible expulsion to a foreign land, essentially becoming stateless. In Bengal’s neighboring state Assam, in addition to being randomly picked up by the authorities and pushed into Bangladesh, Bengali Muslims are on the tenterhooks as their homes are also being destroyed en masse and their names struck off the electoral rolls while Hindu supremacist vigilantes are threatening them to leave.
Enemy of the People
The fear is similar to the one triggered by the ICE raids in the U.S. Chilling as ICE raids are, Modi’s exclusionary model is even more radical, transformative, and quietly efficient. The expulsion campaigns of both Modi and Trump are borne of the same toxic identity politics of majoritarian assertion through the spectacle of punishment of a minority “outsider” other constructed as the enemy of the people. Only, the evil genius of Modi’s program lies in not just constructing this fear of the “other,” but constructing the “other” as well by manufacturing the “outsider” out of the true-born.
Bangladeshis are to Modi what Mexicans are to Trump. Both are proxies dressing up naked identitarian hate with the logic of nationalism. “Non-white people are taking our jobs” would sound just as awful as “Muslims are eating our food” or “Muslims are taking our women”—as the Indian prime minister was trying to say in his Independence Day speech. If there were no Mexicans or Bangladeshis, they would have to be invented for the politics of polarization. Modi is kind of doing just that.
To drive his domestic political agenda, he has transformed a traditionally friendly nation like Bangladesh—in whose liberation war India played a major role—into an existential threat for India in the public imagination. While Trump has been baying for a border wall with Mexico, Modi’s government is pushing on with fencing the entire 4,096 km of the country’s border with Bangladesh; some 800 km of the fencing is yet to be completed.
Thanks to Modi’s emasculation of most of India’s media, especially its news channels, the average Indian is now bombarded 24/7 with messages on the dangers of “Bangladeshi infiltrators,” whipping up Islamophobia by delegitimizing the very existence of a portion of Indians by calling them outsiders. It is creating a consensus for exclusion that is arguably even more polarizing than Trump’s loud, daily rhetoric. Modi has already convinced many Indians to regard a whole segment of natives as illegal immigrants. He is now trying to scale up the campaign against them.
To rid the country of “Bangladeshis,” the BJP-ruled eastern state of Assam conducted a citizenship verification drive called the National Register of Citizens (NRC) a few years ago that rendered 1.9 million people stateless. Modi’s government had pledged to replicate this model across India but had to backtrack following nationwide protests. It is now bringing back NRC through the backdoor by mandating a voter verification drive along similar lines.
The Election Commission of India recently announced a “special intensive revision” (SIR) of the electoral rolls in the eastern state of Bihar in which nearly seven million voters are estimated to have been excluded. The brunt of it is disproportionately targeting Muslims and other disadvantaged groups that struggle to provide the onerous documentation to prove their eligibility to vote. Some see similarities with Jim Crow-era voting regulations that stripped the majority of Black citizens in the South of a political voice. The Election Commission has indicated plans to extend the verification drive to other states, putting India’s 200 million Muslims on edge.
Apart from the voter verification drive, the opposition is now agitating against the government for “vote theft” by fiddling with electoral rolls to steal elections. Documented instances of homes numbered “0”, people named “.”, and thousands of dubious alterations have brought to light how elections have been compromised in a country considered the world’s largest democracy.
As John Keane and I write in our To Kill A Democracy: India’s Passage to Despotism, modern-day despots tighten their grip on power by redefining who count as the “true” people belonging to the polity, and ostracizing those who are deemed not to belong. Elections thus become an exercise in ascertaining the dominance of the “true” people. In the ultimate subversion of democracy, the government starts selecting the voter rather than the voter selecting the government. Modi is literally doing this through the tools of mass disenfranchisement and manipulated electoral rolls, and through the forced displacement of Muslims.
While Trump has only just begun to speak of a new census excluding “illegals” and issued threats of controlling election procedures of states through executive orders, with doubts about the legality or feasibility of these moves, Modi is already miles ahead. He is selecting the people before they get to select him, scripting a much smarter and lethal autogolpe.
*We have tweaked the headline and subhead to more accurately reflect the nuance of the piece.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
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Trump deserves the Mother Teressa" Humanitarian Prize for not being as bad as Modi and a Nobel in Economics for not restricting trade as much as North Korea, and another for preserving more central bank independence that Turkey and a third for net CO2 reduction policy superior to Germany.
How fortunate we are to be ruled by such a genius!
Democrats didn't mind a crackdown on Immigration when it was a Democrat doing it.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DOj--L4AUc-/