NEW DELHI: India has deported without trial to Bangladesh hundreds of people, according to officials from both sides, drawing condemnation from activists and lawyers who call the recent expulsions illegal and based on ethnic profiling.

New Delhi says the people deported are undocumented migrants.

The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has long taken a hardline stance on immigration particularly those from Bangladesh with top officials referring to them as `termites` and `infiltrators`.

It has also sparked fear among India`s estimated 200 million Muslims, especially among speakers of Bengali.

`Muslims, particularly from the eastern part of the country, are terrified,` said veteran Indian rights activist Harsh Mander.

`You have thrown millions into this existential fear.

Bangladesh, largely encircled by land by India, has seen relations with New Delhi turn icy since a mass uprising last year toppled Dhaka`s government, a former friend of India.

But India also ramped up operations against migrants after a wider security crackdown in the wake of the killing of 26 people, mainly tourists, in an attack in Pahalgam, occupied Kashmir, on April 22.

Indian authorities launched an unprecedented countrywide security drive that has seen many thousands detained and many of them eventually pushed across the border to Bangladesh at gunpoint.

`Do not dare` Rahima Begum, from Assam state, said police detained her for several days late last month before taking her to the Bangladesh frontier. She said she and her family had spent their life in India.

`I have lived all my life here my parents, my grandparents, they are all from here,` she said. `I don`t know why they would do this to me.

Indian police took Rahima Begum, along with five other people, all Muslims, and forced them into swampland in the dark. `They showed us a village in the distance and told us to crawl there,` she said.

`They said:`Do not dare to stand and walk, or we will shoot you`.

Bangladeshi locals who found the group then handed them to border police who `thrashed` them and ordered they return to India, she added.

`As we approached the border, there was firing from the other side,` said the 50-year-old.

`We thought: `This is the end. We are all going to die`.` She survived, and, a week after she was first picked up, she was dropped back home in Assam with a warning to keep quiet.

`Ideological hate campaign` Rights activists and lawyers criticised India`s drive as `lawless`.

`You cannot deport people unless there is a country to accept them,` said New Delhi-based civil rights lawyer Sanjay Hegde. Indian law does not allow for people to be deported without due process, he added.

Bangladesh has said India has pushed more than 1,600 people across its border since last month.

Indian media suggests the number could be as high as 2,500. The Bangladesh Border Guards said it has sent back 100 of those pushed across because they were Indian citizens. India has been accused of forcibly deporting Muslim Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, with navy ships dropping them off the coast of the wartorn nation.AFP