Under the burnt residues of around 300 makeshift huts in a slum on the outskirts of Kolkata, the BJP, the main opposition party in Bengal, is looking for Rohingya refugees.
A little over 12 hours after a fire ravaged the Ghuni bustee near New Town Eco Park’s Gate 6, on 17 December, BJP’s IT cell head and co-incharge for Bengal, Amit Malviya, claimed the ruling Trinamool had orchestrated the fire that raged from Wednesday evening to Thursday morning.This is the same slum that was infamously dubbed “mini Bangladesh” after news channels declared that “intruders” were leaving the shanty en masse once the special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls started in Bengal.
The announcement of the SIR ahead of the 2026 Assembly polls did lead to an exodus of people from Bangladesh who had entered India, and many of them had also procured Indian documents. The Telegraph Online has reported on it.
There was also another lot that remained undocumented irrespective of the duration of their stay and employment.
The draft roll of the voters list published on 16 December revealed a total of 58.17 lakh voters have been deleted. Among them, 24 lakh have been marked as “dead”, 19 lakh as “permanently shifted” and 12 lakh as “missing”.
The Election Commission does not specify any voter as “foreigner”; rather, it marks them as ineligible.
Everything is hearsay
The Telegraph Online visited the Ghuni slum on Tuesday, 15 December, and found that the bustee was anything but empty.
The local residents in the area claimed that while a few families did permanently leave once the SIR started, most of the families are still here.
“Several migrant workers come from Malda, Murshidabad and other areas to work in Kolkata. They live here. Once the SIR started, some of them went back home to fill out their remuneration forms. Most of them have come back,” a resident said.
Others said that several migrants tried to fill out the forms online but due to errors they were forced to go to their native villages and fill out the forms offline.
Another resident said that reporters had come on a weekday morning when most of the residents had gone to work, which led to visuals of several houses being locked and empty.
Asked about slums being emptied out because of the SIR, the residents of Ghuni bustee pointed to the adjacent slum and said that they heard that that was the one that witnessed an exodus.
Upon visiting that slum, the replies from the residents were along the same lines as those in Ghunti.
When asked about which slum witnessed an exodus, they pointed to another slum a few kilometres away along the Ghuni road.
The story there was the same as well: “A few Bangladeshi immigrants have left, most of the residents of this village are still here.”
‘Are you a Bangladeshi? Show us your papers!’
When a slum is branded as a mini Bangladesh, every resident, especially the Muslim residents, become an obvious suspect in the eyes of everyone.
Residents claim that they have been harassed by news reporters and a false narrative has been created about them.
“Reporters rushed into my office and the houses of other locals, alleging that they are from Bangladesh and demanding that we show them our papers,” said Mohammad Samon Ali, a contractor who runs a construction business and lives near the slum.
“We have been living here for generations. Some of us live in pucca houses, but some still live in shanties. The media would barge into the shanties without any permission and start harassing the people,” Ali alleged.
He added that the media personnel barged into his office and godown one day and started harassing him and his employees. Residents The Telegraph Online spoke to said that they felt “extremely uncomfortable” and “harassed” by the behaviour of the media, and it went to a point when “locals gathered together to drive the media away”. Ali said that Bangladeshi immigrants live in the slums and villages between Gouranganagar and Keshtopur. “Some of them have left, but those who arrived decades ago and have bought land here are still residing here,” he said.
The media hatred echoed in in the bustee near New Town Eco Park’s Gate 6. There, too, residents united to shoo the media away. However, here, the residents that some of the reporters returned after a few days to apologise to the elders of the bustee. Visit any slum in the New Town area asking about an exodus, and they will point to the next bustee saying “Not this one, we have heard that it is that one”.
Eventually the trail would just lead back to the bustee at Eco Park’s Gate 6.
Intruder vs resident, BJP vs TMC
Ahead of the SIR, both the central and state leadership of the BJP had claimed the exercise was being done to remove “foreigners” and “infiltrators” from the electoral rolls.
Several state BJP leaders, including leader of the Opposition in the Assembly Suvendu Adhikari, had claimed one-crore-plus Bangladeshi Muslims and Rohingyas were enrolled as voters in Bengal.
“Their claims fell flat after the EC published the draft rolls,” Abhishek Banerjee, Trinamool general secretary and the party’s leader in the Lok Sabha, said after the draft voter lists were published.
“They should apologise to the people of Bengal! Where are the one crore Bangladeshis, the one crore Rohingyas who are living in the state,” he had asked.
Malviya declared a conspiracy behind the fire at the Ghuni bustee.
“Ever since the SIR process began in West Bengal, visuals of abandoned and empty huts in the suburbs of Kolkata have repeatedly surfaced. It is an open secret that several people from Bangladesh had settled in the Ghuni slum, where this devastating fire has now occurred,” Malviya said.
“This fire broke out and spread because of the papers and other inflammable articles that the people from another country who stayed here had collected. Most of them have left,” said Abid Hossain, a resident of the slum.
It took at least 30 fire tenders to contain the fire since Wednesday night. The residents alleged the firefighters arrived late by an hour and half.
“Despite the scale and intensity of the blaze, the fire tenders were not deployed with urgency, raising serious questions,” Malviya said. “This is not just an administrative failure; it is deliberate manipulation. Mamata Banerjee is playing with fire. This time, quite literally.”
The draft electoral rolls revealed the maximum number of deletions have happened in Calcutta and the two adjoining districts of North 24-Parganas and South 24-Parganas.
Around 6.06 lakh voters have been deleted from the 11 Assembly constituencies while 7.92 lakh voters in North 24-Parganas and 8.18 lakh voters in South 24-Parganas were deleted.