West Bengal chief minister orders to ‘detain and deport’ Bangladeshis

The BJP won the Rajarhat assembly constituency by a margin of 316 votes, thanks to a special recounting of votes in a booth where 966 voters were Muslims. Over 90 per cent of them apparently voted for the BJP, debunking BJP leaders’ lament that Muslims do not vote for the party.

Yet, Muslims in West Bengal, who constituted 28 per cent of the population in 2011, find themselves in the crosshairs of the two-and-a-half-week-old BJP government in the state. Singled out by several notifications, the latest to sting them is the order to district administrations to prepare holding centres for alleged Bangladeshi nationals and Rohingya refugees, if any, from Myanmar.

Chief minister Suvendu Adhikari on 21 May claimed police had been told not to produce apprehended Bangladeshi illegals before a court but to ‘feed them well and send them straight to a border outpost’ for deportation to Bangladesh by the BSF.

The government notification on Sunday, 24 May to prepare ‘holding centres’ or detention centres in all the 23 districts paves the way for the arrest of ‘undocumented foreigners’ on suspicion and detaining them. The law requires illegal aliens to be booked under Section 14(A) of the Foreigners Act, 1946, and produced before a court.

Assam’s re-elected BJP chief minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma, has publicly bragged about how his government has been pushing people identified by the police, not tribunals, as foreigners across the border at night.

Although the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls undertaken in the state since November 2025 was meant to identify illegal infiltrators, the exercise does not seem to have identified any. The 90 odd lakh voters deleted from the 2024 voters’ list were dropped because they were either dead, had shifted house, were registered elsewhere or were not found by the BLO.

An additional reason for deletions was ‘logical discrepancies’ that included spelling errors and alleged discrepancies in the age of parents or because they were not on the electoral rolls in 2002.

As many as 27 lakh voters deleted have filed appeals before appellate tribunals, which have disposed, according to media reports, some 10 thousand of them so far. Most of the appeals, said to be as high as 95 per cent, were reportedly upheld and the names ordered to be restored in the rolls.

That the new BJP government is going after Muslims in the state became apparent when chief minister Suvendu Adhikari declared that as MLA of Bhawanipur constituency, he is undecided about opening a ward office in the solitary Muslim dominated ward.

Several BJP MLAs publicly announced that they would not even attest certificates for Muslims and would do no work for them. The campaign slogan of the BJP, Jo Hamare Saath, Hum Unke Saath (We stand by those who stand by us), has clearly replaced the slogan of Sab Ka Saath, Sab Ka Vikas (We all stand together as partners in progress).

In one of the first directions given by the new chief minister, bulldozers were sent to Tiljala, a Muslim dominated area in Kolkata, to demolish parts of an illegal construction where two ‘workers’ had died in a ‘fire accident’.

Building regulations fall under the jurisdiction of the municipal corporation, and the chief minister did not have the authority to order arbitrary demolitions, it was argued before the Calcutta High Court, which stayed the demolitions. The court was told that municipal powers were being bypassed through direct state intervention.

Muslims in the city, a sociologist pointed out, are faced with a double whammy. They rarely get rented accommodation because Hindu houseowners are reluctant to let them out to Muslims. Nor can they buy properties due to the same prejudice at play. Poor Muslims build rooms to take in tenants after presumably cutting corners and bribing the municipal employees and politicians.

The unauthorised structures are vulnerable to demolition at any time. But then the entire city is full of unauthorised constructions, though before the Panchayat elections in West Bengal in 2018, BJP had demanded that Mamata Banerjee government increased the OBC reservation from 17 per cent to 27 per cent and bring it up to the national level.

However, the latest OBC notification by the Adhikari government has reduced it from 17 per cent to 7 per cent on the pretext of an order of the Calcutta High Court in 2024. The BJP government is also learnt to have withdrawn the appeal against the HC order in the Supreme Court.

The notice issued by the state's Backward Classes Welfare Department released a fresh list of OBC groups with 66 communities (including 11 Muslim castes) that were included till 2010, and ended reservation benefits for 77 communities that were given OBC status by the previous governments.

Incidentally, 75 of these excluded communities are Muslim or follow Islam. With cabinet minister Kshudiram Tudu announcing that caste certificates issued during the tenure of the TMC government would be re-verified, a large number of Muslims in government jobs apprehend they will be subjected to a "second SIR".

A flurry of orders restricting Friday prayers (namaz) on streets, use of loudspeakers for azaan, restrictions on cow slaughter hitherto permissible in the state and mandatory singing of the national song ‘Vande Mataram’ in madrasas are some of the orders specifically targeting the Muslims during the last 16 days since 9 May, 2026 when the chief minister and five other ministers were sworn in.