India detains Bengali Muslims after branding them ‘Bangladeshis’

NEW DELHI, India (MNTV) — More than 20 Bengali Muslim migrant workers from India’s West Bengal state have been detained and branded as Bangladeshis in another case highlighting the growing vulnerability of Bengali-speaking Muslims working outside their home state.

According to The Observer Post, the workers, mostly from Murshidabad district, had been living and earning their livelihoods in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh for years, with some having migrated there about 15 years ago.

According to their families, police detained between 20 and 23 workers from the Chunchiapara-Ganesh Nagar area of Bilaspur district on Sept. 4 despite them producing Indian identification documents, including voter identity cards, Aadhaar cards and Permanent Account Number cards.

The workers were initially taken to a local police station and later transferred elsewhere, their relatives said. Families subsequently received information that they had been moved to a detention facility in Raipur on suspicion of being Bangladeshi nationals.

Their relatives have approached police in West Bengal seeking information about their whereabouts and demanding their release.

“My husband is not Bangladeshi; we are Indians and possess valid documents,” Afsana Bibi, whose husband was among those detained, said. She said police had previously summoned the workers several times to verify their documents before suddenly taking them away.

Bibi said their phones had been confiscated and she had been unable to contact her husband since his detention.

The case comes amid mounting concern over the targeting of Bengali-speaking migrant workers in several Indian states, where Muslims in particular have faced detention, harassment or accusations of being undocumented immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh.

The issue has become increasingly politically charged as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party intensifies rhetoric against alleged Bangladeshi migrants, frequently portraying undocumented migration as a demographic and security threat.

Bengali-speaking Indian Muslims can be particularly vulnerable to such profiling because language, names and cultural similarities can be used to cast suspicion on their nationality, despite Bengali being an Indian language spoken by tens of millions of citizens.

West Bengal shares a long border with Bangladesh and is home to a large Bengali Muslim population, including in Murshidabad, a Muslim-majority district from which many residents migrate to other Indian states for low-paid work.

The families said the detained men had moved to Chhattisgarh because of limited employment opportunities at home, working largely as hawkers and sending their earnings back to support children and other relatives.

Ramjan Sheikh, a contractor who employed some of the men, said police had checked their documents on several previous occasions without finding problems before taking them into custody at night.

The Migrant Workers’ Unity Forum has sought government intervention, saying the men are permanent residents of West Bengal and should be released if they were detained merely because of their language or identity.

“If they have been detained merely on the basis of their identity, language, or for speaking Bengali and thereby being suspected of being Bangladeshi nationals, the matter is extremely concerning,” the group’s general secretary, Asif Faruk, said.

The families said the detentions have left households in Murshidabad without their primary earners and with little information about when, or whether, the workers will be allowed to return home.