By Joanna Slater and Niha Masih

New Delhi, August 25, 2020: When Ahmed Ali arrived in India earlier this year, he was looking forward to a month of religious study with a little souvenir shopping on the side.

His trip did not go as planned.

Instead, Ali — a pharmacy technician from Buffalo — was among at least six Americans caught up in a sweeping crackdown on an Islamic movement after it emerged as an early source of coronavirus infections in this nation of 1.3 billion people.

Five months later, hundreds of foreigners belonging to the same religious group are still in India. Many were detained, accused of breaking the law and prevented from leaving the country.

Ali, 43, and three members of his family had their passports confiscated and were kept in institutional quarantine for weeks even after repeatedly testing negative for the novel coronavirus.

Now Indian authorities have offered Ali and others in the same situation a deal: Admit to violating the terms of their tourist visas, pay a $70 fine and they can go home. Dozens, including Ali, have refused.

“What did I do wrong?” Ali asked. “We followed the rules of India.”

Ali and his family are part of the Tablighi Jamaat, a century-old Islamic movement headquartered in Delhi that urges Muslims to model their lives on the ways of the prophet Muhammad. It has tens of millions of followers worldwide. Earlier this year, more than 2,500 foreign members of the group were visiting India, according to media reports.

They had no idea their lives would be upended by the pandemic. After India instituted a nationwide lockdown in late March, dozens of coronavirus cases were discovered among those stranded at the main Tablighi Jamaat center. Authorities traced and quarantined members of the group across the country to try to contain the outbreak.

Some members of India’s Hindu nationalist ruling party went further. They falsely accused members of the Tablighi Jamaat of deliberately spreading the virus and engaging in “corona jihad.” The rhetoric spurred a wave of scapegoating that cast Muslims — a religious minority in India — as the source of infections, sometimes with violent consequences.

Meanwhile, the government directed police nationwide to “take necessary legal action” against foreign members of the Tablighi Jamaat on allegations they violated visa regulations and flouted the law governing national disasters. It also announced they would be blacklisted from reentering India for 10 years.

In several states, such foreigners were kept in jails or quasi-detention for months. Many remained confined to institutional quarantine for weeks after they had tested negative for the virus — or long after they had recovered from it. Nearly all were prevented from returning home even when some flights became available.

A spokesman for India’s Ministry of Home Affairs did not respond to questions about the legal actions taken against members of the Tablighi Jamaat or why they were stopped from leaving the country.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi said its diplomats are in touch with “multiple U.S. citizens” arrested in connection with the probe. The embassy has also been in contact with the Indian government regarding the developments, she said.

Despite its strict lockdown, India’s coronavirus cases never stopped rising. It has recorded more than 2.9 million cases, behind only the United States and Brazil, and has the fourth-highest number of deaths in the world.

Back when Ali arrived in India, however, the country had fewer than 50 confirmed cases. A refugee from Myanmar who came to the United States in 2010, Ali has deep family ties to the Tablighi Jamaat. His great-grandfather, grandfather and father were all devotees but never visited its headquarters in Nizamuddin, a storied neighborhood in India’s capital.

Ali first made a solo trip to India in 2019. He enjoyed it so much that this year, he brought his wife and her parents. The couple’s three children stayed behind in Buffalo with their two aunts. When the lockdown was imposed in late March, Ali and his relatives were staying at a Tablighi-affiliated mosque in Delhi, where they slept in its common spaces.

Police stand guard at a quarantine facility in New Delhi for people associated with Tablighi Jamaat in April.

Police stand guard at a quarantine facility in New Delhi for people associated with Tablighi Jamaat in April. (Vipin Kumar/Hindustan Times/Getty Images)
In early April, police arrived and confiscated their passports and phones. They took the family to a school-turned-quarantine center, where three of them tested positive for the coronavirus despite having no symptoms.

Their next stop was Lok Nayak Hospital, a government-run facility dedicated to covid-19. Ali said he saw people coughing so hard they collapsed. A dead body was kept in the bed next to him for 24 hours, he said. Over two weeks, Ali tested negative for the virus three times.

While at the hospital, he was shocked to see headlines in a local newspaper blaming the Tablighi Jamaat for growing infections. “My head was just, like, blown,” he said.

The family spent another six weeks in a different quarantine center, where they again tested negative for the virus. In early June they were transferred to a shuttered school in Delhi, where they have stayed ever since.

Police filed charges against Tablighi Jamaat members across the country, saying they had violated their tourist visas. But tourists can attend religious gatherings, and the devotees say they were not engaging in any activities — such as public preaching — that would contravene visa rules pertaining to the Tablighi Jamaat. In some cases, authorities also accused them of disregarding the lockdown order and spreading infection.

Mohammed Ibrahim, a 24-year-old American citizen, spent weeks in a quarantine center before being jailed for 13 days in the state of Maharashtra. He was released on bail after a court said there was no proof he had violated his visa, nor any evidence that he ever had the virus.

Mohammed Jamal, 61, a truck driver from Buffalo, never tested positive for the virus but was kept in institutional quarantine for nearly two months. He said he had visited India four times on a tourist visa without any problem.

“We didn’t come to this country to commit some criminal act,” Jamal said. “We came to learn and visit our fellow Muslims.” Lower courts have already acquitted nearly 100 foreign nationals accused of violating their visas.

Those stuck in India include citizens of dozens of countries, from Mali to Kyrgyzstan to Malaysia. Now, months after the Indian government began its pursuit of the Tablighi Jamaat members, authorities are wrapping up cases against them.

In early August, police said 106 such foreigners in Kolkata could leave the country since they were no longer needed for the probe into Tablighi activities. They included an American green card holder who said he was not even a member of the Tablighi Jamaat but just happened to take shelter in an affiliated mosque because of the lockdown.

There was “an overreaction by some authorities,” said Salman Khurshid, a former government minister and lawyer who represented some of the Tablighis in a case in India’s Supreme Court. In Delhi, the charges against members of the movement have been largely “sorted out, with the intent that people can return to their homes.”

Ali and Jamal intend to fight the charges against them at trial, a process that could take another eight weeks. They’re both eager to return to their children back home. But they see their decision as a matter of principle.

“I just want to stand for justice,” Ali said.

(from the Washington Post)