India’s Bengal pushes out Muslim Bangladeshis, deepening religious tensions

Hakimpur, India – 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.