‘They treated us like criminals’: HC quashed their externment. They lost jobs, missed births and elections

For nearly seven months, Saeed Ahmed Abdul Wahid Choudhary lived in a rented room in Mumbra, uncertain about when he would return home; Akbar Hussain Sayyed, a delivery agent and local political worker, could not be with his wife, infant daughter and ailing mother for four months; Mohammad Rafiq Gulam Rasul Ansari fretted about not being able to meet his 68-year-old mother for months; and Firoz Abdul Wahab Khan had to miss the birth of his second child.Between December 2025 and early 2026, the four were externed by the Mumbai Police from the city relying largely on FIRs lodged against them over political protests in 2019 and 2025 on a range of issues, from the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and National Register of Citizens, to the Ayodhya Ram temple and Varanasi Gyanvapi mosque rows, and aza