On May 24, Monowara Bewa, a 60-year-old woman from Sukhatikhata village in Assam’s border district of Dhubri, was called to the local police station “just to record a statement.” She never returned home.
Now her son, 27-year-old Iunuch Ali, has filed an urgent habeas corpus petition in the Supreme Court of India, alleging that his mother has been unlawfully detained and is at imminent risk of being “pushed back” across the India-Bangladesh border—a move he claims is not just illegal, but a direct violation of multiple Supreme Court orders.
The top court has agreed to hear the matter next week.
Ali states in his petition, accessed by Maktoon, that he went to the Dhubri SP (Border) office the next day, 25 May, and was shown the orders of the Supreme Court to prove that her Civil Appeal is pending. However, the police officials refused to listen to the Petitioner or release his mother.
The petition, filed on May 30, seeks the immediate release of Monowara Bewa, who was declared a foreigner by a Foreigners’ Tribunal (FT) in 2016 but has a pending appeal in the Supreme Court.
In 2016, a Foreigners Tribunal in Dhubri declared her a foreigner, rejecting the documents she provided to prove her Indian lineage. That decision was upheld by the Gauhati High Court in 2017. But in 2017, the Supreme Court upheld the validity of Certificates issued by the Secretary of the Village Panchayat and granted leave against the order of the Hon’ble Gauhati High Court.
“There is a serious apprehension that the detenue may be subject to an illegal ‘pushback’ operation,” the petition states.
“The police cannot legitimize arrest by calling it as mere interrogation or routine investigation when the detainee has been in their custody since the evening of 24.05.2025, and has not been allowed any access to her family members.”
Bewa is among the hundreds of people detained in Assam in May, with several of them pushed back to the Bangladesh border allegedly without due process. The crackdown focused on people who were on bail after spending three years in detention camps.
An official reply in the Assam Legislative Assembly on January 22, 2022, listed Monowara Bewa among the 771 people released on bail as per Supreme Court orders, confirming her release date as December 28, 2019.
On February 4 this year, the Supreme Court directed the state government to start the process of deporting foreign nationals being held in the state’s detention centres immediately.
Petition challenge “push back”
But the petition points out that, law does not recognise ‘push back’; arresting foreign nationals and taking them to the international border and either casting them away or pushing them across international borders without any verification and acceptance by the authorities of the other country.
Earlier, the Assam government had stated on record that any deportation cannot be carried out without nationality verification forms being sent to the Ministry of External Affairs, and only after valid travel documents are received, any foreigner is handed over to the BSF for repatriation.
But critics allege that none of this has happened in the “push-back”. Despite this, the Supreme Court has refused to entertain a petition against the Assam government’s action, urging the petitioner to move to the Gauhati High Court.
Last week, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma admitted to “pushing back” persons who were declared foreigners to Bangladesh.
“We are duty bound to protect the interests of Assam and expel all illegal immigrants from the State through any means and as per directions of Supreme Court,” he said in a post on X.
“We remain committed to carry out our activities in this direction,” he declared.
Maktoob has reported that blood relatives of some of the expelled people claim they are Indians, and they were arbitrarily declared foreigners, against which they have appealed in court.
Debabrata Saikia, the Leader of the Opposition in the Assam Legislative Assembly, has raised significant concerns regarding the state government’s recent actions of “pushing back” allegedly undocumented migrants to Bangladesh. Saikia, in a letter to External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, alleged that the state’s actions appear to disproportionately target Muslim communities, undermining India’s secular fabric.
Since the push out, two Bengali ethnic Muslim women from Assam, who were allegedly forced into the no man’s land between India and Bangladesh by the Border Security Force, were brought back and returned to their homes, raising concerns about the screening for the action.
Shona Bhanu and Rahima Begum were among hundreds of Bengali-origin Muslims picked up and hastily pushed into Bangladesh territory.
According to The Indian Express, more than 2,000 alleged illegal Bangladeshi immigrants are estimated to have been “pushed back” across the border by Indian authorities since Operation Sindoor on May 7.
Last month, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) formally raised concerns with India regarding allegations of racial discrimination against Bengali-speaking Muslims in Assam.
