Kolkata, West Bengal: At 10 am on 18 April, a group of three to four Hindu extremists barged into the ground floor rooms of a two-storied house in a neighbourhood called Jamalpur neighbourhood in the Kushinagar district of north-eastern Uttar Pradesh. 

Soft-spoken Abul Bashar and seven other Bengali Muslim travelling salesmen—who purchased garments, such as nightdresses, skirts, T-shirts, kurtis (short tunics for women) and palazzo pants from wholesalers in Malda, West Bengal, and sell them on bicycles or motorbikes—lived there. 

Four of them were home, preparing to cook lunch, when the men bearing allegiance to the far-right ideology of Hindutva broke in, abused Bashar and his housemates, ransacked their belongings and held up a rusted sickle and vegetable knives they found in the house, claiming they were weapons. 

“The intruders hurled abuses, slapped one of us, pulled at another’s beard, and asked us to leave Uttar Pradesh immediately,” Bashar told Article 14. 

Bashar said that the attackers told them that Muslims were carrying out atrocities on Hindus in Bangladesh and Bangladesh-origin Muslims were doing the same with Hindus in West Bengal’s Murshidabad. 

So, they should also leave for where they came from, the attackers said. 

The attack on Bashar and his mates was only one of many recent attacks on Bengali-speaking Muslims, who are—to those who do not speak Bengali, and, often, even to those who do—indistinguishable from Bangladeshis, who are being detained in the thousands by state governments nationwide (here, here, here and here).

“Take strict action against the entire network that assists Bangladeshi and Rohingya intruders in entering the country, obtaining documents, and settling here,” a union home ministry statement in February 2025 quoted home minister Amit Shah as saying. “This issue is directly linked to national security and must be handled with utmost seriousness.”

Since Shah’s orders, local police and Hindu extremists launched official and unofficial crackdowns on not just Bangladeshis but Bengali-speaking Indian Muslims in four states—Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Odisha—all run by Shah’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). 

After some neighbours protested the intrusion, the goons left, but they took the sickle and the knives with them. They also took some cash, Bashar said. 

Bashar had been living in Kushinagar for the past eight years. 

The 32-year-old is from a village—where his mother, wife and son live—about 600 km to the east in West Bengal’s Malda district bordering Bangladesh.

West Bengal has India’s second-largest Muslim population, after Uttar Pradesh—24 million, according to the 2011 census. 

The Hindutva Imprint

Bashar did not know who the attackers were but the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Bajrang Dal proudly revealed their involvement. 

From Jamalpur, they went straight to Padrauna Kotwali police station, where they staged an agitation, demanding action against Rohingya and Bangladeshi infiltrators. 

In a written complaint, they informed the police that suspected Bangladeshis or Myanmar’s Rohingyas were living in Jamalpur. As proof of ‘weapons’ in the possession of the ‘illegal immigrants’, they submitted the sickle that they had ‘seized’. 

The VHP and the Bajrang Dal are part of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) family of organisations, commonly referred to as the Sangh Parivar. The RSS is the ideological-organisational parent of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP. 

Their Hindu nationalist rule, for over a decade, has resulted in a normalisation of hate speech targeting India’s religious minorities, including Muslims and Christians, and has resulted in many hate crimes. 

The ruling dispensation’s constant bashing of ‘Bangladeshi infiltrators’ (here, here and here) have also added an ethnic dimension to it. 

In Uttar Pradesh, chief minister Adityanath, a saffron-clad monk-turned-politician ruling the state since 2017, has repeatedly (here and here) bashed “infiltrators”. Shah and Modi have used similar language, calling illegal migrants “termites” and “infiltrators”, without distinguishing them from Indian Muslims.

This was not the first time someone in Uttar Pradesh had harassed Bashar claiming he was Bangladeshi. 

About seven months ago, a group of men stopped his bike, checked the identity documents he was carrying, and, saying that all documents could be forged, dragged him to the local police station. The police let him go after a few hours. 

A few days later, Bashar said, another hawker from West Bengal had a worse experience—vigilantes beat him before handing him over to the police for being a suspected Bangladeshi. 

Perpetrators & Police 

The 18 April attack alarmed Bashar and the others. At about 3 in the afternoon, Bashar and some others went to the Padrauna police station to report the matter. 

“There, we were informed that the police had already received a complaint against us for attacking the very people who had actually attacked us entering our home,” said Manirul Haque, another hawker who has lived in Kushinagar for nearly 10 years.

Haque said the police told them not to worry and to continue staying in their rented home, as the police would visit them for an enquiry. 

At about 11 in the night, the police went to the homes of multiple Bengali-speaking migrant hawkers at Jamalpur and asked 23 people, including Bashar and Khan, to gather all their identity documents. They were then taken to the police station. 

From the morning of 19 April, the media were full of reports of their detention. Sudarshan TV, a TV channel allied with Hindu organisations, UNI, a news agency, and Hindustan, a Hindi daily, reported that the police picked them up acting upon a complaint by the VHP’s Kushinagar district unit president Mukesh Tripathy. 

Speaking to the media, Tripathy said that he got information through their workers that some people in Jamalpur taunt Hindu girls and women. 

“When our people went there for inquiry, they found these people were completely different from us and spoke a different language,” he said. “Further enquiry revealed that 250 Rohingya families were living there.”

For the 23 detained men, it was a long night. 

“We were interrogated non-stop until we were released at around 9 pm the next day,” Bashar told Article 14. “One officer after another grilled us in different rooms, asking details about family members, number of sisters, how many of them are married, what their husbands and in-laws do and so on.”

The police had taken their phones but they were allowed to contact their families for further documents. When their families reached Malda’s Kaliachak police station on 19 April morning to report the incident, the local police contacted the police in Kushinagar. 

The 23 detained men were released around 9 pm. The police asked them to return to the police station at 12 noon the next day to collect their Aadhaar cards. They went but were asked to come back in the evening, when their identity cards were returned, but not before some policemen took Rs 30,000 from them, alleged Haque. 

They all returned to Bengal the next day. 

In a few days, police from Uttar Pradesh came to visit the villages of all 23 men to verify their details. They took photos of their home and family members. 

Of the 23, nearly a dozen went back to Kushinagar by mid-May to resume their business but the rest preferred not to go for fear of further harassment.

“That’s where our livelihood is,” said Khan, who is back in Kushinagar. 

Article 14 sought comment from the Kushinagar police, via email on 17 and 19 May, asking whether they picked up the migrants from their rented places on the basis of the complaint lodged by the VHP and if any case had been filed with regard to the incident. 

Their comment was also sought on the allegation that some policemen at Kushinagar police station took Rs 30,000 from the migrants for returning their Aadhaar cards. 

There was no reply. We will update this story if there is a response.

A Polarising Campaign

The 18 April case is only one of several in recent times where Bengali-speaking migrant workers or small traders, especially Muslims, have borne the brunt of the suspicion that they are Bangladeshis. 

There were at least three more incidents in Uttar Pradesh—in the districts of Mathura and Deoria, among others. 

The victims blame the harassment on the relentless political campaign and media coverage bashing ‘Bangladeshi infiltrators.’

Infiltration from Bangladesh came to the centre stage of national politics in February 2014, when the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate, then Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, raised the issue during his parliamentary election campaign in the Bangladesh-bordering, northeast Indian state of Assam. 

Modi said that there were two kinds of migrants from Bangladesh in India.

The first category, according to him, was made of Bengali-speaking Hindus, who migrated because they were harassed in Bangladesh for their faith. India must accommodate them, Modi said. 

The second category, according to Modi, was made of people “brought in” for “vote bank politics.” These people, who included “smugglers”, must be “pushed back,” he said. 

He then took the campaign to West Bengal, another Bangladesh-bordering state, intensely polarising its socio-political discourse.

The campaign gained momentum after Modi’s ascent to India’s premiership in May 2014. 

It further intensified during 2018-19 over the BJP’s hard push for a twin policy over citizenship—a screening exercise to identify infiltrators (in the form of Assam’s National Register of Citizens, or NRC) and protection to non-Muslim migrants from Muslim-majority neighbouring countries of Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan with the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019.

The widespread nature of the campaign against ‘Bangladeshi infiltrators’ has had an unnerving impact on migrant workers from West Bengal, especially Muslims. 

“Any Bengali-speaking Muslim can face suspicion and harassment,” said Bashar. “Different TV and YouTube-based channels keep talking about infiltration from Bangladesh and how they have all got fake Aadhaar and voter ID cards. Such reports go viral on WhatsApp.”

In recent years, Bengali migrant workers have faced harassment and heckling in Karnataka in 2022, Tamil Nadu in 2023, and Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, and Odisha in 2024, prompting Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee to raise the issue. 

However, there was a surge in such incidents in April 2025, when they were either attacked by locals or detained by the police in Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Odisha—all of them BJP-ruled states. 

Recent Spike 

Saibul Sheikh, a 30-year-old tailor from West Bengal, has been working at different garment factories in Vadodara in east Gujarat for the past fifteen years. 

He left his home for Gujarat at the age of fifteen to learn tailoring. Eventually, Vadodara became his second home, where he spent most of the year, returning to his home in West Bengal’s Nadia district to meet his family only during the major holidays. 

On 26 April, at 4 in the evening, a team of cops from Kumbharwada police station reached the garment factory where Saibul Sheikh and a dozen others from West Bengal work. They were all taken to a high school building being temporarily used as a detention centre. 

Saibul Sheikh said several hundred people, mostly Bengali-speaking Muslims, had been brought there. 

Vadodara Police Commissioner Narasimha Komar told the media the next day that over 500 suspected Bangladeshi nationals were “intercepted” in Vadodara, of whom five had been found to be Bangladeshi nationals.

Verification of others’ documents were still on, he said. “The hunt will continue, especially among industrial workers, hotels, spa, jewelry and imitation jewelry sectors,” Komar said.

Similar crackdowns had been simultaneously launched in Ahmedabad and Surat, two other major cities, apparently triggered by national security concerns in the aftermath of the 22 April terror attack in Pahalgam of Jammu & Kashmir that claimed 26 lives. 

Gujarat Director General of Police (DGP) Vikas Sahay told the media, on 28 April, that they had detained 6,500 suspected Bangladeshi nationals across the state, of whom 450 were found to be illegal Bangladeshi immigrants. 

“The citizenship of the rest are still under investigation. Those found to be Bangladeshis will be pushed back with the help of the BSF,” he said. 

The Indian Express quoted Sahay as saying, “The process is such that we detain them and interrogate them. Their identity has to be established beyond doubt and it is done by verification, interrogation, evidence collection…So, it is a time-consuming process.” 

Saibul Sheikh and about 20 others detained by the Kumbharwada police—mostly informal tailoring workers—were kept in the high school building for a week. 

According to volunteers of Parijayee Shramik Aikya Mancha (migrant workers’ unity platform), Gujarat police told them that the detained persons’ Aadhaar or voter ID card had mismatches in details or Aadhaar fingerprint did not match the government’s digital data base or were not carrying the mobile number linked to the Aadhaar. The police asked them to get more documents from their home—either birth certificate or school leaving certificate. 

Some of them managed to contact the members of the West Bengal-based Parijayee Shramik Aikya Mancha, whose volunteers met their families, collected available documents, and sent them to the Kumbharwada police. 

According to Asif Faruk, general secretary of the platform, most of these people are from economically backward sections and do not keep many documents on hand.

“This is why gathering additional documents took time,” said Faruk. “In some cases, school leaving certificates had to be freshly issued from their respective schools.” 

The police finally released them on 3 May but did not give their phones back until another few days. “They told us that our phones were being investigated,” said Saibul Sheikh. 

He said, during this entire period, 20 of them were kept in one room and given mattresses to sleep on. The owners of the factory they worked at arranged for their food on the request of the police. They did not have much to do except for waiting. 

Saibul Sheikh said when the police released them, they advised them to move out of their workplace and homes and if there was trouble, avoid being outdoors.

Following the detentions in Gujarat, the Communist Party of India (Marxist Leninist) Liberation issued a statement on 29 April, criticised “the witch-hunt and vilification of Bengali Muslims” during the search for illegal Bangladeshi migrants. They alleged that people were “being indiscriminately picked up from working-class neighbourhoods,” and were “capriciously labelled as ‘Bangladeshi’ without any verification”. 

Rajasthan, too launched a drive to identify Bangladeshi infiltrators, detaining 13 people, including a child, in Sikar district. Some were detained in a guest house for nine days. 

According to Article 22 of the Indian Constitution, every person who is arrested and detained in custody shall be produced before the nearest magistrate within 24 hours excluding travel time. Detaining anyone for more than 24 hours requires a magistrate’s authorisation. 

However, this clause is not applicable if the detained person is “for the time being is an enemy alien” or arrested or detained under any law providing for preventive detention. 

The term ‘enemy alien’ refers to nationals of countries India is at war with. India is not at war with Bangladesh. 

Article 14 emailed the Vadodara police on 17 and 19 May asking if those detained for a week were arrested, detained with magistrate’s authorisation or treated as ‘enemy aliens’. They have not responded. The story will be updated if they do. 

Ordeals In Odisha 

Mohammad Salamat Sheikh has been running a utensil shop in Charampa near Bhadrak railway station in eastern Odisha for the past seven years. 

Originally from Binodia village within Bharatpur police station jurisdiction in Murshidabad, West Bengal, Salamat Sheikh employs about 20 workers who ferry the utensils on their bicycles in different neighbourhoods. Apart from cash, they also accept women’s hair and damaged mobile handsets in exchange for utensils. 

On 27 April, a group of men stopped one of his workers, Saheb Sheikh. He said they accused him of being a Bangladeshi and slapped him. 

“I had already instructed all my workers that if they ever get mobbed on suspicion of being a Bangladeshi, they should immediately tell the mob to hand them over to the police. Saheb did the same,” Salamat Sheikh told Article 14. 

The police informed him about his worker being at the police station. He went there with all of Saheb Sheikh’s documents and was able to secure his release in a few hours. 

But Saheb Sheikh refused to work any more. He said he was too scared to be in Odisha and went straight back home to West Bengal. Other workers soon followed him. 

By mid-May, Salamat Sheikh had only seven workers left, the rest having gone back to Murshidabad.

Tension has been rising in Odisha, where the BJP came to power in June 2024. 

According to Rakibuddin Sheikh, another young man from Jalangi in Murshidabad who runs a utensil shop in Bhadrak, there has been an increased presence of vigilante gangs on the streets. 

“They refuse to acknowledge our Aadhaar or voter ID cards,” he said. “They say, Mamata Banerjee has got all you Bangladeshis fake ID cards.”

Saheb Sheikh’s harassment followed incidents in Odisha’s Mayurbhanj and Sambalpur. 

On 21 April, a group of 62 migrant construction workers from Murshidabad district were on their way to Keonjhar in Odisha when their bus was stopped in Mayurbhanj, a district in eastern Odisha that borders West Bengal. 

According to Piyarul Sheikh, who is from Saidapur village in Murshidabad district, the group of about a dozen men, armed with sticks, rods and iron chains, beat up some of the migrants and sent the bus back to Bengal. 

“They said that since Murshidabad is full of Bangladeshis, and Muslims are beating Hindus there, people from Murshidabad would not be allowed to work in Odisha,” Piyarul told Article 14. 

A group of migrant construction workers were attacked at Sambalpur railway station, in northwest Odisha, soon after they got off the train on 23 April. 

On 1 May, construction workers from Malda were attacked in Sambalpur and forced to leave. 

Salamat Sheikh said that about 30 to 35 small traders like him from Murshidabad employ more than 500 people from Murshidabad as hawkers in Bhadrak town and its neighbourhood. 

Some sell utensils, some clothes, sandals, mosquito nets and gamchhas (traditional cotton towels). By the end of April, according to him, most of the hawkers had returned to their home state. 

Fears over Fallout

Responding to the chain of developments, two parliamentarians from West Bengal’s ruling party, the Trinamool Congress—Lok Sabha member of Parliament (MP) from Murshidabad, Yusuf Pathan and Rajya Sabha MP Samirul Islam—sought  home minister Shah’s  intervention.

On 5 May, chief minister Banerjee expressed concerns over the growing number of incidents targeting Bengali Muslims in Odisha, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. 

“I want to say one thing, you people may torture our migrant workers for speaking Bengali but we will not do that in Bengal. This is the difference between those people and us,” she said. 

She also pointed out that about 15 million people from other states work in Bengal. 

“Don’t play with fire,” said Banerjee “I will not do anything but there are other kinds of jealous people around. If someone goes and threatens some people in the name of such organisations, why should I take any responsibility?” 

She said did not want “any kind of misunderstanding” and hoped “good senses” would prevail.

Bannerjee’s mention of “jealous people” could be a reference to the Bengali ethnic rights groups, especially Bangla Pokkho, which has menaced  ‘outsiders’ in Bengal. On social media posts, they asked if Odias working in Bengal should be spared when Bengalis working in Odisha were being attacked.

(Snigdhendu Bhattacharya is a Kolkata-based author and independent journalist, who writes on politics, history, human rights, culture, environment and climate change.)

Get exclusive access to new databases, expert analyses, weekly newsletters, book excerpts and new ideas on democracy, law and society in India. Subscribe to Article 14.