Public opinion in India, from all but the most radical Hindus, has largely registered strong disapproval and often outrage at the treatment permitted by Myanmar’s Nobel Peace Prize winning leader Aung San Suu Kyi of her country’s Muslim Rohingya community.

Now, unfortunately, Indians face a similar crisis themselves as the government in Delhi prepares to deport to Bangladesh four million people, almost all of them Muslims, from the northeastern state of Assam.

The authorities have drawn up a register of people who had already been living in Assam when Bangladesh broke away from Pakistan and acquired independence in 1971. This came after a brutal, some still claim genocidal nine-month fight against the Pakistan military, who used three ruthless Islamist militias to massacre and intimidate those who supported independence.

The Indian government has calculated that four million ethnic Bengalis do not make the March 1971 cut-off date and will be deported to Bangladesh. It is very clear Premier Narendra Modi’s administration is aware of the danger of religious tensions, not simply in Assam but elsewhere in the country. It can claim that to a large extent its hand has been forced by the state government which is run by Modi’s own nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). This has long used the illegal immigrant issue to curry electoral favor with the Assamese majority.

To its credit, the Delhi government has tried to ring the deportation process with safeguards. The list of four million names on the National Register of Citizens (NRC) was published this week. There is an appeals process. Given the extreme slowness with which virtually every juridical procedure is conducted in India, a potential four million appeals could take decades to hear. But, of course, not every one targeted for deportation - and the list includes whole families - will have the savvy, the money or even the literacy to contest their fate. And the fact remains that these people are now, at the stroke of a government pen, being rendered stateless and condemned to a legal limbo while their appeals are heard. They are now, de jure, in the same wretched position as Myanmar’s Muslim Rohingya.

Modi’s government will argue that its action in Assam bears no resemblance to the blatant ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. Many ethnic Bengalis will make the March 1971 cut and face no questions about their Indian citizenship. Nevertheless, there seem to be legitimate concerns about their own future in this relatively prosperous state of some 32 million, which nevertheless is experiencing widespread unemployment. Only six years ago, almost half a million people fled their homes and an estimated 100 died when an Assamese community turned on its Bengali Muslim neighbors.

It must be a given that all states regulate who is entitled to be a citizen. And it is not simply countries that have experienced profound political change in the recent past that can make serious errors here. The British this year blundered when they declared stateless, a group of West Indian immigrants brought to the UK in the 1950s to do menial work, because these people had never applied for any official documentation. Members of Assam’s Bengali community, whatever their entitlement to call themselves Indian citizens, are right to be concerned, as is the rest of India. This is an issue of considerable danger.