When India passed the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in 2019, there were reasons to be skeptical about its implications. The law’s exclusion of Muslim refugees seemed difficult to reconcile with Articles 14 and 21 of the Indian Constitution, which guarantee equality before the law and protection of life and liberty to all persons. Coupled with the proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC), there was concern that poor and undocumented minorities — many of them native-born — might face disenfranchisement or detention.

Yet five years on, with the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that none of the worst-case predictions have materialized. There have been no mass detention camps, no sweeping disenfranchisement and no deportations on anything near the scale seen in the United States or even in Western Europe.

Implications of the CAA

India has no codified asylum law and is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention. The CAA, which offers a path to citizenship for non-Muslim minorities from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, is ethically troubling for its explicit exclusion of Muslims, including persecuted sects like Ahmadis, Shias and Hazaras.

India also fails to recognize atheists, queer people and political dissidents, all of whom may face real persecution in the region. Additionally, the CAA excludes asylum seekers from other jurisdictions, such as the Uyghurs from Xinjiang and persecuted Christian communities in Myanmar. There is a clear case for reforming the CAA to include these groups and make it consistent with India’s constitutional commitment to nondiscrimination and equal protection.

The CAA was not a diabolical master plan nor “fascist” ideological blueprint, but rather a kind of ad hoc triage — an attempt, however flawed, to deal with the overwhelming demographic and administrative pressures of undocumented migration, particularly from Bangladesh. Like much of India’s immigration policy, it was reactive and shaped more by logistical and political considerations than by any coherent doctrinal vision.

India’s role in immigration

India has long played a unique role as a receiving state in South Asia. During the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971, India took in an estimated ten million refugees, overwhelmingly Bangladeshi Hindus fleeing communal violence. Between 1971 and 2011, it was estimated that over 11 million Bangladeshi Hindus entered India. Today, at least two million still reside in the country.

Since the early 1970s, for which we have good data, there has been no counterbalancing of Indian Muslim asylum claims in the nearby Muslim-majority nations Bangladesh, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Oman or the Maldives. The number of Indian Muslims seeking asylum in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and the EU has also been statistically insignificant. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) records and national statistics for all these countries confirm this.

Au contraire, India continues to host significant refugee populations: over 100,000 Tibetans, including the Dalai Lama, approximately 95,000 Sri Lankan Tamils, Afghan and Myanmar minorities, and individuals such as the Bangladeshi feminist author Taslima Nasreen, as well as the Pakistan-born singer Adnan Sami, the latter granted full citizenship. Unlike its neighbors, India has extended sanctuary for decades, often without international financial or logistical support.

Migration around the globe

Despite this record, India is often singled out. In July 2025, The Washington Post ran the headline: “In India’s deportation drive, Muslim men recount being tossed into the sea.” To make matters worse, the article was reprinted subsequently by Genocide Watch! The article referred to boat repatriations of Rohingya that involved no deaths or injuries to anyone involved.

On the contrary, thousands of migrants — mostly from Muslim-majority states — have drowned since 2015 in the Mediterranean due to Frontex-supported border practices. The US deports mostly Hispanics from Central America. Australia continues to detain asylum seekers offshore, many of them Muslim. Yet we do not see headlines accusing these countries of “deporting Catholics” or “tossing Muslims into the sea.”

Pakistan has embarked on the deportation of 1.7 million undocumented Afghans, unprecedented in postwar history. The Washington Post’s headline would appear grotesque if applied to the United States, the EU or any comparable democracy, or even to Pakistan. Yet, such language is reserved for India, where humanitarian inconsistencies are interpreted not as flaws of governance, but as actions of a “genocidal state.”

To be fair, India deported approximately 192 Rohingya in May 2025. Its pushbacks of undocumented Bangladeshis are far more numerous, amounting to tens of thousands annually, according to the Border Security Force. These actions frequently occur without formal legal proceedings, raising genuine due process concerns and sometimes imperiling Indian Bengali-speaking Muslims.

Recent evidence demonstrates that Rohingya camps in Bangladesh are being used by groups like the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) and the Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO) to recruit, smuggle meth and train fighters. The 2025 Crisis Group report links these groups to Myanmar’s ongoing civil war. India, bordering the narcotics-trafficking Golden Triangle in Myanmar, fears militant and narcotics spillover — reframing the Rohingya issue as both a humanitarian crisis and a regional security threat.

Still, the scale of deportations from India pales in comparison to other democracies, operating with vastly greater capacity and international legitimacy — and with less scrutiny. The US deported over 271,000 people last year. Frontex, the EU’s border agency, carried out more than 86,000 forced or voluntary returns in 2022. Australia has kept over 3,000 asylum seekers in offshore facilities since 2013.

Reframing the refugee framework in India

Without a doubt, India needs a more coherent refugee framework. One viable option is adopting a differentiated risk framework, akin to what Germany has implemented, which prioritizes vulnerable groups for protection while retaining case-by-case scrutiny. Another is establishing an independent asylum determination body, much like Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board, which separates executive discretion from legal adjudication and increases transparency.

India’s refugee policy is flawed — at times exclusionary and often inconsistent. Like many democracies, India struggles with migration, state capacity and identity. Islamophobic rhetoric and anti-immigrant hysteria do exist in India, and in some cases, mirror the nativist panic and punitive enforcement patterns seen in the US under the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), or the securitized asylum discourse in Europe and Australia.

But this is precisely why nuance is important. India belongs squarely within the global democratic conversation on asylum, borders and belonging, not outside it. Vilification as a genocidal anti-Muslim ethnocracy — instead of well-deserved criticism of its legal and structural limitations — is neither factually grounded nor helpful in light of genuine border control imperatives around terrorism and narcotics.

[Natalie Sorlie edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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