Jess Bidgood | Outsiders | EXPOSURE/Aftermath Workshop in Ajmer

EXPOSURE/Aftermath Workshop in Ajmer 

Mohammad Jamil has just returned from visiting his wife in prison.

He is a slight middle-aged man, wearing a worn plaid shirt. His daughter Jamila, 16, wears a clean powder-blue suit, while Zareena, 14, is shrouded in the black robe worn by married Muslim women in public.

The girls wear their best clothes to visit their mother, Tahila, who is being charged with a common and highly tabooed crime: living illegally in India as a Bangaldeshi national.

But Tahila had an Indian passport. Her arrest, rooted in a neighborly grudge and made possible by widespread institutional corruption and deep-seeded resentment of Bangladeshis living in India.

In 2007, a bomb blast at the Dargah, ascribed to the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al Islami, a terrorist group active in Bangladesh, led to a police “crackdown” on illegal immigration. The past years have also seen the insitution of “push back policy”, the mostly undocumented practice of informally deporting individuals suspected of Bangladeshi origins. These practices force immigrants into a shadowy, fearful existence, paying bribes and facing prejudice, jail, or even death for the crime of not belonging.

The Jamils live in Ajmer, a city nestled in the foothills of dry Rajasthan. Home to the Sharif Dargah, India’s most important Muslim shrine, it is a center of gravity for Muslims in India—both tourists and immigrants alike.

To leave the Dargah and walk towards the edges of the city takes one towards Taraghar. It doesn’t sell religious relics or the more expensive saris and cookware found in the rest of the city; here, you buy a single package of milk, bags of chips, cheap shawls. The further out you go, the less expensive it gets, because this is where the poor people live. Eventually, when you hit the dry, open outskirts of the city, you find the slums.

Bangladeshi nationals are everywhere and nowhere throughout this area. Hardly anyone, it would seem, is actually from Ajmer. They say they are from West Bengal, the Bayr State, Calcutta, all on the India side of the India-Bangladesh border. Locals, however, say that virtually everyone is from outside of the country.

So haziness and suspicion about national origins becomes a norm. What is clear, though, is that people flock to Ajmer—and that they are not wanted there. Musavir Hussein says he came here from the Byar state twenty years ago. His home, he said, offered him no economic opportunity. “Here you have the Dargah, you have tourists and businesspeople. So you can get your bread and butter.”

Mona Bibi traveled to Ajmer 15 years ago from Calcutta when she was unable to provide a dowry to her husband. “There is a lot of work here. I can work as a servant in a house,” she says, “plus, at home I would never be able to get the food that I get here for free,” referring to the food donations that are a regular part of worship at the Dargah.

But because of the crackdown and the threat of push-back, living here involves increasing fear and the paying of bribes to a corrupt police force.

Bibi remembers how, shortly after the bombing, she was visited by police who suspected her of being an illegal immigrant. She was told to pay them or face serious consequences. When she could not pay, “They came back. And they broke our houses, they broke everything.”

Hussein says that other locals have taken advantage of the atmosphere of suspicion towards the immigrants. “There are local guys, not police, who take 200 rupees from us or they break our homes and beat us,” he says. “They are the local Muslims and we bend before them. They don’t care how critical our condition is.”

Police and vigilante bribery flourish under the culture of fear that the push-back policy creates. Carol Geeta, who works with at SASVIKA, an NGO that campaigns against police torture, explains that many immigrants to Ajmer—from India and Bangladesh alike—lack the documentation to prove where they are actually from.

But many people’s lack of documentation goes back much further—to the partition of India and the seemingly arbitrary divisions it created.

For police under pressure to assuage terrorism fears by deporting immigrants, however, it is easier to unofficially deport unofficial illegal immigrants.

The town controller, the town's highest elected official, says most of the Bangladeshis are gone now, but raids still happen a couple of times a year. The border police say they have deported maybe 70 families since the bomb blast, and that they only do so under official circumstances. The People's Union for Civil Liberties, India's largest human rights organization, says that the majority of the families arrested after the blast weren't verifiably Bangladeshi.

“The police hand over suspected Bangladeshis to the CID, who hand them over to the border forces, and they reach Bangladesh,” says Geeta.

Her organization is currently involved in a lawsuit against the Indian government, accusing them of committing police torture by practicing pushback policy. The case centers around a woman named Reziya. Although police were unable to verify her status as a legal or illegal immigrant, she and her family were unofficially deported to Bangladesh.

She and two of her grandchildren managed to make it back into India, where they were jailed.

But her husband and two more family members, stuck in Bangladesh and unable to prove any citizenship there, were shot and killed.

In Mohamad Jamil’s case, push-back was a weapon used to address a very different conflict: a dispute between neighbors over water.

Jamil sits on the bed in his two-room home, built of brick and concrete on a forgotten hillside by he and his wife many years ago. He is surrounded by documents: copies of his and her Indian passports, written affirmations of her Indian citizenship, the odd medical record.

He says that the landlord in their community held a grudge against their family, and so had a friend in the police hold his wife’s passport when she went to register for an election 15 months ago.

It was intended to scare them. “They began demanding money from us, which we didn’t have. They said she could have her passport back in exchange for sexual favors, but she was unwilling to do that,” he says, adding “She had just been to Mecca.”

Empowered by their possession of the passport, they ignored the other documents Jamil had to prove that he and his wife were legal and continued to make demands. “They began harassing us. One night they came and Tahila fell on to her knees, begging them to leave us alone. They kicked her face.”

Two months later, Tahila was pushed back, left in the jungle between Bangladesh and India. She managed to make it back and, like Raziya, was imprisoned.

She has remained there for 13 months. Her eldest daughter, Jamila, is now responsible for maintaining her families home.

She also works making roti at a local guest house. When she works there, she lives there, away from her family.

Jamil himself now faces charges of aiding and abetting an illegal immigrant. Numerous witnesses have been called against him and his wife; people who claim to have known her in Bangladesh when, he says, they never did.

Still, he remains hopeful that she will be freed.

If they are both convicted, they each face 4-5 years in prison. “The children,” he says, “would be orphaned.”

Upon release, it is likely that Tahila would be pushed back again.

Taraghar is an originless community, but still a community. Mohamad and Jamila's neighbors come by to check on the family, Muna  gossips with other women and they look after each other's kids.
 
I ask a man, Musavir Hussein, if he would ever leave Ajmer. He says he's worried about bribes and getting kicked out, but there is work here and this is home. After all, he's lived in this neighborhood for decades.