Modi government’s offensive against Muslims

The Modi government’s drive to Demolish, Disenfranchise (currently through the ‘Special Intensive Revision’ of electoral rolls) and Deport Muslims, Bengalis and the labouring poor is intensifying further.

A member of South Asia Solidarity Group was part of a team organised by Communist Party of India -Marxist Leninist- Liberation CPIML comrades, which visited Jai Hind Camp in Delhi and various areas in Gurugram/Gurgaon (Haryana) where Bengali Muslim migrant workers are living, and keeping the city going through their labour, many for more than two decades. They are currently facing a government offensive against Muslim Bengali speaking people from West Bengal and Assam, who are Indian citizens but labelled Bangladeshi ‘illegal migrants’ simply because of their language, religion, and class.

People are being picked up and put in detention centres and some have even been deported to Bangladesh, and subsequently returned to India by the Bangladesh authorities. People spoke to us about being taken away by plain clothes police in unmarked cars, in some cases being beaten up and tortured, and taken to hastily set up detention centres where they were held for several days. All of them have proof of identity and citizenship but this is being ignored.

Police claim they are acting on an order from the Ministry of Home Affairs, but no one has been allowed to see this order so far. The communities are being systematically terrorised and many have fled back to their home districts in West Bengal, forced to abandon whatever they have built up over the years, taking their children out of their schools and colleges. But those who remain, while traumatised, are also determined to resist this injustice. As Fatima says (see video here), a united mass movement like the farmer’s movement or that over Waqf is urgently needed.