Xenophobic persecution of Bengali migrant workers

The Indian government’s actions are creating a new deportation and detention policy that will disproportionately impact its own citizens who speak Bengali.

Earlier this year, when the United States started deporting undocumented immigrants, India stated quite emphatically that it is working together with the US to identify and receive back people who had travelled via the undocumented route. 

The Government of India refuses to follow this process with Bangladesh in the case of alleged undocumented Bangladeshis. 

Often this results in the government abandoning its own citizens from West Bengal to the whims of the police hunting for undocumented Bangladeshis. 

Consider the case of Palash and Shukla Adhikary, a Bengali-speaking couple, who, along with their two-year-old son, were detained for nearly a year in Karnataka. They were suspected of being undocumented Bangladeshi nationals. 

Palash and Shukla, like an estimated 2.2 million others working in the unorganised sector across different Indian states, hail from West Bengal bordering Bangladesh. Bengali is the common language of both West Bengal and neighbouring Bangladesh.

Although not from Bangladesh, the Adhikary family’s experience is merely one of many shared by Bengali-speaking internal migrant workers in India. 

In June, there were reports of 300 Bengali migrants being detained under similar charges in Rajasthan, 444 in neighbouring Odisha, and nine in Chhattisgarh. All these states are ruled by the Hindu Right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), also in power at the Centre.

More worryingly, at least seven Bengali migrant workers were picked up from different Indian states and pushed into Bangladesh without due process, which involves detention, ascertaining of nationality, contact with the country of origin, and finally deportation.

Instead, migrants like Nazimuddin Mondal and Mehboob Sheikh recount being detained without charges, beaten up, and pushed into Bangladesh. They were brought back to West Bengal only after the state government and the local administration intervened at the behest of the families. 

Since the 1990s, when the Hindutva ideology became ascendent with the BJP gaining political power, the undocumented Bangladeshi has been the favourite scapegoat of Right-wing Hindus, held responsible for everything from shrinking job opportunities and terrorism to affecting a demographic change. 

In 1992, ‘Operation Push Back’ rounded up undocumented Bangladeshis in the national capital, New Delhi, and pushed them into Bangladesh. However, even at that time, several Bengalis from West Bengal were forced across the border, despite their vehement protests.

Since then, every year a handful of alleged Bangladeshi nationals are deported from India. But the narratives surrounding them far surpass the number of alleged undocumented Bangladeshis. In big cities like Mumbai and Delhi, Muslim migrants from West Bengal are routinely dubbed as Bangladeshis. 

Poor, abandoned, discriminated against

Migrant workers were abandoned by the nation during the Covid-19 crisis and forced to walk across the country after the sudden imposition of a nationwide lockdown. While the government made provisions for international migrants to return by chartered flights, even routine trains and buses in the domestic sector were halted with barely four hours’ notice. The number of migrant workers dead during their march back continues to elude the authorities. 

In the aftermath of the recent detentions, migrants increasingly report being targeted due to the language they speak, Bengali, and clothing (often the lungi). Worn in many South and South-East Asian cultures, the lungi or sarong has come to be identified with Muslims in India. 

The lungi is also worn by the Rohingyas, the stateless Muslim ethno-religious minority from Myanmar’s Rakhine state. A stateless people, India has approximately 45,000 Rohingyas immigrants across different states. 

The Indian government claims that there are 1.7 million undocumented Rohingyas living in India, a grossly exaggerated number — one that is then used to blame the Rohingya for carrying out the exact same acts that the undocumented Bangladeshi are accused of.

In May, India pushed 100 Rohingya refugees into Bangladesh, abandoning 40 more in the Indian Ocean, in blatant disregard of all international protocols and protection mechanisms. 

The Bengali Muslim migrants — and surprisingly some Hindu Bengalis as well — are often also targeted as Rohingyas.

The Chief Minister of Assam has recently gone on record saying if people from the state’s Bengal-origin Muslim minority “write (their language) as Bengali in the census, it will only quantify the number of foreigners in the state”. Bengali is the second-largest spoken language in India. It is also the second-largest language in Assam, where there is a long history going back to the ‘Bongal Kheda’ agitation in 1960, of attacks against Bengali speakers.

There is no justification for conflating Bengali speakers with non-citizens, the undocumented and, one fears, even the stateless.

Palash Adhikary’s family supplied all kinds of documents to prove his citizenship, including his voter ID card, the AADHAR card, the PAN card, life insurance certificates, and vehicle registration documents. None of these were considered sufficient to prove his Indian citizenship to the police.

The Special Intensive Revision of the electoral roll in Bihar also raises similar fears as it is ostensibly meant to weed out Bangladeshi illegal immigrants from the voter rolls. If none of these documents are proof of citizenship, then who is a citizen?

In addition to Assam, in several other states intensive drives are continuing to identify Bangladeshi illegal migrants. Since 2019 (the year when the National Register of Citizens in Assam declared 1.9 million people as non-citizens) India has been building a series of detention centres near major migration hubs, including Assam, New Delhi, Gujarat, Goa, and Tamil Nadu. Built for recognised foreigners, the suffocating camps in Assam have already claimed 26 Bengali speakers, not yet proved to be undocumented. 

The Indian government’s xenophobic persecution of the Bengali migrant workers does not bode well for the nation. By its actions it is creating a new deportation and detention policy that will disproportionately impact its own citizens who speak Bengali.

The harassment, detention, and deportation of Bengali-speaking migrant workers is merely the first step in identifying and creating a new stateless population in South Asia. That is the dangerous direction in which the process of identifying the ‘illegal’ immigrant in India seems to be moving.

Samata Biswas is Assistant Professor and Co-ordinator, Department of English, The Sanskrit College and University, Kolkata.

(This article was first published under Creative Commons by 360info.)