West Bengal Assembly Elections 2026 | A struggling family’s Indianness on endless trial

Paikar (Birbhum): Bhodu Sheikh squats by the narrow alley and points his fluttering finger at the mud shack behind him. “This is my ancestral home. My great-grandfather, my grandfather and my father lived here. I grew up here and raised my children here,” the ailing 63-year-old mumbles. Then, his words laced with pain, anguish and disbelief, he adds: “But they now raise questions about my identity as an Indian and want to brand my family as Bangladeshis!”

Inside the cramped shanty, where Bhodu, his wife, and their family share space with a newly hatched brood of chicks, his daughter Sunali Khatun gently rocks her one-and-a-half-month-old son, Apon, to sleep in a makeshift hammock strung from the low asbestos ceiling.

“My husband has not yet seen our newborn,” Sunali says with quiet resignation, as her two other children – daughter Anisa and son Sabir – huddle close beside her. “We could not get anything new this Eid – not even for my children, or for my brother’s. How could we? We can barely manage two meals a day.”

Sunali with her father Bhodu Sheikh. 

The household at Paikar in the Murarai Assembly constituency of Birbhum not only has abject poverty etched all over it, but the family’s ordeal has also been reflective of identity insecurity that has been haunting many in poll-bound West Bengal. A large number of the state’s over 20 lakh migrant workers spread across the country were harassed and assaulted in Maharashtra, Odisha, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Delhi last year, some were even detained by local police and deported to Bangladesh, allegedly often without being allowed to prove that they were citizens of India.

The search for livelihood took Sunali and her husband, Danish, from Paikar to Rohini in Delhi, where she worked as a domestic help, and he earned a living dealing in scrap. On June 18, 2025, the Delhi Police detained the couple, along with their young son, on suspicion of being illegal migrants from Bangladesh – allegedly disregarding the Aadhaar cards and other documents they showed to prove that they were citizens of India.

“Only because we spoke in Bangla among ourselves, the Delhi Police suspected us to be Bangladeshis,” says Sunali. Sweety Bibi, who also hailed from Paikar and lived in Rohini, Delhi, was also detained, along with her minor sons Qurban and Imran. They were later handed over to the Border Security Force, which herded them aboard a special aircraft, flew them to Assam and then, in the darkness of night, sent them across the India-Bangladesh border.

“They (the BSF personnel) had guns, and they told us that we would be shot if we tried to turn back to India, instead of going into Bangladesh,” says Sunali, who, along with her husband and son, as well as Sweety and her sons, spent several days and nights in a jungle before being arrested by Border Guards Bangladesh and taken to a jail. “I was pregnant then…It was very difficult for me.”

The intervention by the TMC government in West Bengal, and an order from the Supreme Court, finally paved the way for the return of Sunali and her son, Sabir, to India on December 5. Her husband, Danish, is still in Bangladesh. So are Sweety Bibi and her two sons.

“There was no legal hurdle in Bangladesh, but the Government of India chose to facilitate the return of only Sunali and Sabir, but not Danish and others,” says local social worker Mofijul, who went to Dhaka to bring back Sunali and Sweety and their families.

“The case is before the Supreme Court of India. We will not rest till we bring back all our people whom the Bangla-Birodhi governments of the Bharatiya Janata Party in different states and the Centre illegally deported to Bangladesh,” says Samirul Islam, a TMC member in the Rajya Sabha and the chairman of the West Bengal Migrant Welfare Board.

Even as Sunali is waiting for her husband’s return from Bangladesh, the Election Commission has opened a new front for the family’s battle to prove its Indianness. Her mother, Jyotsna Bibi, is one of over 60 lakh voters, who have been placed in the “under adjudication” category in the electoral roll that was published at the end of the Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls in West Bengal. So has been Danish’s mother Dilruba Bibi. The process had earlier resulted in the deletion of around 60 lakh other voters from the rolls.

“My parents were on the 2002 voter list, and their voter cards were among the documents we presented when we were branded as illegal migrants and deported across the border,” says Sunali, adding with a sigh: “Now, they have put my mother’s voting right under question”. Her husband’s grandfather, Ekramuddin Sheikh, was also on the roll that was published after the last SIR.

The BJP has made illegal migration from Bangladesh to India its main poll-plank in West Bengal, accusing the ruling TMC of helping the infiltrators settle in the state and turning them into its vote bank, changing the demographic profile of the state. The party has said that no legitimate citizens of India, but only the illegal migrants from Bangladesh, have been targeted, neither in the series of crackdowns in the states ruled by it, nor in the revision of the lists of voters in West Bengal.

The TMC, keen to counter the BJP’s Hindutva with Bangaliyana, has alleged that the harassment of the Bengali-speaking migrant workers from West Bengal in the states ruled by the saffron party reflects the saffron party’s disdain for the people of the state. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s party has also been accusing the EC of trying to disenfranchise the genuine citizens of India, to ensure electoral advantage for the BJP.

“This is the land deed proving the ownership of the land I inherited from my ancestors,” says Bhodu, holding up a laminated piece of old yellowish paper. “This was issued in 1952. What more kagaaz do they need to be convinced that we are citizens of this country?”