Skip to content

Worse Than Trump: India is Deporting Its Own Citizens | With Abhishek Saha

Indian authorities have been rounding up Muslim citizens and deporting them with horrific callousness, sometimes going as far as pushing them off of boats into the ocean.

Worse Than Trump: India is Deporting Its Own Citizens | With Abhishek Saha

The world is rightly horrified by how US President Trump is deporting people, including minors, without due process. Something similar is underway in India, but worse and under the radar. Even since the border skirmishes between India and Pakistan this year, Indian authorities have been rounding up Muslim citizens and deporting them on the spurious grounds that they either Pakistani or Bangladeshi infiltrators.

Abhishek Saha is an Indian journalist and author of No Land's People. He joins us on the show to discuss the devastating impact of India's forced deportations.

Read No Land's People: https://harpercollins.co.in/product/no-lands-people/

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/newsletters/

In Solidarity is openDemocracy’s podcast about people, power, and politics. Support the show by visiting https://www.openDemocracy.net/donate/

Credits:

Presented by Aman Sethi

Edited and produced by James Battershill, Ayodeji Rotinwa & Carla Abreu

Theme song ‘Odyssey’ performed by Edward Abela

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction

01:44 What's happening in India?

05:02 Why Bangladesh?

07:05 The global pushback against migration

12:39 Punishing inherited people

14:42 Who determines what people are 'undesirable'

17:50 Identifying outsiders

21:48 Abusing bureaucracy


openDemocracy Author

Aman Sethi

Aman Sethi is editor-in-chief of openDemocracy. Before joining us he was deputy executive editor at HuffPost. Before that he was the executive editor for strategy at BuzzFeed, editorial director with Coda Media, editor-in-chief of HuffPost India, associate editor with the Hindustan Times, and foreign correspondent (Africa) and Chhattisgarh correspondent with The Hindu. His award-winning reportage both in India and around the world has touched on some of the most pressing issues of our time, such as migration, land grabs, labour rights, public health, nationalism, democracy and insurgency. He is the author of the critically acclaimed non-fiction book ‘A Free Man’.

All articles

More in Interview

See all

More from Aman Sethi

See all