Boy looking for mother in Pakistan sent back to Bangladesh

“Ramzan left for Kolkata this evening, where he will be helped by the NGO Sanlaap to fly to Bangladesh where his father lives,” said Archana Sahay, who runs Umeed, the shelter home where Ramzan lived, the Indian Express reported yesterday. The teenager migrated to Bangladesh in 2009 with his father Mohammad Kazal who, after separating from Ramzan’s mother Razia Begum, moved to Bangladesh to stay with his parents. Later Kazal remarried a Bangladeshi woman, said Hamza Basit, Ramzan’s friend in the shelter. Ramzan’s new stepmother allegedly beat him a lot, so in 2010-11 he ran away from home and started his journey to reunite with his mother. He entered India by walking across the Bangladesh-India border because someone told him that is how he could go back to Pakistan, according to Basit. Crossing over to India, he first went to Ranchi, then to Mumbai and Delhi before ending up in Bhopal, where he was detained by police at a police station in October 2013 and later sent to Umeed. Government officials and social workers in both India and Pakistan tried to reunite Ramzan with his mother. Razia was offered a visit to India to meet her son, but she refused to go to India because she feared Muslims were not treated well there. Ramzan could not be sent to Pakistan because he did not have the documents to prove his Pakistani citizenship. “We tried hard to send him to his mother in Pakistan, but could not. So we had no choice but to reunite him with his father as it is easy to travel to Pakistan from Bangladesh than from India,” Archana Sahay told PTI.