You return home late one night. As you let yourself in, a policeman grabs you and says, ‘Caught you breaking in.’

‘I’m not breaking in,’ you say. ‘It’s my house. See, I have a key.’

‘You’re a sly one,’ says the policeman. ‘You even had a key made. I suppose you’ll next fish out some IDs’ — and as you start doing just that, ‘Don’t bother, I know what those cards are worth. You’re up to no good, sneaking around when decent folk are asleep. Jail’s where you belong.’

Across India, thousands of migrant workers from West Bengal are savouring a grim version of this grotesque comedy and finding nothing remotely funny in their situation. They are confined for days and weeks, humiliated and beaten up. More than one have emerged with broken limbs. They produce Aadhaar cards, voter cards, school certificates, even land deeds. They are detained nonetheless while the ‘suspect’ documents are verified, where they are not simply torn up and thrown away. The cause for suspicion is not divulged. It is widely thought to be the Bengali language the holders speak. Nor do we learn how often the suspicion proves justified. After detaining hundreds of victims, Haryana had expelled only 10 Bangladeshi infiltrators till the end of July. Of the 447 held at Jharsuguda in Odisha, 90% were released within days with the jury still out on the rest.

My subject is not the justifiable expulsion of illegal immigrants but the collateral damage inflicted on bona fide Indian citizens trapped in the fray. Thousands of Indian Bengalis across the country have fled their accustomed places of work, often after gross ill-treatment and humiliation. Most chillingly, several of them were conveyed to the border and pushed into Bangladesh, effectively leaving them stateless at the mercy of a foreign regime. Even one such case would be one too many. The plight of Sunali Bibi, eight months pregnant, seems finally to have provoked an outrage. She was ‘pushed back’ over the border with her husband and young son, besides another woman and her two minor children. There are at least eight earlier instances where the victims have returned to India. How many might have sunk without trace?

It beats belief that a democratic State could disown and imperil its citizens in this way. No less appallingly, the State remains unfazed even when the betrayal is exposed. There is no apology, no compensation, no explanation from the state governments involved. The home ministry is silent, as the Indian mission in Dhaka seems to be. The victims’ only resort is the West Bengal government, which has moved court. The exemptions accompanying the new Immigration and Foreigners Act might bring some relief to Hindu victims, but they leave the Muslim Bengali-speaking Indian citizen still more vulnerable.

Meanwhile the undoubted fact of illegal migration is worked up by every hi-tech rumour mill into a lurid myth. There are no reliable counts of Bangladeshi and Rohingya infiltrators, still less their impact on the demography of a nation of 1.4 billion people. It is thus possible to cite any fanciful figures, with rhetoric masquerading as statistics, to breed mistrust and hatred across the nation, and launch an official drive in that fevered milieu. While the all-India politics behind the drive is all too predictable, it is astonishing that the Bengal BJP should not have uttered a squawk in support of its fellow citizens from that state.

Instead, it protests that the latter would not have looked for jobs outside Bengal were the state’s economy in better shape. This argument is both irrelevant and open to question. A 2024 report of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister places West Bengal among the top five states for inward as well as outward migration, the former a new development. These figures might be nuanced on analysis, but the only rational stand is to accept inter-state migration as a legitimate and necessary economic function, and value the people who provide it. That is the legal and official position, undermined by orchestrated misinformation.

The response of the Bengal government thus seems misdirected. The limited aid disbursed to returning migrants from its coffers can hardly sustain them: they are already returning to their workplaces in other states, however torn by anxiety and foreboding.

Still more crucially, this inadequate support dilutes the right of these migrants, as of all Indian citizens, to live and work anywhere in the country. It is a national issue: it should not be clouded by religious, communal and regional prejudice. As it is, we are cohabiting with staged ‘encounters’ and bulldozer justice. The violence to legal and human rights is now stretched to the summary denial of citizenship itself by indiscriminate detention and, at its most extreme, transborder pushbacks. No Indian can live at peace in the shadow of such violations.

The Bengali bhadralok have confined their response to the cultural comfort zone of the nobility of the Bengali language and the excellence of Tagore’s poetry. But this is not a language issue at all, except insofar as language is abused as a dog-whistle to identify victims for persecution. The basic concerns are graver by far.

India is redefining the ambit of citizen rights and the notion of citizenship itself. The drive against illegal migration has been weaponised to this end. On the one hand, citizenship is now so hard won, obtained by such a fraught and byzantine process, that millions risk failing the test. Yet it is so fragile that local policemen can shatter it, driving us out of our homes and homeland.

The chattering classes rest secure that such a fate cannot befall them. But their complacence rests less and less on their bedrock identity as citizens and increasingly on privilege, class and cultural standing. These are shifting and treacherous sands. A Calcutta technocrat was barred entry to a Noida hotel because he spoke Bengali. Before such instances multiply, it behoves all thinking Indians to deplore the erosion of rights to the least of our fellow citizens.

Sukanta Chaudhuri is Professor Emeritus, Jadavpur University