— ✍️ Uthara U.R.

On July 4th, Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in Trinidad and Tobago with gifts: a replica of the Ram Mandir and a vial of holy water from Prayagraj, drawn from the Sangam during the Maha Kumbh. Alongside these offerings, he announced the extension of Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI) eligibility to sixth-generation Indian-origin Trinidadians, a gesture framed as a tribute to shared heritage.

“We deeply value the strength and support of our diaspora,” PM Modi said. “With over 35 million people spread across the world, the Indian diaspora is our pride... each one of you is a Rashtradoot, an ambassador of India’s values, culture, and heritage.” Roughly 35% of Trinidad and Tobago’s population traces its ancestry to indentured labourers from India, mainly from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. They arrived on ships like the Fatel Razack between 1838 and 1917. Uprooted by colonial policy, they were sent to work on sugar plantations. They brought with them Bhojpuri, deities, and rituals—fragments of home. Over generations, these reshaped into a Caribbean identity.

Modi’s visit to Port of Spain was rich in symbolism, meant to honour shared heritage and highlight India’s global cultural influence.
But the contrast is hard to miss. While Indian-origin families thousands of kilometres away are being celebrated, minorities within India continue to face harassment, surveillance, and wrongful detention, often on the suspicion of being “illegal immigrants.”

In the same week as Modi’s Trinidad outreach, six residents of Cooch Behar in West Bengal, legally resettled after the 2015 India–Bangladesh enclave exchange, were picked up by Delhi Police and branded “Bangladeshis.” They were released only after producing documents that should never have been in doubt: Aadhaar cards, voter IDs, and proof of legal citizenship. But that’s only one layer of a deeper pattern of profiling and erasure.

Recent reports from Cooch Behar reveal that Indian citizens were deported at gunpoint by the Border Security Force (BSF). According to Maktoob, at least four Muslim men from Dinhata block were abducted by BSF personnel, taken to the border at night, and forcibly pushed into Bangladesh, despite having valid documentation.

At Home, Under Suspicion

This is no one-off error. The pattern is spreading. This week, on July 9th, Jharsuguda police in Odisha detained 444 migrant workers for “verification” on suspicion of being Bangladeshi or Rohingya. The detainees, mostly employed in construction, mining, and industrial work, were held in two separate centres under directives from the Ministry of Home Affairs. Odisha’s BJP-led government has constituted Special Task Forces in every district, each with a Foreigners Registration Officer (FRO), to identify and deport so-called “undocumented” migrants. An old jail in Athagarh has even been earmarked as a permanent holding centre.

These actions come just days after West Bengal accused Odisha of illegally detaining nearly 100 of its migrant workers. Officials in Bengal alleged that these citizens were falsely profiled based on language and appearance. The BJP, which came to power in Odisha in 2024, has since been running a sustained campaign alleging large-scale infiltration by “Bangladeshi and Rohingya” migrants. This narrative now seems to be shaping administrative policy.

Suspicion, here, is directed at the working class, the Muslim, the Bengali-speaking, the barefoot.
In Assam, the AIUDF has formally accused state authorities of routinely interrogating and detaining Bengali-speaking Muslims, often without legal basis. A memorandum submitted to the governor in late May highlighted how people with valid voter cards, Aadhaar, and land records suffered “trauma, indignity, and reputational damage.”

West Bengal MP Samirul Islam went further, pointing out that in BJP-led states, citizens are being rounded up without any police records or verification from state governments. Indeed, public reports from late May show that over 300 Bengali-speaking Muslims were secretly detained, and approximately 145 reportedly “disappeared,” with allegations that many were forcibly pushed into Bangladesh without due process. One survivor recounted to Al Jazeera how detainees were “sunk into a swamp” near the border and threatened with rubber bullets by BSF officials.

At the same time in Rajasthan, 13 Bengali-speaking migrant workers, children among them, were detained for more than a week at a brick kiln despite presenting authentic documents. Local NGOs raised strong objections, questioning whether speaking Bengali amounted to a crime and demanding accountability.

These detentions aren’t confined to a few states. Migrants across Odisha, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, and Delhi report similar experiences—brutal interrogations, humiliation, wrongful accusations that hinge on language, dress, and appearance, not documentation.

Perhaps most disturbing are the reports of Indian citizens, especially elderly Bengali-speaking Muslims, being deported at gunpoint by the BSF. The Guardian chronicled the ordeal of 62-year-old Hazera Khatun, a physically disabled grandmother from Assam, who, despite carrying Aadhaar and voter ID proving two generations of Indian citizenship, was picked up on May 25 and forced into Bangladesh at gunpoint along with others.

Selective Inclusion

At the heart of this contradiction lies the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, or CAA, passed in 2019, notified in March 2024, and marketed by the state as a humanitarian law. On paper, it offers fast-tracked Indian citizenship to undocumented migrants from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh—but only to those who are Hindu, Sikh, Christian, Jain, Parsi, or Buddhist. Muslims are conspicuously excluded.

The state insists that the CAA is a protective measure for persecuted minorities in neighbouring countries. But its deeper impact is domestic: it renders Muslim identity itself a red flag within India’s own borders. Bengali-speaking Muslims, many born in India, some whose families have lived here for generations, are still vulnerable to profiling, wrongful detention, and the looming threat of statelessness.

For them, there is no legal pathway to regularisation. No symbolic gesture. No replica of anything.

And that raises a fundamental question: why is India offering Overseas Citizenship to sixth-generation Indo-Trinidadians, descendants of indentured migrants who left nearly two centuries ago, while treating its own citizens, just a few states east, as suspects?

This is ideological selectivity. Increasingly, the state’s vision of citizenship appears governed not by law or lived history, but by religion, loyalty, and political utility. When ancestry is Hindu and far away, it is honoured. When it is Muslim and nearby, it becomes a liability.

Modi’s foreign diplomacy today is steeped in cultural performance. It is not policy, but symbolism, that travels best.
But the very symbols that build bridges abroad are used to build barricades at home. The Ram Mandir itself was born from the demolition of a mosque and decades of violent, state-sponsored communal violence. Its inauguration in January 2024 was broadcast across the country like a national coronation. But it wasn’t a moment of shared pride—it marked the consolidation of Hindu majoritarianism.

The same state that exports sacred waters and temple replicas abroad now surveils and detains its own citizens in the name of purity and security.
This is deliberate political messaging. The PM may speak in gentler tones on foreign soil, but the story remains the same: India is Brahmanical Hindu first. The narrative is tailored for its audience, but the underlying frame does not shift.

In Port of Spain, faith builds bridges.
In Delhi, it builds barricades.

Who Belongs in Modi’s India?

This is the question at the centre of it all: what kind of citizenship is being redrawn today? Who belongs, and who doesn’t? Who gets embraced as part of the Indian story, and who gets written out?

As Modi courts the diaspora with temple replicas and expanded OCI access, the message is consistent: belonging is extended to those who are culturally aligned, geographically distant, and politically useful. Meanwhile, within India, millions—Muslims, Dalits, Adivasis, migrants—are subjected to suspicion, surveillance, and exclusion.

This isn’t simply a contrast between diaspora celebration and domestic repression. It is the consolidation of a state-sanctioned identity, one that privileges a curated, Sanskritised, Brahmanical version of Indianness. This is the grammar of Hindutva, now embedded in both policy and performance.

The Modi government’s international posturing is theatrical. Cultural symbols—replicas of the Ram Mandir, vials of Sangam water, speeches on civilisational kinship—are deployed as tools of soft power. They construct a global image of India as spiritually Hindu and culturally ancient. But beneath the iconography lies an exclusionary project that recodes “Indianness” as Brahmanical, majoritarian, and non-negotiable.

The very symbols sent abroad to connect with the diaspora are wielded at home to isolate, surveil, and punish. The image of the Ram Mandir itself unites those abroad while dividing those within. It is at once a diplomatic gift and a domestic warning.

Through laws like the CAA and processes like the NRC, through the selective application of justice, through the silence on hate crimes and lynchings, the Indian state has reframed Muslim existence as provisional.

What we are witnessing is the rise of a state that functions both as sovereign authority and cultural curator, determining not just who is governed, but who is grievable, who is visible, and who is remembered.

You cannot sanctify identity abroad while criminalising it at home. The replica of a temple cannot hide the silence of detention centres. The holy water from Sangam cannot purify the erosion of constitutional promise.

And no matter how far you carry the Ganga, it cannot wash away injustice at home.

- Uthara U.R. is a Master's Student at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of The Mooknayak.