MEA Signals Plans to Deport Significant Number of Illegal Bangladeshi Immigrants from India

India on Thursday requested Bangladesh to expedite the verification process of nationality to facilitate the deportation of a large number of illegal Bangladeshi immigrants in India.

India Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal, at a weekly media briefing, underscored that whoever was living illegally in India, irrespective of nationality, would be treated as per the law.

We have a significant number of Bangladeshi nationals in India who need to be deported. We have requested the Bangladeshi side to confirm the nationality. We have a pending list of over 2360 cases of individuals who need to be deported. Most of them have gone through the jail process. In most cases, the verification process of the nationality has been pending since 2020," Jaiswal said.

Illegal immigrants usually enter India without proper travel documents by clandestine means, and thus it is difficult for the authorities to precisely estimate the number of people living in the country illegally.

Earlier this month, Assam's South Salmara district security forces arrested and then pushed back at least five Bangladeshi nationals on the allegation of illegal infiltration.

Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma observed that infiltration from Bangladesh has increased in recent months, citing the failure of Bangladesh's textile sector as the reason for the upsurge, which has resulted in large-scale unemployment.

"We have so far arrested about 1,000 Bangladeshi individuals in the past few months. They were sent back immediately after arrest," Sarma said, pointing to economic instability in Bangladesh as a reason behind.

In a follow-up development, Delhi Police recently arrested six Bangladeshi women from different areas of the national capital, busting a large human trafficking ring enabling illegal ingress from Bangladesh. The authorities confirmed that the women were illegally staying in the country and will be deported.

In the last month, Gujarat police launched one of the biggest raids on illegal immigration, arresting more than 1,000 Bangladeshi citizens in a single day. Working on the orders of Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel and State Home Affairs Minister Harsh Sanghavi, Ahmedabad police arrested 890 suspects, while Surat police arrested 134.

Meanwhile, Bangladeshi media had reported that India's Border Security Force (BSF) had repelled some 300 individuals, including Rohingya refugees, back into Bangladesh via remote border locations on May 7 and May 9. The Bangladesh Foreign Ministry then wrote to India protesting against these pushbacks.