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Mr. Mondal says life had been going easily for a couple of 12 months and a half in Mumbai’s Nalasopara space, the place he lived on hire. With a day by day wage of ₹1,300, the migrant from Tartipur village in Murshidabad district, West Bengal, had come to Maharashtra to work. On June 9, 2025, there was a knock on his door. Men in uniform had come for him. They took him to the native police station. Mr. Mondal recollects that there have been 13 Bengali-speaking males on the police station. Then started a journey of about 2,500 kilometres spanning six days.
From the police station in Mumbai, Mr. Mondal says he and some others had been taken for a medical check-up, then pushed to Pune the subsequent morning. He recollects that they had been placed on a flight from Pune to West Bengal, their palms in zip-ties.
After touchdown someplace in north Bengal, Mr. Mondal says he was pushed alongside the worldwide border within the early hours of 1 morning and pushed into Bangladesh.
“The males in plainclothes compelled me to cross the border. It was the scariest day of my life,” he says. He was handed ₹300 in Bangladeshi forex, a packet of meals, and a bottle of water. “‘You all are Bangladeshis,’ the person instructed me in Bengali, threatening to shoot me if I attempted to return.”
On June 14, 2025, a video of him and two others, Minarul Sheikh and Mostafa Kamal Sheikh, each additionally migrant employees from West Bengal, allegedly picked up by the police in Maharashtra, surfaced on social media. Sitting in an open subject, the lads cried out to the West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee for assist: “Mamata (Banerjee) Didi please save us… We have been pushed into Bangladesh.” The subsequent day, the three had been repatriated by the India-Bangladesh border near Mekhliganj city of Cooch Behar district, West Bengal.
Across India, hundreds of Bengali-speaking migrants are being requested for documentation to show their Indian citizenship. The crackdown started, say sources within the Home Ministry, after the regime change in Bangladesh in August 2024. The questioning intensified after the Pahalgam assault on April 22, 2025. Ms. Banerjee alleges that the depth of it’s felt most within the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-ruled States.
The Delhi Police has checked paperwork of over 16,000 Bengali-speakers over the previous few months. The Haryana authorities had arrange detention centres in July the place they allegedly held folks. In Gujarat, over 1,000 had been detained in Ahmedabad and Surat. Through June and July, migrant employees have been leaving jobs in different States to return to West Bengal.
Almost a month after the incident, Mr. Mondal is again residence. He wears the identical shirt by which he was seen within the video, and is struggling to seek out work in his village. “The contractor (in Mumbai) is looking me recurrently, however I’ve no paperwork; they had been all taken by the police. Here, even when I get work, I don’t get even ₹500 a day,” the migrant employee says.
The village, situated alongside one of many distributaries of the Ganga, has a standing crop of jute in July, rising to virtually 5 ft. The roads are stuffed with potholes so deep that geese swim in them. Most males within the village migrate out of West Bengal for work, although there isn’t a dependable information on what number of do.
Going again to work
Less than a kilometre from his home, is a locality the place different migrant employees have been compelled to return from their administrative center. They had been detained for 3 days within the neighbouring state of Odisha. They had been a part of a gaggle of about 400 who had been detained by the Jharsuguda police in Odisha through the second week of July.
On July 9, 2025, the Trinamool Congress (TMC), the ruling social gathering in West Bengal, posted a 55-second video of the employees on social media. In the video, Samiul Ansari (31) is describing how they had been picked up at nighttime.
At their village in Murshidabad, Mr. Samiul Ansari is joined by 4 others: Yeasmin Ali Ansari (50), Manaruzzaman Ansari (41), Newton Ansari (33), and Amanat Ansari (31). They sit in a circle and narrate their ordeal throughout detention for 72 hours. By Indian regulation, police can detain an individual for now not than 24 hours, earlier than which they have to be produced earlier than a Justice of the Peace.
“The police didn’t beat us on the detention centre, however stored saying that they’d orders from above to detain us,” Mr. Samiul Ansari says. The males, who had been detained in Jagatsinghpur district in Odisha, say they’ve been going to the State for a decade to work; this was the primary time they’d confronted hassle. Odisha’s authorities is run by the BJP that got here to energy final 12 months.
“There is not any work right here. Maybe we received’t go to the place the police had detained us,” they are saying. The three youthful males within the group went again to Odisha 11 days later.
Their best concern is what identification paperwork they need to carry in order that the police doesn’t detain them. In the village, Razzak Sheikh, the daddy of two migrant employees, has filed a habeas corpus petition earlier than the Calcutta High Court, when his sons had been detained elsewhere in Odisha. “I bought a name from the police there, who threatened to push my sons into Bangladesh if we failed to provide delivery certificates.”
In Murshidabad, Razzak Sheikh, the daddy of two migrant employees, has filed a habeas corpus petition on the Calcutta High Court. | Photo Credit: Shiv Sahay Singh
Having an Indian delivery certificates is, nevertheless, no assure say migrant employees, that they won’t be harassed. Amir Sheikh, 19, from Malda’s Kaliachak space, who was allegedly jailed in Rajasthan for per week earlier than being pushed into Bangladesh in May 2025, had one, say his mother and father.
Up to 1,000 folks had been recognized as suspected Bangladeshi nationals, detained, and despatched to 6 detention centres, within the State. The mother and father have produced their passports too, however say their son continues to be caught in Bangladesh. On August 7, 2025, the daddy filed a habeas corpus earlier than the Calcutta High Court.
On July 30, 2025, the Maharashtra authorities claimed that 42,000 ‘pretend’ delivery certificates issued to ‘Bangladeshis’ had been cancelled, and the quantity to be additional cancelled by August 15 could be far larger.
Politics at play
In the primary week of May 2025, weeks earlier than these tales of migrants alleging detention and pushing into Bangladesh surfaced, TMC Rajya Sabha MP Samirul Islam wrote a letter to Mr. Shah. In it he claimed there was a “disturbing sample of focused hostility” in opposition to Bengali employees in BJP-ruled States similar to Gujarat. Mr. Islam is the chairperson of West Bengal Migrant Welfare Board.
By the second week of July, studies of migrant employees in numerous elements of India started surfacing virtually day by day in West Bengal. On July 16, 2025, Ms. Banerjee hit the streets in Kolkata and warned that protests would rage throughout the nation if Bengali migrants proceed to be harassed.
Two days later, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whereas talking at a public assembly in Durgapur within the southern a part of West Bengal and considered one of India’s important steel-producing centres, stated that “Bengali asmita” (identification and tradition) was paramount to the BJP, however emphasised that “whoever has infiltrated into the nation might be handled as per regulation”.
Kolkata’s youth, on Bengali ashmita
“As a non-binary particular person, I discover probably the most freedom in expressing myself by Bangla. It doesn’t confine me to gendered pronouns: I can merely be a ‘tui’ or ‘tumi’ to these I like. My Bengali identification thrives in Satyajit Ray’s movies, within the consolation of aloo-sheddho bhaat, and within the Durga Pujo essays I wrote yearly in class, guided by my grandfather’s handwritten notes.” — Zoya Khan, filmmaker, 27
“Political actions, intelligence, tradition: Bengalis have all the time been on the forefront of this stuff.” — Pratyasha Pal, a post-graduate scholar of History, 23
“Bengali identification is the Bengali language, Durga Pujas, and soccer. The manner we specific ourselves in Bengali, our mom tongue, is essential to expressing our true feelings.” — Guddu Adhikari, hospital intern, 21
“We have loads to be happy with, as Bengalis, like our literature and our freedom fighters.” — Soumit Choudhury, journalism scholar, 19
“To me, anybody who speaks Bangla is Bengali. There isn’t a divide in case you are Hindu or Muslim or the place your hometown is. As a scholar of Bengali literature, I’m very connected to our nice writers: Rabindranath Tagore, Jibanananda Das, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay.” — Riya Nayak, Bengali literature scholar, 19
“Bangla is our mom tongue, and to me, that’s crucial facet of being Bengali.” — Aniket Pal, voice actor and blood financial institution employees member, 25
“Bengali identification is everybody who speaks in Bengali, be it in West Bengal, Tripura, or Bangladesh. It is our mom tongue, and that’s the place our identification lies; it’s a shared identification.” — Abhinab Das, scholar of philosophy, 20
“If there may be something referred to as Bengali ashmita, then it’s a response to what’s taking place in our nation proper now. Before, this identification was extra cultural; now it’s a matter of ego as effectively.” — Rushati Saha, illustrator and graphic designer, 25
“For me, my Bengali identification is related to Durga Pujas, soccer, and staying in Kolkata. I used to be raised in Lucknow, so my exploration of the traditional Bengali tradition has been restricted.” — Pritam Sarkar, learning Comparative Literature, 20
“Bengal’s tradition and heritage are nice, however the present charge of unemployment and lack of alternatives in West Bengal make me marvel if I’ve sufficient to be happy with.” — Shinjini Guha, MBA scholar, 21
“My favorite a part of being Bengali is being in love and expressing love in Bangla. This is the sweetest language on the planet.” — Swarnali Adhikari, medical scholar, 24
“Even if our textbooks are in English and we be taught within the English medium, one of the simplest ways for me to know an idea is thru Bengali. My mom tongue is behind my elementary understanding of the world.” — Saikat Duari, scholar of Mathematics, 20
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On July 21, 2025, Ms. Banerjee addressed her social gathering’s annual Martyrs’ Day rally. This is a commemoration of the day 13 folks had been killed in 1993, when police fired on the Youth Congress, then led by Ms. Banerjee. Before lakhs of supporters in Kolkata she claimed that the BJP authorities on the Centre “was unleashing terror on the Bengali language” and introduced {that a} “language motion” would proceed till the Assembly polls, due in 2026.
From the stage of the mega Trinamool occasion, the social gathering chairperson learn excerpts from what she referred to as a secret notification issued by the Union Government in May 2025, and despatched solely to BJP-ruled States, which acknowledged that if somebody was suspected of being Bangladeshi, they need to be detained for a month and despatched to detention or holding camps.
Amidst hundreds of migrants returning and the disruption of labor, the talk on Bengali language and identification continues to rage. On August 3, 2025, the Delhi Police issued a letter referring to the Bengali language as Bangladeshi, which the Trinamool took up as an insult to the “Bengali-speaking folks of India”.
The very subsequent day, whereas justifying the motion of Delhi Police, BJP IT cell chief Amit Malviya stated, “There is, the truth is, no language referred to as Bengali.”
The West Bengal BJP management stated that the drive is to determine Bangladeshi infiltrators and never migrants of the State. Leader of Opposition Suvendu Adhikari and newly appointed State BJP president Samik Bhattacharya communicate of “sanitising the voter listing and eradicating lakhs of Bangladeshi voters”. They insist on a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the voter listing on the traces of what’s taking place in Bihar.
Economically talking
The flight of industries and unemployment stay main challenges in West Bengal. The National Statistical Office’s (NSO) Annual Survey on Unincorporated Sector Enterprises (ASUSE) made public in 2024 identified that West Bengal misplaced 3 million jobs in unincorporated enterprises from 2015-16 to 2022-23.
In 2024, the Union Finance Minister had stated that the share of commercial manufacturing in West Bengal had declined from 24% on the time of independence to three.5% in 2021.
Economist Abhirup Sarkar, the chairperson of the West Bengal Infrastructure Development Finance Corporation, says, “There are historic causes behind the decline of industries in West Bengal. One of the most important elements is that Kolkata was dominated by British firms, which left after independence. Then, through the Left regime, militant commerce unions and strikes performed a job within the flight of capital.” He provides that productiveness is low in West Bengal, however there may be additionally a notion battle in regards to the State.
More than a shared border
West Bengal shares a 2,216-km border with Bangladesh, and about 450 km of the border stays unfenced, making it porous in elements. Union Home Minister Amit Shah has stated that is largely as a result of the West Bengal authorities just isn’t offering land to take action.
However, there are cultural, historic, and geographic ties between the Bengalis on either side of the border. The partition of Bengal passed off on Rakshabandhan day in 1905, when the then Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, divided the Bengal Presidency into west (predominantly Hindu, together with Bihar and Orissa) and east (predominantly Muslim, together with Assam). This was annulled in 1911, when the capital was moved to Delhi.
However, there was additional turmoil in 1947, when East Pakistan was fashioned, and other people moved throughout the newly-formed border, on the idea of faith. In 1971, when Bangladesh was fashioned, one other wave of individuals got here to India.
Ten years in the past, in 2015, a Land Border Agreement was signed between the 2 nations, the place land parcels had been exchanged, as a result of there was Indian territory deep inside Bangladesh and vice versa. People in these parcels got the selection to develop into Bangladeshi nationals or Indian residents.
Shamshul Haque and Rabiul Haque selected India, and migrated to Gurugram, in Haryana, to work. They had been arrested on suspicion of being Bangladeshi nationals.
“We selected to return to India leaving our hometown behind as a result of we all the time considered ourselves as Indians. I had by no means thought, even in my desires, that I might be held on suspicion of being Bangladeshi,” Shamshul says, exhibiting a citizenship certificates issued by West Bengal’s Cooch Behar district administration.
While nearly all of migrant employees detained or pushed into Bangladesh are Muslims, there are some from the Matua neighborhood, a sect of Hindu Namashudras, Dalits who migrated from Bangladesh, who’re additionally going through detention.
In Nadia district, two migrant employees from a Matua household, who had brazenly introduced their allegiance to the BJP, had been arrested by the Maharashtra police a number of months in the past. Manishankar Biswas (23) and Nirmal Biswas (22) had left their residence to work as carpenters in Akola district.Their father, Nishikanta, is an agricultural labourer. He and his spouse, Pushpa, do not need the cash to journey to Maharashtra. They stay in a home put along with tin sheets.
Pushpa and Nishikanta Biswas, the mother and father of Manishankar Biswas and Nirmal Biswas, who had been arrested by the Maharashtra police allegedly on suspicion of being Bangladeshi nationals. | Photo Credit: Shiv Sahay Singh
“We have had a number of circumstances of individuals of the Matua neighborhood being held by the police in Maharashtra. When the police choose up folks on the idea of language, each Hindus and Muslims might be arrested,” says Nikhilesh Adhikari, a Nagpur-based lawyer who’s making an attempt to rearrange bail for the 2 males.
On June 28, 2025, Ms. Banerjee urged migrant employees to return to West Bengal and warranted them of labor. Just somewhat over a month on, there are serpentine queues of migrant labourers at Howrah Station, reserving tickets to depart once more.
Rakesh Alam, 27, is boarding the Howrah Ahmedabad Superfast Express, leaving his four-month-old daughter behind. He says, “I can not keep in Bengal when I’ve a household to feed.”
shivsahay.s@thehindu.co.in
Edited by Sunalini Mathew
