On December 5, six months after being forced across the border into Bangladesh by Indian authorities, 25-year-old Sunali Khatun was allowed to return to her home state of West Bengal. She is eight months pregnant.
Indian officials had detained Khatun, her husband and eight-year-old son in Delhi’s Rohini area on June 20, claiming that the family were “illegal migrants of Bangladesh”.
But when Scroll’s Anant Gupta travelled to Khatun’s village in Birbhum district in August, her family showed him land records going back five generations. Gupta even interviewed the midwife who had delivered Khatun.
Though Khatun is relieved that her baby, due in January, will be born in India, she is worried about her husband. She and her son were let back in after India’s Supreme Court urged the government to allow them to return on “humanitarian grounds”. But her husband remains stranded in Bangladesh.
Khatun is just one of the many victims of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s cynical strategy of weaponising anxieties about belonging and citizenship to brutalise India’s most vulnerable citizens – especially Muslims.
The horrific cost paid by the scapegoats of this campaign has been the focus of Scroll’s journalism for much of 2025.
The BJP declared its intention to show Indian Muslims exactly where they stood in 2016, when it moved the…
Source: 2025: The year the crusade to define India as a Hindu rashtra intensified
