Dignity Deported: Uproar Over First Batch of 104 ‘Illegal’ Indian Immigrants Sent Back to India in Shackles 

This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end…
– Jim Morrison

If I had been Jim Morrison, I would sing once again, that old is gold ‘whiskey bar’ song, lyrics slightly altered:

Show me, again, the two ‘Red Eyes’ (laal aankhein)…
Oh, don’t ask why, Oh don’t ask why…
for if you don’t gonna show me your two ‘Red Eyes’…
I tell you we must die, I tell you, we must die…
I tell you, I tell you, I tell you we must die…

The soul-stirring music does not fade away in Jim Morrison’s mind-blowing songs. It enters the fingers and eyes, the intestines and the nervous system, pulsates like an unrequited, insatiable, explosive longing, beats like a drum beat in mad despair and passion.

This is the end, my friend, he sings another apocalyptic song, but this is not the end. There is no end to this beginning.

It’s just that in this case, it tells us of shackles, chains, and abject humiliation of hard-working human beings chasing an El Dorado, while some of them ate with their hands chained, while others had to walk in shackles to piss.

Terrified. Terrorized.

Red Eyes?

In a land where white invaders turned colonizers enacted ritualistic genocides of the great indigenous civilizations of natives, which flourished there for centuries, the U.S. Border Patrol Chief Micheal W Banks had the audacity to release a slick video of those deported, declaring that they are “aliens” — “if you cross illegally, you will be removed.”

I mean this is not a morbid, AI-driven Hollywood flick with some goddamned ‘aliens’ inside a not-so-cosy American bedroom; this is a tangible, anti-cathartic moment, a real episode ‘on air’ for 40 long hours, with an American army aircraft deporting helpless Indians, in the most degrading manner.

Such a scenario was last seen in history, perhaps, when shackled Black men and women from Africa were sold to utterly ugly white traders with dirty teeth and filthy minds, in bustling slave markets of America — like cattle. Check their teeth, like horses, the ‘ugly teeth’ would say; that would suggest a healthy body!

This seems to be the perverse nostalgia that drives the toxic adrenaline of the white supremacist, sexist, and racist fan clubs of Donald Trump — getting drugged on MAGA — Make America Great Again!

And this is the first batch of 104 ‘illegal’ Indian immigrants. Around 18,000 are meant to be deported. According to reports, there are 700,000 plus Indians in the U.S. with no proper documents. A large chunk from Gujarat — the homeland of the PM, and his best buddy, the Union home minister. Both are from Gujarat.

Red Eyes?

Of the 104, 33 are from Gujarat, 30 from Punjab, and 33 from Haryana, plus, from UP, Chandigarh and Maharashtra. This group included 19 women, 13 minors, a four-year-old boy, and two girls, ages — five and seven. One woman, who paid ₹1 crore to a human trafficking crook, was trapped in sleazy conditions in sundry South American countries, and then illegally pushed inside the U.S. She had a son with her. She was chained and sent back.

So, did they do the same with the little boy and the two little girls? Did they put them in chains and shackles?

“They treated us like criminals,” said Sukhpal Singh. “If we would try to stand because our legs were swelling due to the handcuffs, they would yell at us to sit down.”

“We were handcuffed and our legs were chained throughout the journey. These were opened at the Amritsar airport,” said Jaspal Singh.

Indeed, Harwinder Singh could write a tragic sequel to ‘Around the World with fake documents’. From a village in Hoshiarpur in Punjab, he crossed Qatar, Peru, Colombia, Brazil, Nicaragua, Panama, and Mexico. From the Mexican border, he entered the US. 

“We crossed hills. A boat, which was taking him along with other persons, was about to capsize in the sea, but we survived,” he told the media.

In the last four years, under the current regime in Delhi, Indians entering the U.S. — illegally — have risen sharply — from 8,027 in 2018-19, to 96,917 in 2022-23, as per official statistics. How come Delhi could not see what was coming?

The “treatment of Indian nationals, dragging them like criminals like this is unprecedented,” said former diplomat, Anil Trigunayat, who has served in the U.S. He told Al Jazeera: “Handcuffing and those kinds of things are inhuman essentially. They have shown a very crass side of the American establishment. This is crass language. And absolutely unjustified and unnecessary.”

Predictably, the opposition took this ‘Red Eyes’ government to task. Rahul Gandhi posted a social media post with a deportee telling his horror story. In Parliament, there was an uproar.

Typically, in a lackluster response, the External Affairs Minister, S Jaishankar, stated that the government was working with the Trump administration to ensure that Indian citizens are not mistreated. He said that the US’s operating procedure had allowed the “use of restraints” while deporting since 2012 and “there has been no change from past procedure”. He said Delhi was informed that women and children were not restrained and their demands during transit, including food, medical attention, and toilet breaks, were attended to.

Al Jazeera reports the contrary (February 7, 2025): “That was not the experience of Khusboo Patel, a 35-year-old from Modi’s home state in Gujarat, on the 40-hour journey back home, her family said… “She was shackled in chains her whole journey, strictly restricted to her seat,” her elder brother, Varun Patel, told Al Jazeera from his home in Vadodara, a city in eastern Gujarat…

… Khusboo had been in the U.S. barely for a month when she was detained by the authorities. “We were not aware of her whereabouts and it made us anxious,” Patel, the brother, said. The family learned about Khusboo’s return when local media reached out…  “She told us that they were brought in like prisoners and criminals,” he said. “Nobody harmed her, but it was a horrifying experience.”

…Patel said he was disappointed in the Modi government’s failure to “secure a dignified return of our citizens. “What can they do for us now? That time is gone. Our government enabled this mistreatment.”

If there is a ‘certificate of honor’ given to Mr M, here it is, from a family in Gujarat.

Compare this to the response of the gutsy president of Columbia. First, he refused to allow U.S. military planes with deportees to land in his country. They were sent back!

Gustavo Petro, a Leftist, said categorically that the US “cannot treat Colombian migrants as criminals”. He was ready to send his presidential plane to the US to transport the migrants “with dignity”. He disclosed that over 15,000 undocumented Americans are living in Columbia, but he would not do what Trump is doing — raids, arrests, forcible deportations.

In a classic Latin American response on X, while tracing the literary tradition of the “land of butterflies”, he reminded of Columbia’s Noble Prize-winning novelist, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the rebel legend, Aureliano Buendia, in his magic-realism epic, One Hundred Years of Solitude. He wrote: “I don’t like traveling to the US, it’s a bit boring.”

“Maybe one day, over a glass of whiskey, which I accept, despite my gastritis, we can talk frankly about this, but it’s difficult because you consider me an inferior race, and I’m not, nor is any Colombian. So if you know someone who is stubborn, that’s me, period.”

Petro threw an open challenge to Trump: “You can try to carry out a coup with your economic strength and your arrogance like they did with (Salvador) Allende (former Chilean president). But I will die in my law, I resisted torture and I resist you. I don’t want slavers next to Colombia, we already had many and we freed ourselves. What I want next to Colombia are lovers of freedom…”

Mr. M is slated to travel to Washington, D.C., and meet Trump on February 12, 2025. So, will he tell his “My dear friend”, a piece of his mind?

Or, will it be all, another media gimmick?

(This story was first published in lokmarg.com and republished with permission.)

---

Amit Sengupta is a journalist and teacher based in Delhi.