Pushed across the border despite the court's mercy: Assam's missing women and the machinery that 'lost' them

Congress MP Gaurav Gogoi has written to External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar asking for help to bring back two Assam women pushed across the India-Bangladesh border, even though the Gauhati High Court had set aside the Foreigners' Tribunal opinions against them. Jahanara Begum and Mumtaz Begum were sent across the border despite judicial relief, Gogoi told the minister, urging the foreign ministry to intervene and secure their return to India. Mumtaz Begum's case has become the defining indictment of Assam's citizenship machinery. A Bengali-speaking Muslim woman from Nagaon, she spent years contesting a Foreigners' Tribunal determination. After the High Court remanded her case for fresh consideration, she appeared before the tribunal with her lawyer on May 30. The tribunal again declared her a foreigner. What followed, the High Court would later find, was not due process but a choreographed removal. She was taken into police custody almost immediately, shuttled through police stations and holding centres in Nagaon, Goalpara and Sribhumi between June 4 and 13, and handed to the BSF on June 13. She was sent across the border around midnight on June 14. Her husband was not informed; he had to approach the High Court to learn where she had gone. In September, a division bench of Justices Kalyan Rai Surana and Susmita Phukan Khaund delivered a sharp rebuke: the Nagaon tribunal's conduct displayed apparent "malice in law", and the state machinery had acted "in tandem" to block her right to challenge the order. The certified copy had been deliberately delayed so she could be removed first. The evidence the tribunal had brushed aside was substantial: her grandfather's names in the 1965 and 1970 electoral rolls, her father's 1977 voter-list record and voter ID, panchayat certificates, a school transfer certificate and land records. The court ordered Rs 2 lakh interim compensation to her husband, directed the MEA to locate her in Bangladesh and bring her back, and set aside the tribunal's ruling for fresh consideration. Months later, she remains untraceable. Bangladesh's Home Ministry, where the matter was referred to police on September 27, says it has no information. An appeal carrying her photograph was published in Bengali newspapers on September 22. The court's orders, it turns out, travel slower than the midnight vans. The case exposes Assam's "speedy push-back" strategy. In January, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said the state would push people into Bangladesh within a week of their being declared foreigners, specifically to avoid prolonged appeals; he said about 2,000 people had been pushed back in the preceding three months. Assam's tribunals have stripped some 1,30,000 people of Indian citizenship in four years. Mumtaz Begum's case shows the machine from the inside: a citizen denied a hearing, moved in the dark, and "lost" across a border her own government called foreign to her. Gogoi's letter asks the foreign ministry to do what the state machinery refused to: find the women and bring them home.