KOLKATA: West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee on Tuesday said that the Bengali-speaking people from the state were being tagged as illegal Bangladeshi immigrants and rounded up by the police in some Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled states.
“We have received information that 300-400 people from Itahar (in north Bengal’s Cooch Behar district bordering Bangladesh) have been rounded up and forcibly held inside a house in Rajasthan. They were branded as Bangladeshis because they speak Bengali although they showed their Indian identity documents,” Banerjee told reporters at the state assembly complex.
“I will bring this to the notice of the Prime Minister. People who speak Bengali are being illegally pushed back to Bangladesh by BJP-ruled states,” the Trinamool Congress (TMC) chairperson said.
The chief minister alleged that bona fide citizens of West Bengal are being selectively contested in BJP-ruled states.
She said: “Anybody who came from Bangladesh after March 1971 (when the nation was born) is a bonafide Indian citizen. If speaking Bengali is a crime then let the Centre ban the language that (Rabindranath) Tagore and Subhas Chandra Bose spoke. We have 15 million migrant workers in Bengal. People from other states work here as well. Is that a crime? Similar incidents have happened in Madhya Pradesh, Odisha and Maharashtra.”
Mosaraf Hussen, the TMC legislator from Itahar, alleged that those allegedly held by the Rajasthan administration are kept in a house named Ambedkar Bhawan at Bhiwadi city, which was part of the National Capital Region (NCR).
Hussen said he brought the matter to the notice of the chief minister on Tuesday.
“A man from Itahar somehow managed to call me from Rajasthan and informed me that these men are being forcibly held inside a house named Ambedkar Bhawan. They were not allowed to contact the police. I sought the chief minister’s intervention,” Hussen said.
The allegation was levelled days after the West Bengal police helped a migrant worker and his wife return home after they were declared illegal Bangladeshi immigrants by Maharashtra police and deported to the neighbouring country by the Border Security Force (BSF).
Fazal Mondal and his wife Taslima, who are residents of North 24 Parganas district, were arrested on June 10 from the Naya Nagar area in Mumbai and deported to Bangladesh on June 14, the family told the media. The Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) returned them on June 16.
On June 15, three migrant workers from Murshidabad district and two from East Burdwan district managed to return to India. These men were held by Mumbai police on June 12 and the BSF deported them on June 14. They, too, claimed that they were arrested despite showing documents such as Aadhaar and PAN cards.
BSF has not commented on these incidents or responded to emails sent by HT in this connection.\
Samik Bhattacharya, chief spokesperson of the Bengal BJP unit, said action was being taken against illegal Bangladeshi immigrants in non-BJP ruled states too. “Such arrests are being made in Tamil Nadu as well although it is not a BJP-ruled state. The identity documents carried by a section of Muslim, Bengali-speaking migrant workers have been found to be fake in all the states where the administrations have cracked down on illegal immigrants. I informed several Bengal ministers about this,” Bhattacharya said.
“Secondly, by making these allegations, Mamata Banerjee and her party are spreading hatred against people from other Indian states, especially those who speak Hindi. Many migrant workers from these states have told us that they are being stigmatised,” he added.
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