By Anant Gupta
“We know that Mamata makes fake Aadhaar cards for you people,” Mehebub Sheikh recalled a police officer saying to him.
On June 9, the 38-year-old mason was at a tea shop in Mira Road, a town north of Mumbai, when the police detained him on the suspicion that he was an undocumented migrant from Bangladesh.
Mehebub, who had worked in and around Mumbai for over a decade, thought he had the documents to disprove their charges. He showed the police his Aadhaar card and voter card to prove that he was from Murshidabad in West Bengal.
But first the police and later the Border Security Force dismissed him outright. “They threw them in the dustbin,” he said, showing with his foot how a BSF officer allegedly dumped his documents in a pedal bin.
On the night of June 13, Mehebub was forced across India’s border with Bangladesh, allegedly at gunpoint, even as his family in Murshidabad scrambled to get land records and other documents.
He had been given only four days to prove that he was an Indian citizen.
A police official from the Mira Road police station claimed: “We did what we did according to the law. He was unable to provide any documents to prove his nationality.”
More than two months later, on August 22, Prime Minister Narendra Modi echoed what the police had said to Mehebub. While addressing a rally in Kolkata, he linked the problem of illegal immigration to Mamata Banerjee’s party, the Trinamool Congress.
“Those who have come here only to snatch the livelihoods of our people, those who are staying here with fake documents will have to go,” Modi said, drawing loud cheers from the crowd. “For that to happen, the TMC [Trinamool Congress] government, too, has to go.”
This story was originally published in scroll.in. Read the full story here.