“Aap chronology samjhiye,” home minister Amit Shah said in West Bengal in 2019. Understand the chronology. First, a new citizenship law that excludes Muslims. Second, a National Register of Citizens (NRC) to purge “infiltrators”.
As Bengali-speaking Muslim workers are detained in the thousands in states run by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and as the Election Commission of India announces an urgent revision of electoral rolls in Bihar—the papers of 80 million will be checked at their homes before November 2025—so that, among other things, “foreign illegal immigrants” can be weeded out—panicked Muslims in West Bengal have started queueing up at block development offices to collect, correct or update records. West Bengal elections are next year.
Even spelling mismatches and errors in birth dates can land them in detention centres, or worse, removed from Indian territory. They—better than anyone—know the NRC has started.
On 25 June 2025, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government determinedly observed samvidhan hatya divas (Constitution murder day), marking 50 years since the declaration of Emergency by former Congress Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
Modi and other top functionaries of government and the leaders of Modi’s BJP reminded India how democratic and constitutional rights were suspended during the 21 months of Emergency between 1975 and 1977.
In the eastern state of West Bengal on the same day, volunteers of the Parijayee Shramik Aikya Mancha (migrant workers’ unity forum or the PSAM) described to me how two telephone helpline numbers rang incessantly for a few hours, starting in the evening and continuing till late in the night, leaving them exhausted.
The first flood of calls came from the neighbouring state of Odisha, where police detained about 60 workers who had migrated from Malda district of northern West Bengal. They were detained at the Mahanga police station in Cuttack district of southeastern Odisha, where most worked on a building project and lived in makeshift tents next to the construction site.
Then came the news of detentions in Bhubaneshwar, Odisha’s capital. Seventeen residents of East Midnapore district in coastal West Bengal were being held at Bhubaneshwar’s Kharvel Nagar police station. Another six residents of Bengal’s Murshidabad district were detained by the Lakshmi Nagar police in the same city. The detainees included travelling salesmen and street vendors. Soon, PSAM volunteers learnt of the detention of 13 residents of West Bengal’s Birbhum district at Remuna police state in Odisha’s coastal district of Baleswar.
This story was originally published in article-14.com. Read the full story here.
