The Muslims Stranded in the India–Bangladesh "Push-In" Need Ownership by a State, the Caliphate.

News:

Hundreds [of Muslims] taken to the border and many others put in detention centres [in India] as part of a ‘detect, delete and deport’ crackdown on undocumented migrants. (Al-Jazeera, 10 Jun 2026)

Comment:

Over the past several weeks, Bangladesh has repeatedly accused India of attempting to push groups of people across the border into Bangladeshi territory without following formal verification and repatriation procedures. India, meanwhile, says that it is trying to identify and deport undocumented migrants and has asked Bangladesh to verify thousands of suspected Bangladeshi nationals residing in India.

The India-Bangladesh border is not a natural barrier. It is a colonial wound. For over a century before Partition in 1947 and long after, millions moved fluidly between what is now Bangladesh and the Indian states of West Bengal, Assam, and the northeast, bound by shared language, culture, and kinship. This was never a one-way movement. Hindus fled persecution in Bangladesh; Muslims crossed for work, medical treatment, and survival. The border cuts through paddy fields and rivers where kinship has no regard for nationality. Migration here is not an invasion, it is the organic consequence of geography, colonialism, and poverty. Yet, it has been systematically reframed by India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as a singular, existential threat carried entirely by one religion.

When the BJP came to power in Assam in 2016, it promised to "weed out illegal foreigners". The National Register of Citizens (NRC), originally born from a 1970s anti-foreigner movement, was weaponised into a tool of Muslim exclusion. Approximately 1.9 million people were excluded from the final NRC list but contrary to BJP's narrative, more Hindus than Muslims (nearly 1.5 million) were among them. Yet, this detail was buried beneath the electoral machinery. The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), passed in 2019, provided the corrective only for non-Muslims, allowing migrant Hindus excluded by the NRC to receive citizenship while the fate of Muslims, over one-third of Assam's population, remained entirely unclear.

The BJP has turned refugee policy into a proxy war on Muslims. The strategy delivered results. In the 2019 parliamentary elections, Modi's BJP won a bigger majority than in 2014 after promising a nationwide NRC in its manifesto. Home Minister Amit Shah publicly called Bangladeshi immigrants as "termites" and "infiltrators". Though India hosts tens of thousands of Buddhist refugees from Tibet and Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka, the BJP has consistently singled out Muslim migrants, Bangladeshis and Rohingya, purely over their belief.

In April 2026, what had long been implied became explicit. An internal BSF communication dated March 26 instructed units along the eastern and northeastern sectors to assess the "feasibility of deploying reptiles in vulnerable riverine gaps" where traditional fencing has proven impractical. The use of reptiles, Al Jazeera reported, was described as being "in line with Home Minister Amit Shah's directions". Researcher Angshuman Choudhury told Al Jazeera: "once you release venomous snakes and crocodiles, they won't be able to differentiate if it's a Bangladeshi or Indian: this is peak cruelty, a whole new way of weaponizing nature against human beings". Wildlife experts warned the plan is ecologically absurd; crocodiles are not native to these border areas, and floods could sweep venomous snakes into villages on both sides. (Al Jazeeera). This came after security agencies in Assam had already, in the summer of 2025, forcibly pushed dozens of Indian Muslims into Bangladesh, accusing them of being undocumented immigrants. Bangladesh sent them back, leaving them stranded in no-man's land. These were called Pakistanis until before 1971, then they were Bangladeshis but as a matter of fact they are Muslims that the BJP regime needs to expel out to convert this border area into a Hindu majority vote bank in order to succeed in this electoral democracy.

The Islamic verdict is clear and the state bears an active responsibility of protection over every soul within its territory, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. The Prophet Muhammad (saw) declared:

«من آذى ذميا فقد آذاني ومن أذاني فقد أذى الله»

“Whoever harms a dhimmi [a non-Muslim under Islamic governance] harms me, and whoever harms me has harmed Allah” (Tabarani), meaning the state's covenant of protection is a matter of divine accountability, not mere politics.

Historically, the Islamic Caliphate institutionalised this principle in remarkable ways. Under Umar ibn al-Khattab (ra), the second Caliph, the displaced and persecuted peoples, including Christians and Jews, were granted aman (safe passage and security) and their properties and lives were placed under state protection. During the Abbasid Caliphate, scholars recorded that non-Muslim merchants, migrants, and refugees traversing Islamic lands enjoyed legal standing and recourse before Islamic courts. The Ottoman Caliphate, at its height, became a formal refuge for the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492, with Sultan Bayezid II reportedly saying that the Spanish king had impoverished his own kingdom by expelling such productive people. This tradition stands in stark contrast to what India's BJP government is doing today: not merely refusing protection, but actively weaponizing the state apparatus, its citizenship laws, its border forces, and now its rivers against Muslims.

What is unfolding on the India-Bangladesh border is not border security, it is the systematic dehumanisation of a religious section dressed in the language of the nation-state. The crocodile proposal is not an aberration; it is the logical endpoint of a decade-long campaign that turned citizenship into a weapon, migration into a slur, and Muslim lives into a political instrument unless these in-between borders are removed again as in pre-colonial era under a Caliphate (Khilafah).