An ‘indigenous’ Assamese woman was pushed into Bangladesh. A year later, she is still stuck there

In June last year, Jakia Begum found an elderly woman sitting by a road in a neighbourhood in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh.

She was drenched in the rain, and weeping. She appeared to have injured her hand.

Jakia Begum’s daughter Klanti Akhtar told Scroll: “She could not tell us how she had ended up here. When we asked her about her home, she said she was from Nalbari.”

Akhtar, a 28-year-old woman from Dhaka’s Mirpur locality, had never heard of Nalbari before. “We thought it was a place in Dhaka or somewhere in Bangladesh.”

Moved by her plight, Jakia and her daughter brought the woman home. It was only later that Akhtar googled Nalbari and realised that the woman they had rescued was from Assam, India.

Sakina Begum, the 69-year-old woman from Nalbari, does not remember how she ended up in the Dhaka neighbourhood of Mirpur.

All she remembers is being taken from a police station in Assam to India’s largest detention centre in Matia – and then pushed across the border near Dhubri district into Bangladesh.

The days after are blurry in her memory. She boarded a bus and asked the conductor to take her to Nalbari – and somehow made it to Dhaka, over 500 km away.

“I told them [Jakia and her daughter]...

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