MUMBAI, India — For the past decade, Mustafa Kamal Sheikh set up a makeshift stall opposite a police station in a working-class suburb of Mumbai. His speciality was jhalmuri, a fiery snack made of puffed rice and spices. The cops often came down for a bite and small talk.
One day in June, two officers came to his house and asked for his ID. He showed them four, including a card that identified him as a voter in Indian elections. Kamal says the constables accused him of forging them and detained him. He denies the accusation.
Kamal, 52, did not get a phone call or a lawyer. Over the next five days, he says the police and a team of India's Border Security Force flew him more than a thousand miles away, to the India-Bangladesh border.
One midnight, Kamal says, "The border guard gave us 300" in the Bangladeshi taka currency — less than $3 — "and told us to cross over." He recalls the guard saying, "If you return, we will shoot you.' " He says he was part of a group that included a few dozen people — all Muslims seized from Mumbai.
He says the Indian border guards allowed him to return to India two days later, after videos went viral on Indian social media of him and two other expelled Indian Muslims sobbing near the border, and listing their Indian addresses, complete with the postcodes. The Maharashtra state police, which is accused of detaining Kamal, did not respond to NPR's requests for an interview.
The crackdown followed attacks in Kashmir
Human Rights Watch, which has been monitoring these expulsions, says a stepped-up crackdown began in May. That's when local media reported the Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi ordered the deportation of "illegal immigrants" after militants gunned down tourists in a meadow in Indian-administered Kashmir in April. India blamed Pakistan for the attack that killed 26 people, leading to four days of fighting in May. Pakistan denies any wrongdoing.
India has not released any figures on deportations, but the Human Rights Watch report, citing Bangladesh border guards, said that Indian authorities expelled more than 1,500 people to neighboring Bangladesh and Myanmar between May 7 and June 15. That included Indian citizens and around 100 Rohingya refugees, who are a predominantly Muslim minority who had fled ethnic cleansing in Myanmar.
The rights group says Indian authorities expelled people without any legal process. Reuters and local media report authorities in the Indian states of Assam and Gujarat also bulldozed the homes of Muslim families. They also detained many in states across India.
Like Kamal, most of the people targeted by authorities were working-class and spoke Bangla, a language shared by the Indian state of West Bengal and Bangladesh next door.
Meenakshi Ganguly, deputy director of Human Rights Watch's Asia division, says their shared language made them an easy target, because Bangladeshis do migrate to more prosperous India, largely to work.
But the crackdown, says Teesta Setalvad, co-founder of the Mumbai-based nonprofit Citizens for Justice and Peace, was meant to distract from uncomfortable questions around the Kashmir attack.
"A terror attack of this kind creates a certain national outrage," says Setalvad. "Now it appears to us, this was to completely divert attention from that failure to protect the innocent Indian citizens," with politicians choosing to stoke public fears by branding immigrants as "infiltrators."
India's Home Ministry, which oversees immigration, did not respond to NPR's requests for an interview.
This is the latest move in a years-long campaign by the Modi government to target Muslims. In 2019, Modi's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) used a controversial citizenship law to target and expel Muslim citizens from the state of Assam. The same year, party leader Amit Shah, who now heads the powerful Home Ministry, promised at an election rally that if his government was elected, they would find "infiltrators" and "dump them in the Bay of Bengal."
And during the months-long crackdown that followed the militant attack in April, some Rohingya refugees say that's exactly what the Indian government did.
Rohingya are targeted
For more than a decade, New Delhi's Shram Vihar neighborhood has been a refuge to dozens of Rohingya families. They live in skeletal houses propped up by bamboo sticks and tarpaulin, rats running in and out.
In the first week of May, the police came by and asked them to come in for biometric verification.
"My parents and brother went with more than a dozen others but did not return," says resident Nooralamin, who only uses one name. Four days later, his brother called him — from a phone number in Myanmar.
Nooralamin recalls his brother saying Indian security personnel flew them to the Andaman island in India's east, forced them onto a navy ship, and took them near the coast of Myanmar a little before dawn. They gave them life jackets and ordered them to jump in the sea.
During the call, Nooralamin's brother said a rebel army fighting against the Myanmar junta sheltered his brother and parents.
"They would've died if a group of Burmese fishermen hadn't spotted this and rescued them soon after," says Nooralamin. "The police only spared me because my wife recently had a miscarriage."
A similar crackdown unfolded in New Delhi's Uttam Nagar neighborhood around the same time, Rohingya residents there said.
Nearly 40,000 Rohingya people are estimated to live in India. Many of them are registered with the United Nations' refugee agency, UNHCR. Until 2018, their registration with the U.N. agency helped them access services from public schools and hospitals. But the tide has turned since then.
Ahead of local legislative elections in New Delhi earlier this year, the BJP, which governs federally, promised to deport Rohingya refugees within two years if elected. It won with a more than two-thirds majority.
Hemant Tiwari, a senior officer in Delhi police, said there was no police operation targeting any ethnic group — only immigrants, he said, who were in the country illegally.
An ideological project
Ziya Us Salam, a columnist with the liberal newspaper The Hindu and author of the book Being Muslim In Hindu India, doesn't believe the government's explanation of acting against illegal immigration.
"The idea is to generate hate towards average Indian Muslims and capitalize on it at the time of elections," he says.
He notes that tight races are coming up in three states in the next few months and "crackdowns against Muslims have worked in the past." Last month, the BJP's X account for one such state posted an artificial intelligence-generated video warning of a large influx of Muslims in skullcaps and burqas unless the party was voted back in power.
Such tactics, says Salam, distract from government failures — like falling short in generating employment, building schools or hospitals, and the fact that the Indian government has still not identified the militants behind the April attack in Kashmir.
For those who were at the receiving end, like Mustafa Kamal, the memories of forced expulsion are still fresh.
He is now at his mother's village in West Bengal. He says he wants to go back to selling jhalmuri in Mumbai, where he can earn a lot more than he does working on a farm back home. If the police come for him, he will feed them too.
It won't be a choice, he says, citing a Hindi saying that translates to, "When you live in the sea, don't make enemies out of crocodiles."
Copyright 2025 NPR