Night deportations and daylight denials by Mary Long

There are moments when a government's actions reveal more than any speech ever could. Reports of Indian border guards forcing thousands of Muslims of Bangladeshi origin across the Bangladesh border under the cover of darkness paint a disturbing picture of a country increasingly willing to replace due process with intimidation. If people are truly living in India illegally, every sovereign nation has the right to enforce its immigration laws. But there is a profound difference between lawful deportation and midnight expulsions that leave women and children abandoned between borders as though they are disposable.

According to the accounts emerging from the frontier, families are allegedly being pushed through gates in the dead of night, left stranded in uncertainty without proper legal procedures or humanitarian safeguards. Such scenes belong to the pages of history that democratic societies promised never to repeat, not to the world's largest democracy in the twenty-first century.

The timing raises equally uncomfortable questions. These expulsions reportedly accelerated after the Bharatiya Janata Party secured political gains in West Bengal. Whether coincidence or calculated political messaging, the symbolism is impossible to ignore. Immigration has increasingly become an emotional political weapon, one capable of mobilizing votes by identifying convenient scapegoats. When governments discover that fear wins elections, compassion is often the first casualty.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has long faced accusations from critics that his administration has blurred the line between national security and religious majoritarianism. Supporters argue that the government is merely protecting India's borders and enforcing laws against illegal immigration. Every country is entitled to secure its frontiers. But laws derive their legitimacy not simply from enforcement but from fairness, transparency and respect for human dignity.

The concern is that religion increasingly appears to determine who is viewed as a threat and who is welcomed. When the overwhelming focus falls upon Muslims, whether they are Rohingya refugees or people of Bangladeshi origin, it becomes increasingly difficult to dismiss accusations of selective targeting. Policies may be written in bureaucratic language, but their impact is measured in human lives.

Children do not understand geopolitics. Mothers carrying frightened infants across dark fields are not symbols in ideological battles. Elderly men separated from decades of memories are not statistics to be celebrated at political rallies. They are human beings caught in a struggle where identity has become more important than humanity.

History repeatedly teaches that governments rarely begin by stripping rights from everyone. They start with groups portrayed as outsiders, burdens or threats. Once society accepts exceptional treatment for one community, exceptional measures slowly become ordinary. Democracies do not collapse overnight; they erode through countless decisions justified as necessary, temporary or patriotic.

India has every right to determine who may legally reside within its borders. No reasonable observer disputes that principle. But the strength of a democracy is demonstrated not by how firmly it controls its borders but by how faithfully it upholds justice while doing so. Deportation carried out without transparency, legal safeguards and respect for human rights diminishes the values that democratic governments claim to defend.

A nation confident in its laws has no need to conduct expulsions in darkness. When people disappear into the night instead of appearing before the law, the darkness becomes more than a setting. It becomes a symbol of a government that increasingly seems comfortable allowing fear, division and religious prejudice to guide policies that should instead be governed by justice and humanity.