Kolkata: On the evening of 9 June 2025, construction workers Mehebub Sk and Shamim Khan, both in their 30s, freshly showered after a day of work, went for a cup of tea to the tea-stall near the bus stand for route number 15, in Thane district’s Mira Road neighbourhood in the western state of Maharashtra.
Migrant workers from Murshidabad district in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal, the two live at a construction site located a few hundred metres from the bus stand. A late evening cup of milky tea was a routine they had established over the previous four months.
That evening, they were chatting in their mother tongue, Bengali, with some other workers, when, around 8.30 pm, policemen in plain clothes approached them.
Asked to show their identity documents, Mehebub Sk and Shamim Khan produced their Aadhaar card (issued by the Unique Identification Authority of India); their permanent account number (PAN), a card with an alphanumeric code issued to tax-payers by the income-tax department; and voter identification cards issued by the Election Commission of India. The policemen were unsatisfied and told the men the cards were fakes.
The policemen took the duo to the Kanakia outpost of Mira Road police station, where several other Bengali-speaking men were already detained.
Across Maharashtra, raids to round up Bangladeshi immigrants living in India without legal documents had been underway in various cities over the previous few days. The drive was in line with intensified operations to flush out illegal immigrants that began in multiple states ruled by prime minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) after the 22 April terror attack in Pahalgam, in India’s Jammu & Kashmir.
This story was originally published in article-14.com. Read the full story here.