Investigation

How Indian Citizens Became 'Illegal Migrants' (Long Read Edition)

A second look at Sunali Khatun’s deportation, written for the long-read template.

By Adrija Bose, Srijit Das & Rohan Seth
9 min read
22 Nov 2025
How Indian Citizens Became 'Illegal Migrants' (Long Read Edition)

A border crossing in West Bengal. · Photo: BOOM

Editorial Note: Why read this

The same investigation, presented with serif typography and a narrower reading column.

Sunali Khatun, an Indian citizen, was held in a Bangladeshi jail for five months after Indian authorities deported her without an inquiry. Her case, examined alongside at least a dozen others from West Bengal in 2025, suggests a deportation process that has stopped doing the verification it was designed to do.

How the case unfolded

She was picked up in a routine sweep and processed for deportation within five days. The paperwork was in English; the interview was in Hindi. No Indian authority cross-checked her name against the electoral roll she has been on since 2019, or the Aadhaar she has held since 2014. Her family learned where she was only after Bangladeshi officials, finding her documentation in order, allowed her one phone call home.

What the courts found

When the Calcutta High Court reviewed the case in September 2025, it called the procedure "compressed beyond recognition" and ordered the state to identify every similar removal in the past three years. Thirteen names came back. All thirteen carried Indian documentation.

Indian citizens are not supposed to be deported. That a process designed to remove non-citizens reached Sunali at all suggests one of two failures: a verification step that does not function, or a procedural step that has been removed. Both deserve a longer look than they have received so far.

#Digital Rights #Immigration

Edited by Kabir Singh

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About the authors
Adrija Bose

Adrija covers digital rights, surveillance, and the systems that determine who gets to belong. She joined Decode after seven years at India's national press, where her reporting on the Aadhaar identity programme won the Red Ink Award for human rights journalism.

Srijit Das

Srijit works the data side of Decode's labour and platform desks — wage transparency, gig-economy enforcement, and the algorithms that decide who gets hired. He holds a master's in public policy from the National Institute of Public Finance and joined Decode in 2024.

Rohan Seth

Rohan writes about state surveillance, facial recognition deployments, and how platforms negotiate with regulators in India. Previously a tech reporter at The Hindu's Bangalore bureau, he joined Decode in 2025 to lead its surveillance accountability beat.