Motherhood meets politics: ‘Apon’ becomes TMC’s weapon against BJP

Kolkata: ‘Apon’ – meaning ‘our own’ – is the name the Trinamool Congress general secretary Abhishek Banerjee has given to a baby boy born to Sunali Khatun, a migrant worker, who hailed from Birbhum in West Bengal but was detained by police from Delhi and deported to Bangladesh in June 2025.

Sunali was eight months pregnant when the Delhi Police detained her, along with her husband, her minor son, and three others, on suspicion of being illegal migrants from Bangladesh. They all were handed over to the Border Security Force, which quietly sent them across the India-Bangladesh border to the neighbouring country. After a six-month-long ordeal, she was brought back from Bangladesh to India on December 5, following an order from the Supreme Court. She gave birth to a baby boy at Rampurhat Government Medical College and Hospital on Monday.

“At Sunali’s request, I named the baby boy ‘Apon’, because no power on earth can make our own people feel like strangers. They are ours. They belong with us, among us, forever,” Abhishek wrote on X after seeing the mother and her newborn son at the hospital on Tuesday.

The TMC, over the past several months, ran a campaign against the governments of the BJP-ruled states for the detention of migrant workers from West Bengal by police and, in several cases, even deportation to Bangladesh, often in disregard of the detained people’s claim of being genuine citizens of India.

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and other TMC leaders accused the BJP-led governments in Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Gujarat and Delhi of harassing migrant workers from her state only because they spoke in their mother language, Bangla.

Bangla (Bengali) is not only the national language of Bangladesh, but also the language of the majority of people in West Bengal.

The TMC sought to use the "harassment" of the Bangla-speaking migrant workers from West Bengal in the BJP-ruled states to counter the saffron party’s allegations that Mamata Banerjee’s government had been pursuing a policy of appeasing the Muslims and facilitating infiltration from Bangladesh to India to turn the illegal migrants into her party’s vote-bank in West Bengal.

Sunali was arrested in Bangladesh after being sent across the border from India. The pregnant woman had to spend several months in jail in the neighbouring country before the intervention of the TMC government in West Bengal, and an order from the Supreme Court paved the way for her return to her home. Her husband, Danish, is still in Bangladesh.

“In the Mahabharata, the Kauravas met their downfall because of the grave sin of violating Draupadi’s dignity out of arrogance. The modern-day Duryodhana-Dushasana duo will face democratic retribution in Bengal for the unspeakable torture, insult, and humiliation inflicted upon a pregnant mother,” Abhishek wrote on X, drawing a parallel between the ordeals of Draupadi and Sunali and taking a tacit dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah.

Abhishek, while addressing a rally at Rampurhat in Birbhum, said that the BJP would have to pay the price for the harassment and torture that Sunali, despite being pregnant, had to endure after being picked up by Delhi Police from the national capital. “She told me how they had to spend night after night in forests and cross rivers before reaching Dhaka, where the police arrested them. Their only offence was that they spoke in Bangla,” said the TMC general secretary.