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The scripting of Bengalis as 'Bangladeshi'

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National Heraldpublisher-detail-arrow
26th June, 2025 16:45 IST

On 16 June, four Indians were “brought back” from Bangladesh — after they had been deported on suspicion of being Bangladeshis.

These four Indians were Muslim, Bengali-speaking and suspected to be Bangladeshis, claimed the Maharashtra police and the state government. The unfamiliarity of the police in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Haryana or Delhi with the different dialects of Bengali or Assamese that the ‘suspects’ spoke added to their suspicion, reportedly.

What was more bizarre was that these citizens had been asked to sing the national anthem. They had fumbled, which seemingly cemented the suspicion that they were not Indians. Every time they claimed they were Indians from West Bengal, they were administered a beating, they recalled on their return home.

But how many poor and semi-literate people in India can actually sing the national anthem? Are even policemen fully familiar with the lyrics? Is this now the litmus test of citizenship?

The documents produced by these alleged ‘interlopers’ as proof of their Indian citizenship, including their Aadhaar numbers and even the voters’ identity cards, were thrown away — presumably on suspicion that they were forged.

The West Bengal government was not taken into confidence.

The Bangladesh government was not consulted, either.

Yet the men were allegedly beaten up, taken to the Indo–Bangladesh border not very far from their village and ‘pushed back’ into the No-Man’s Land skirting Bangladesh.

Surprisingly, the Border Security Force too carried out no due diligence here, did not even consult the local police before pushing these citizens across the border at gunpoint.

This was not an isolated incident and several such cases have been reported in recent weeks and months from the Assam border as well.

My husband is Indian; we know justice will prevail: Wife of Assam man deported to Bangladesh But for the local administration...

Luckily for these four more recently ousted citizens, including a young couple, the West Bengal government was eventually alerted.

The local police swing into action and verified that they were indeed Indian citizens. Information was shared with Bangladesh and the four have since returned home.

The incident was widely reported in the media. West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee said that she believes the prime minister is not aware of these cases and asserted that she would draw his attention to them. What was not reported is that nobody from the Maharashtra government, police or the BSF apologised for their failure to follow due process, for falsely questioning the citizenship of Indian citizens.

Bengali-speaking workers targeted in BJP-ruled states: Mamata Banerjee

Meanwhile, the harassment and the anxiety have left the families traumatised, but these poor people are just happy to be back and would like to leave the nightmare behind.

They are not the sort to take the police or the government to court. But this is hardly the first time something like this has happened. This last was just one more episode in a horror series that has been playing out since the 1990s.

Even as such incidents are played up now, there is a sense of déjà vu.

For back in the day when L.K. Advani was home minister in the Atal Behari Vajpayee government, India had already witnessed such drives to weed out ‘Bangladeshis’. The horror played out in photographs and on television then, though not yet on the non-existent social media. There were, even then, photographs of men squatting or standing, roped together, as they waited to be ‘deported’ across the Indian border into Bangladesh.

This is but a trend that has accelerated in recent years. Every week now, in one state or another, Bengali-speaking men and women are being picked up by the police on suspicion of being ‘infiltrators’.

The latter are themselves under pressure to weed out ‘foreigners’ and are acting on instructions from the union home ministry to check which Muslims are Bangladeshis. Catching a ‘culprit’ showcases their diligence in following orders.

Earlier this week in Rajasthan too, several Bengali-speaking men were picked up and, despite their protests and the production of documents, the police suspected them to be illegal Bangladeshi immigrants.

So, more of the same... or is there something new in the water this time?

In the 1990s, the alleged illegal Bangladeshi immigrants were invariably tracked down in states such as Maharashtra, Gujarat or the Delhi National Capital Region.

Workers in Maharashtra, especially Zhaveri Bazar in Mumbai, and Surat in Gujarat, were many of them highly skilled, much sought-after artisans in the jewellery and precious gems sector, cutting and setting diamonds and other stones. Others were daily-wage workers in construction jobs or other unskilled labour; their wives often worked as domestic help in local households or in services and industries where women constituted the bulk of the workforce.

When the first wave of rounding them up began, trainloads of Muslim artisans and Bengali labourers in the 1990s rushed back to their villages, seeking support from the then-Left Front government of West Bengal headed by the CPI(M). They got off at places such as Uluberia, in Howrah district, and headed back to villages in the Hooghly, Malda and Murshidabad districts, going to ground there.

But now, in May 2025, over 500 persons suspected to be Bangladeshis have been rounded up from Maharashtra, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Delhi NCR, Haryana and Goa. They haven't been sent home or gone home; they have been summarily deported. More than 500 people have been rounded up from Assam and from across West Bengal.

In Assam, a 58-year-old woman, Shona Banu from Barpeta said she and 13 others were pushed across the border, even though she was an Indian citizen. She has since returned.

Declared 'foreigner' in 2017, Assam woman is recognised as Indian citizen An international consensus?

This is a familiar trope, still — and not just in India.

It gained international attention most recently when the United States of America on orders from President Donald Trump launched its current cross-country drive to identify, locate, take into custody and deport persons who may or may not be citizens — as well as persons who may or may not be connected to criminal or terror networks, persons who may or may not be guilty of violating the laws, persons who may or may not be posing a threat to national security. And the American immigration police are carrying this drive out with speed, gusto — and embarrassing inefficiency.

India reinventing the deportation of citizens is, however, bad governance — no matter the Trumpian precedent.

Deportation of illegal immigrants is a different matter, of course, and has been an ongoing process. The Border Security Force routinely pushes back people from Bangladesh who are intent on illegally entering India.

Deporting Indians, however — as Advani too found out — is inefficient, politically embarrassing and expensive.

Determining the identity of Indians, especially those who are Muslim and Bengali- or Assamese-speaking, is also expensive — the exercise of listing Indians in the National Register of Citizens in just one state, Assam, had cost the Indian taxpayers Rs 1,602.66 crore by March 2022.

It is possibly a comforting exercise for the BJP’s fervent supporters, who are convinced that Muslims will soon outnumber Hindus in states such as West Bengal, Assam and even Jharkhand, when the saffron party declares that it shall identify every illegal Muslim immigrant and send them back to Bangladesh.

It's why, for the purposes of mass mobilisation at election time, a slogan like ‘Ek hain toh safe hain (united, we are safe)’ made political sense for the Bharatiya Janta Party during the Jharkhand elections in 2024 .

Is the drive justified for the average citizen, then?

After months of concerted and coordinated action by police and central agencies, the drive carried out in several BJP-ruled states at some cost appears to have thrown up a few thousand ‘suspects’.

This does not square with the hype or even the cost.

Economic pressures do force people in some parts of the world to seek better opportunities elsewhere. Union home minister Amit Shah would do well to recall the number of Gujaratis apprehended and deported by the United States over the years as illegal immigrants. Is the number of illegal Bangladeshis in India much higher?

To suspect bona fide Indian citizens of being aliens, and illegal immigrants at that, because they speak Bengali — or eat muri (puffed rice) and crave fish, or wear Madras-check lungis — and because they are Muslims is really preposterous.

As government policy and as an instrument of governance, the exercise of weeding out ‘illegals’ on suspicion rather than verified information is inefficient, expensive and just bad strategy.

Some from Bangladesh may well be infiltrating our borders and acquiring fake documents with the help of local political parties eager to take advantage of them both as cheap labour and as captive voters. But to polarise and communalise people by targeting Indian citizens exposes both callousness and incompetence.

The truth around the BJP’s bogey of ‘Bangladeshi infiltration’ in Jharkhand

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