‘We are very much Indian citizens’

Bengali-speaking migrants, mostly Muslims, were rounded up by the Mumbai police, flown cross-country and forced into Bangladesh – even though they had IDs that proved their Indian citizenship

Neha Banka

Fajer and Taslima Mondal outside their home in Hariharpur village in West Bengal’s North 24 Parganas district, after they were brought back to India. They had been pushed into Bangladesh on the suspicion of being foreigners. Neha Banka/The Migration Story

HARIHARPUR, WEST BENGAL: In her modest one-storey home, 19-year-old Taslima Mondal looks exhausted. It’s not just the heat making sweat bead on her face—morning chores remain unfinished, and a steady stream of visitors hasn’t let up. For the past 10 days, people have stopped by her home in North 24 Parganas district, wanting to hear her story.

Taslima and her 21-year-old husband, Fajer, had moved from Hariharpur village to an outlying Mumbai suburb with their year-old daughter, Rukshana, in search of a better life. But after working in the city for a year, things fell apart.  

On June 10, 2025, they had visited the iconic Gateway of India to celebrate Eid-al-Adha and returned to their home in an informal settlement in Mira Road, inhabited mostly by Bengali-speaking migrants, later that night. Suddenly, at 2 am, just as they had fallen asleep, the city police knocked on their door, demanding to see proof of citizenship.

"When the police came, I told my mother to look after my child,” said Taslima. “They didn't ask my parents (who lived next door) to go with the rest of us, so I left my daughter with them. We didn't know how long we would be gone or where we were going.”

Taslima and Fajer got into the police van, but little did they know that this was the beginning of a week-long nightmare. In June this year, the Mondals along with five other migrant workers in Mumbai – all Bengali-speaking Indian Muslims – were detained by the police for allegedly being ‘illegal’ Bangladeshis. 

The Mondals were among the seven people who were transported from Mumbai to West Bengal and then forced across the border to Bangladesh allegedly at gunpoint by the Border Security Force (BSF). In their own telling, the migrants, most of them born and raised in West Bengal’s border villages, had moved to the city seeking better work opportunities. 

These ‘push-ins’ are part of the Indian government’s larger expulsion drive of Bangladeshi nationals it claims are living in the country illegally. This drive has reportedly intensified in recent months, especially after the attack in Pahalgam in April 2025, and authorities say they have detained undocumented Bangladeshi immigrants in several states such as Assam, Gujarat, West Bengal and Maharashtra, among others.    

Caught in the crosshairs are Bengali-speaking Indian citizens, many of them migrant daily-wage earners trying to eke out a living in the big city. 

Labelled Bangladeshi

Hariharpur in North 24 Parganas district is around 500 metres from the India-Bangladesh border and has 4,477 residents (Census 2011). Most young people from the village have migrated to other Indian states for work—a trend observed in several districts due to the lack of jobs paying a living wage. Though data on this is scarce, villagers say unemployment is especially acute in remote border villages.

“All I was wearing was a lungi and gunji (undershirt),” said Fajer, recalling the night he was picked up. “A police bus took us to a BMC (Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation) office.” Once day broke, he called his parents to let them know what had happened. 

Latifa Mondal (left), whose son Fajer was forcibly sent to Bangladesh, stands in her kitchen in Hariharpur village, North 24 Parganas district. Neha Banka/The Migration Story

Back in Hariharpur, Fajer’s mother, 63-year-old Latifa Mondal, had just started her morning chores in the kitchen. “Fajer called his father and said he was detained and asked  him to send copies of all his identification documents over WhatsApp. He had taken the originals with him, but the Mumbai Police tore their (his and his wife’s) Aadhaar cards, voter cards and PAN cards. They didn't believe that Fajer and Taslima were Indian citizens,” said Latifa.

She immediately turned to her neighbours and the village panchayat for help. Throughout the day, she and Fajer’s father called everyone they could think of, including local politicians, hoping that someone would  be able to convince the Mumbai Police that the young couple were Indian citizens. 

“Nothing worked and we could not get them released,” said Latifa. Soon after, Fajer’s phone stopped working. Later, Latifa would learn that it had been seized by the police. 

Fajer and Taslima told The Migration Story that they were made to stay in a municipal office building with other migrant workers for four days. Then, they were taken somewhere else – they didn’t know where – and days later, found themselves on a plane with the migrants. They got off at Siliguri, in northern West Bengal, and were taken close to the Bangladeshi border. 

Then, in the dark of the night they were all pushed into Bangladesh at gunpoint, Taslima said. 

The India-Bangladesh border region in West Bengal is mostly endless rice fields interspersed with small water bodies. Unable to see much in the dark, Taslima and Fajer found themselves stumbling into a small graveyard, seeking shelter. The next morning, they woke up to the sounds of soldiers of the Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB), who had found them in their territory. 

Soldiers of the Border Guard Bangladesh oversee the handover of Indian migrant workers who were pushed into Bangladesh, at an undisclosed location along the India-Bangladesh border.

Picture credit: Parijayee Shramik Aikya Mancha

Relying on the kindness of strangers

“Two to three days after he had first spoken to us, my son called from an unknown number and said that they had been sent to Bangladesh,” said Latifa. A sympathetic BGB soldier had lent the Mondals his phone to call home. 

With no identity documents on them, the Mondals had still more challenges ahead of them. They had to convince the Bangladesh border guards that they were Indian nationals and find a way to return home.

“We had not eaten anything for several hours and were hungry. The Bangladeshi border guards fed us some khichuri (rice porridge) and told us to tell our family to send our IDs to a Bangladeshi WhatsApp number,” recalled Taslima. 

The couple struggled to eat the khichuri made of thick, unpolished rice, something they weren’t used to, but were moved by the soldiers’ compassion. Meanwhile, Fajer’s family was hurriedly putting together all identity documents -  birth certificates, voter cards, PAN and Aadhar cards, which established their Indian citizenship - which they sent on a WhatsApp number provided by the Bangladesh Border Guard soldier. But it would take several days and an intervention by the West Bengal state governmet that confirmed their citizenship, which finally paved the way for their return to India. The Bangladeshi border guard soldiers handed them over to the BSF on June 17 when the couple finally entered India in West Bengal’s Uttar Dinajpur district, at the border crossing near Bhatol town, almost 700 kilometres north of Hariharpur, where they met their family and panchayat members.

Not an isolated incident

On June 10, taxi driver Mujibur Sheikh, 33, was beginning his work day in Murshidabad district’s Bhagwangola town (around 170 kilometres north of Hariharpur), when he got a call from his older brother Mehbub. The 36-year-old had been detained by Mumbai Police on the suspicion of being Bangladeshi.

A small border town, Bhagwangola offered few opportunities, so Mehbub ended up migrating to Mumbai for work. He had been working at a construction site in Mira Road for two years, but on June 9, while drinking tea after a long day, he was picked up by the police along with several other Bengali-speaking workers.

Mehbub Sheikh, sits with his children in his home in Bhagwangola town in West Bengal’s Murshidabad district after he was brought back to India from Bangladesh. Picture credit: Mujibur Sheikh

“My dada (older brother) called me from a police officer’s number. We shared documents with them (birth certificate, voter card, PAN and Aadhar cards),” said Mujibur. But it was of no use.

Three days later, the men were taken to Panvel, a town near Mumbai, then Pune and finally flown to Siliguri in northern West Bengal. On June 14, they were divided into groups and pushed across the India-Bangladesh border, Mujibur said.

A similar story was unfolding in Murshidabad’s Tartipur village, nearly 50 kilometres from Bhagwangola. Khadeja Khala, 31, was at home when her husband Nazimuddin called to say he’d also been detained in Mumbai. 

“I’m not educated, so I don’t know too much about what happened,” she told The Migration Story. “My husband will know but he has gone out to search for work and stays out for a long time every day.” 

Administrative fault lines

Meghna Burade, senior inspector at Mira Road police station – under whose jurisdiction the aforementioned detentions took place – did not respond to repeated requests for comment. However, The Telegraph quoted her defending the police action, stating they were “not at fault” and had acted on a police commissioner’s order and detained several suspects, including Mehbub Sheikh. 

Burade claimed that he had “failed to produce” a birth certificate or any proof of his Indian citizenship. “We are not at fault… We demanded documents from them that could prove their nationality. Generally, we don’t consider Aadhaar and PAN cards for this purpose, as they can be fraudulently obtained. Hence, we asked him to produce his birth certificate or any other document. But he failed to produce the same and also did not provide any other document or his family’s documents to support his claim that he is Indian,” she reportedly said.

Often, families of people pushed into Bangladesh usually turned to village elders, panchayat members and the state-run West Bengal Migrant Welfare Board for help. Some reached out to Parijayee Shramik Aikya Mancha, a Murshidabad-based non-governmental organisation that works with migrant workers from the state, who are in distress.

“We launched a helpline in April (2025) after writing to the Ministry of Home Affairs that migrant workers from West Bengal were being tortured and harassed across the country. But no action was taken,” said Asif Faruk, the organisation’s general secretary. “Then, in June, we found out that seven workers had been sent to Bangladesh.”

The families say that the organisation helped to raise awareness about the push-ins on Facebook, prompting swift action from the West Bengal government to bring the workers back. “When a call (from a distressed migrant) comes in, we get in touch with the police of the state where the worker has been detained. Then, we send the concerned officers identification documents for verification. The officers now know about our organisation, so they verify the identity of the migrant worker through us,” added Faruk. 

However, since the organisation had mostly dealt with domestic strandings of migrants, it could only do so much for these workers, Farukh admitted. “We got in touch with police officials in Maharashtra and West Bengal. We also informed the West Bengal Migrant Welfare Board and the Murshidabad Superintendent of Police,” Faruk said. “It was only after intervention of the state government that the workers were returned to India.”

Several hours after the migrants were sent to Bangladesh, the All India Trinamool Congress’ (AITC’s) Rajya Sabha MP Samirul Islam, also the chairperson of the West Bengal Migrant Welfare Board, was alerted about the ‘push-ins’ by village-level party workers.

“We asked Mumbai Police, Maharashtra Police and the BSF how they could do this without informing the state government. So, they had to work to return the migrant workers through a Border Security Force (BSF)-Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) flag meeting,” Islam told The Migration Story. 

Although India’s BSF has not issued any official statement on the push-ins, an official requesting anonymity said, “They didn’t have any documents and BSF just sent them across the border. Mumbai Police told us they were Bangladeshi, so we didn’t engage with the case too much. Then, it became a political issue. Look, nobody pushes their own citizens into another country. Illegal Bangladeshis working in India never have any documents and neither did this group.”

Three of the seven migrant workers forcibly sent to Bangladesh by the Indian authorities stand outside a police station in West Bengal’s Cooch Behar district after they were sent back to India. (Centre, left to right: Mustafa Kamal, Minarul Sheikh, Nazimuddin Sheikh.) Picture credit: Parijayee Shramik Aikya Mancha

Deported from their own country

In Mumbai, Taslima recalled that there were Bangladeshis who lived not too far off from them. “There is no denying that there were Bangladeshis working there (in Mumbai), but these people lived separately. We knew they were there, but we are very much Indian citizens. We could identify who was Bangladeshi because even though they spoke Bengali, it was in a dialect we did not understand. We don’t speak that way here.”

Families of the detained workers say they blame Mumbai Police more than the BSF – for suspecting Indian nationals, destroying their documents and sending them across the Bangladeshi border.

“We can’t imagine how a citizen can be treated in this way,” said Mujibur. “The Mumbai Police caught him (my brother) only because he was Muslim. But our citizenship was verified. We have no connection with Bangladesh.” His brother, Mehbub, is traumatised by his deportation, and the Sheikhs want him to rest for a few months before he starts looking for work again.

Activists and villagers, who helped families reunite with the deported migrants, feel that the push-ins had to do with the language they spoke and the religion they practised. All seven are Bengali-speaking Muslims.

On June 24, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee addressed the push-ins of Bengali-speaking Indians into Bangladesh. She told reporters in the state assembly: “I often urge people to stay back and work here, but many go outside the state in search of a livelihood. Is it their crime to speak in Bengali? They carry all the relevant citizenship documents.”

Around 22 lakh workers from West Bengal are employed in other parts of India, Banerjee added. “When they speak in Bengali among themselves, they are labelled as Bangladeshis and sent to Bangladesh. Many such cases have come to us, and we have brought them back (from Bangladesh).” 

The chief minister also said that 300 to 400 workers in Rajasthan had been “labelled as Bangladeshis. What is happening? They are not Bangladeshis, they have their own identity. They are residents of West Bengal, and West Bengal is a state of India.”

Rebuilding upended lives

Back in Hariharpur, Latifa calls out to Taslima to help prepare lunch. Abdul Gaffer Mondal, a village panchayat member and school teacher, stops by to check in on the family. He was among the first to help Latifa when she told her fellow villagers about Taslima and Fajer’s deportation. 

“Many migrant workers don’t have formal education, and they don't know about the helpline (run by Parijayee Shramik Aikya Mancha),” he told The Migration Story. “But we have access to the internet, so we are aware. Many don't have the confidence to call that number even if they know about it, but I think awareness is increasing after this incident.” 

As visitors slowly trickle out of Fajer’s house, Latifa gets a moment’s respite. The last few weeks have been overwhelming for the family. “To tell you honestly, I don’t know who offered what kind of help over the last several days. We called everyone we could, and people did help in many ways,” Latifa said. 

Taslima Mondal, who was sent to Bangladesh by the authorities, was reunited with her daughter, Rukshana 10 days after she was picked up in Mumbai. In this picture, she ties her daughter's hair into a ponytail outside their home in Hariharpur village, North 24 Parganas district, West Bengal. Neha Banka/The Migration Story

Like the other migrant workers rounded up in Mumbai last month, Taslima and Fajer’s lives have been upended. Though the Mondals reunited with their daughter in the village, many worries often furrow Taslima’s forehead. The couple has been trying to get all of their IDs remade with the panchayat’s help. 

“Now what will I do? We are citizens of this country, isn't it? So why did they tear these documents? We will have to get them done again. You know my husband’s voter card? He had voted just once in his life, and they destroyed it,” she said.

Fajer also lost his hajari (employment) card, which he had slid between his cell phone and its cover. The Mumbai Police seized both and he now has no way of contacting his employer. “We don't know if he will get his remaining salary (for June). The employer knows what happened to us and told us to inform him of our fate. But we don’t have that phone or his number anymore, so how can we call him? My husband’s salary for the last month is still with him. Maybe we will get it back if we go to Mumbai,” she said. 

After being sent back to India by the Bangladesh Border Guard, Fajer Mondal took up a job at a construction site near Hariharpur village, North 24 Parganas district. Here, he can be seen leaving for work for the day.

Neha Banka/The Migration Story

While Latifa does not want her son out of her sight, staying in Hariharpur may not be an option for Taslima and Fajer. He lost approximately two weeks’ worth of wages because of the deportation, and though he has found work at a construction site near the village, the work is sporadic. During the monsoon, he is called to work only when it doesn’t rain. By contrast, in Mumbai, work continues, come hail or shine, and the salary comes in when it's due. In the village, he gets paid only Rs. 400 per day, but in big cities like Mumbai, he’s paid double that amount for the same work. 

“I will have to go somewhere else, even if I don’t go back (to Mumbai). Otherwise, how will we eat? The salary here is too little. Neither will I be able to eat nor will I be able to feed the family. Everyone leaves the village because of some compulsion or the other,” Fajer said.

“We are trying to see if these migrant workers can get 100 days of work in the state itself,” said Faruk, referring to the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) scheme, which guarantees 100 days of employment to adult members of every rural household willing to do unskilled manual work. 

Taslima Mondal walks around Hariharpur village with her daughter, Rukshana, in West Bengal’s North 24 Parganas district. Neha Banka/The Migration Story

As Fajer sets off for work on his cycle, Taslima walks around the village with her daughter. “We both left for jobs outside the village because it was double the income, and it would mean that I could bring up my child well,” she said. “You can see the (bad) condition of our home here. Sometimes, we eat only once a day. I want to go back to work in Mumbai. We are poor and we have to go. And even if we don’t go to Mumbai, we will go somewhere else.” 

Edited by Subuhi Jiwani

Neha Banka is a Kolkata-based journalist. She reports on a wide range of subjects, including borders, migration, trafficking, public health, gender and climate and environment.