On the morning of June 30, the Odisha police landed up at the home of Ismail Sheikh, a 34-year-old mason from Bengal’s Murshidabad district.
Sheikh had arrived in Odisha three days ago to work at a building construction site in Jagatsinghpur district, and was living with four other workers from Murshidabad.
“The police asked us where we were from and what our religion was,” Sheikh recounted to Scroll. “I told them that we are from Murshidabad and we are Muslims.”
The police officials then asked Sheikh to visit the Balikuda police station and submit his and his roommates’ Aadhaar cards. He complied.
The next day, the five workers from Bengal were summoned to the police station again. They went with their documents but were asked to go to the Paradeep police station, 65 km away, to verify their documents. “They said we will be taken in a bus and brought back the same way. We agreed,” he said.
At Paradeep police station, however, their photographs were taken and they were taken to a camp 2 km away. Sheikh saw that other Bengali Muslim workers in Balikuda had also been summoned to the camp. “We were 36 people in all,” Sheikh said.
It was at the camp that Sheikh realised why they had been called there. “One official from the Jagatsinghpur district administration came to the camp and said: ‘You all are Bangladeshi. You are speaking Bengali means you are Bangladeshi’,” Sheikh said. “He threatened to take us to the border and hand us to the BSF [Border Security Force].”
Sheikh recounted the official saying: “Don’t talk too much, or we will send you to Bangladesh.”
Sheikh and 35 other workers spent six days at the camp. They were released on the morning of July 5 after the intervention of the West Bengal government.
Others were not as lucky. On June 20, two families were picked up by the Delhi Police from a slum in Rohini – 29-year-old scrap dealer Danish, his wife and son, and 33-year-old Sweety Bibi and her two minor sons.
Six days later, they were “pushed” into Bangladesh, according to a police statement. The police refused to accept that that they belonged to Birbhum district in West Bengal.
This story was originally published in scroll.in. Read the full story here.
