Bengali-speaking Muslim workers across India are facing detention and deportation amid heightened scrutiny over alleged unauthorised migration, with their ethnicity, language and religion sometimes becoming grounds for suspicion before documentary verification, Scroll reported.

The report by Abhishek Saha, published on September 30, examines recent cases involving Bengali-speaking Muslims in several parts of India and argues that identity markers are increasingly being used to determine who is treated as an outsider.

In Bengaluru last month, around 3,000 Bengali Muslim garbage and waste workers were picked up by police during a verification drive targeting allegedly unauthorised migrants. According to the report, only 31 were eventually identified as Bangladeshi nationals and sent to West Bengal for deportation to Bangladesh.

In Chhattisgarh, 23 workers from West Bengal were detained this month on suspicion of being Bangladeshi nationals. Only one of those detained was Hindu, while the others were Muslims, according to Scroll.

The report also cites the case of a Muslim woman from West Bengal’s North 24 Parganas district who was detained and deported to Bangladesh in July.

Saha writes that these incidents follow a wider campaign that began last summer, when thousands of Bengali Muslim workers were detained across India and hundreds were deported to Bangladesh. Some were later allowed to return to India, including after legal intervention.

According to the report, some of those deported were irregular migrants from Bangladesh, but others were Bengali-speaking Indian citizens who had moved to different parts of the country for employment.

Scroll identifies two recurring patterns in the cases it examined. The first is that suspicion often appears to be triggered by a combination of ethnicity, language and religion, with documentary verification coming later.

The second concerns the treatment of citizenship documents. Families have presented records including school documents, land ownership papers and electoral-roll entries, but such documents have sometimes failed to prevent detention or deportation.

The report describes this as “documentary doublethink”, citing legal scholar Mohsin Bhat: officials question the authenticity of documents while simultaneously demanding additional documentation that can be difficult for marginalised families to produce.

Saha also points to cases in which people pushed into Bangladesh were subsequently allowed to return to India following court intervention. Among them were Sunali Khatun and Sweety Bibi, Bengali Muslims from West Bengal who were returned to India following directions from the Supreme Court.

Another case involves Mumtaz Begum, a Bengali Muslim woman from Assam who remains in Bangladesh. The Gauhati High Court has directed the Assam government to pay her Rs 2 lakh in compensation and asked the central government to facilitate her return, according to the report.

The article argues that such cases raise questions about the consequences of immigration enforcement when citizenship verification is incomplete or when identity becomes a basis for suspicion.

It also cites political scientist Niraja Jayal Gopal’s criticism of attempts to identify undocumented migrants through broad elimination-based processes, as well as legal concerns over the risk of pushing vulnerable people towards statelessness.

The report concludes that the treatment of Bengali-speaking Muslims raises broader questions about equal citizenship, due process and the protection of India’s linguistic and religious diversity.