The world’s largest democracy is on the path to creating South Asia’s new stateless population

Earlier this year, when the United States of America started deporting undocumented immigrants, India stated quite emphatically that it is working together with the US to identify and receive back people who had travelled via the undocumented route.

The Indian government refuses to follow this process with Bangladesh in the case of alleged undocumented Bangladeshis.

Often this results in the government abandoning its own citizens from West Bengal to the whims of the police hunting for undocumented Bangladeshis.

Consider the case of Palash and Shukla Adhikary, a Bengali-speaking couple, who along with their two-year-old son, were detained for nearly a year in Karnataka. They were suspected of being undocumented Bangladeshi nationals.

Palash and Shukla, like an estimated 2.2 million others working in the unorganised sector across different Indian states, hail from the Indian state of West Bengal bordering Bangladesh. Bengali is the common language of both West Bengal and neighbouring Bangladesh.

Although not from Bangladesh, the Adhikary family’s experience is merely one of many shared by Bengali-speaking internal migrant workers in India.

In June 2025, there were reports of 300 Bengali migrants being detained under similar charges in Rajasthan, 444 in neighbouring Odisha, and nine in Chhattisgarh. All these states are ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party, also in power at the Centre.

More worryingly, at least seven Bengali migrant workers were picked up from different Indian states...

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