The rising number of illegal immigrants and a court indictment against a Bangladeshi national over the past 48 hours highlight Karnataka’s pressing problem of what to do with these individuals.

Individuals face imminent deportation under the National Register of Citizens (NRC). There is, however, no clear direction on how to do this, experts said.

On Sunday afternoon, a 24-year-old man wielding an Indian passport was arrested at the Kempegowda International Airport on charges of being a Bangladeshi citizen living in India illegally.

Mohammed Arif Bishi Ghazi, 24, was taken into custody as he attempted to board a flight to Kuala Lumpur.

Checking Ghazi’s documents, immigration officials at the airport were stunned to discover that Gazi was, in fact, one M D Arif Hussein, a Bangladeshi citizen living illegally in India.

“We found that Ghazi had earlier travelled to Malaysia in October 2018 using his Bangladeshi documents, and through that, we discovered that he had used forged identity documents to procure a bona fide Indian passport,” the airport police said.

Two days after Ghazi was taken into custody, a second Bangladesh national, Khadija, 27, who was arrested in 2016 on charges of living illegally in India. On Tuesday, she was sentenced by the civil sessions court to five years’ imprisonment. The court further ruled that Khadija, a native of Manirampur in Bangladesh, must be physically deposited across the border at the conclusion of her sentence.

This order comes close on the heels of a deportation order passed against a group of 80 Bangladesh nationals arrested last month.

Catch-22

“That court order was unprecedented,” said a source helping detainees with legal services. Another hinted that the precedence had been set because of the auspices of the NRC, which is criminalising illegal immigrants, primarily Bangladeshis.

“There is clear intent to deport these people, but the actual order has not yet come from the Foreign Regional Registration Office (FRRO),” the source added.

To a question, Labhu Ram, of the FRRO, asked DH to contact the Deputy Commissioner of Police. A source, however, specified that the police were awaiting instructions from the FRRO. “As a consequence, the deportations are being postponed week to week,” the source said.

Many eminent persons have warned that the deportation exercise will push the migrants to a Catch-22 situation.

At an event to discuss the NRC on Monday, historian Ramachandra Guha noted that no repatriation agreement exists between the two countries. “Dhaka has already declared that the NRC is an internal Indian problem,” he had said.