On August 8, 2026, police teams broke into the sheds of Bengali Muslim migrant workers around 6:30 am at various locations across Bengaluru, and detained over 900 people, including children and elderly. All of them are employed in manually collecting or segregating garbage – a job nobody else in the city is willing to do. Apparently, this action against the people who provide this lifeline service to the city, was taken to ‘identify illegal Bangladeshis’.
The police carried no warrants or official orders for their so-called verification drive. They barged into their homes early in the morning, demanded to see documents and responded with physical aggression when their methods were questioned. Even when the workers produced their identity proof, the police dragged them away. Their phones were confiscated, and in some cases, their sheds were vandalised. The police even smashed some CCTV cameras that the workers had put up for their own safety in the settlements.
The brazen, racially motivated violations by the law enforcement agencies continued even after human rights activists and lawyers convened. The police refused to let the lawyers and activists meet the detainees and threatened them saying they were ‘supporting illegal infiltrators’.
The police officers repeatedly claimed that they were under orders from higher authorities. One wonders what these instructions were because the cops on the ground couldn't agree on the exact set of documents they needed for the verification.
The migrants were lathi-charged and detained without due process. They were further assaulted inside the police station and humiliated by being made to squat on the floor. The police refused to let them use their phones, even to show their documents. They also went through their call logs, galleries and messages. This inhuman early morning crackdown lasted till about 8 pm.
What was gained?
The most telling part of this entire exercise is that the police had to release 800 of the 900-plus workers within 24 hours. This shows that the verification drive, the trespassing into homes, the detentions, assaults and intimidation was a complete farce.
If there are suspected illegal immigrants in the country, what is the process to identify them? Is it ok for hundreds of people to be captured like cattle, when there are existing constitutional processes which don’t involve violence? The police acted unconstitutionally, and violated the basic rights of some of the most marginalised migrant groups in this megacity. If it isn’t bad enough that lakhs of people in the IT city are employed in a profession that does not belong to the civilised world, the Bengaluru police seemed keen to show them that they could make their lives even worse.
The police are not at liberty to detain people on suspicions of them being foreigners. The women, children and men detained by the police were mostly Indians. This is clear from the fact that 800 of them were released. These people are economic refugees – semi-nomadic, Bengali-speaking, lowered caste, Muslim Indians. They don’t have any land, capital, savings, education, or even prolonged domicile status at one place. They travel across for menial jobs at the cheapest labour costs.
Bengaluru has a two tier waste management system. On top are the Pourakarmikas, mostly Dalits from the Madiga community, who have battled through generations for their labour rights, and achieved partial powers of negotiation after decades of unionising. They work as sweepers, drivers and waste collectors.
The collected waste is then transported to godowns and often into the homes of the migrant workers, where entire families sort hair from gum, bottles from caps, needles from syringes, and condoms from nappies in the heaps. They are the bottom layer of waste workers hired through informal bonds with the Greater Bengaluru Authority and their contractors.
They don’t have any union, capital or political power. Their ancestors have historically worked as indentured labourers, landless farmers, masons, carpenters, weavers, tanners, and other menial workers in villages and towns across what was once the united Bengal Presidency under the British.
The partition that never ended
In the last decades, climate change, failing agriculture, declining financial liquidity, lack of employment, and inflation have chased them out into the cities. Instead of taking equitable measures for them, the system further marginalizes them to create a permanent, informal, labour force at the cheapest costs. But it doesn’t just end at feudal and capitalist exploitation. The government endlessly propagates communal and ethnic marginalisation of the poorest Muslims for vote bank politics.
The words “Bengali” and “Bangla” have become threats and urban slurs, denoting infiltrators. The overlapping dialects shared by Indian Bengalis, Bangladeshi Bengalis, and Rohingyas have become a strong reason to box them all together as “ghuspetiyas”. Bengali migrant workers (not the Bhadralok corporate and IT employees!) are permanently marked for suspicion as infiltrators. It’s a vicious mix of xenophobia, racism and blind sectarian politics.
Which came first, the economic exploitation or the ethnic, is a difficult question to answer, as the populations doomed to this life are also historically the most exploited, politically weaponised, marginalized, poorest, landless, most hated, and hunted for centuries in the subcontinent’s history.
The ethnic hate for Bengali migrant workers can be traced back to colonial times. Muslims, Namasudras, and Adivasis from East Bengal, Saonthal Pargana, Jharkhand and parts of Bihar (undivided Bengal Presidency) were taken in large numbers to the hills of Assam and Sylhet to work in tea plantations as cheap migrant labourers since 1837, many of their descendents working as semi-nomadic workers till today.
In the later years, many Muslim and Namasudraa Bengalis migrated to Assam escaping communal tensions in undivided Bengal. The census results, married with desires for a Hindu ethnostate in the upper caste echelons, gave birth to the systemic racial profiling and hatred towards Bengali migrant workers in twentieth century Assam. On May 23, 1930, a headline read, ‘Communal Riot in Assam: Traces of Tension Still Exist’.
Further chaos ensued after partition in 1947, when Sylhet was made a part of East Pakistan, causing an influx of Bengali refugees into Assam. Then came the refugees of political unrest and climate catastrophes compounding each decade, and the independence war of Bangladesh (Mukti Juddha) in 1971.
There has been a steady influx of Bengali speaking Muslims and Namasudras migrating into Assam, that is a fact. But what’s untrue is that Bengalis are overtaking the ethnic Assamese in population, and Assamese language and culture are at stake. Incidentally, Assam only absorbed 3% of the migrating populations resulting from Mukti Juddha, but screamed the loudest about migrants taking over the state.
Of the ten million people taking refuge in India after and during Mukti Juddha, 80% were Hindus – not Bhadraloks, but Namsudras. This story of minority infiltration is ridiculously similar to every ethnostate's narrative, in history and in the present. This is a well constructed political strawman used to sway vote banks.
This anti-Muslim and anti-Bengali racism reached a fever pitch in 1970s, when Assam Students Union, Sahitya Sabha, Gana Parishad workers, and Assamese celebrities spearheaded a series of violent mass exodus drives of Bengali Muslims from Assam, popularly denoting them as “Ali, Coolie, Bangali” which means “Muslim, Labourer, Bengali”, marked as the most dangerous threat to Assam’s sovereignty and cultural identity.
Here’s a headline from a series of reports on Anti Bengali-Muslim riots, ‘800 People Flee Assam, Exodus to W Bengal’. Fed by decades of xenophobic propaganda and hate speech, the movement turned into genocide. Communal riots took place in Assam every decade since Independence, 1948, 1950, 1960, 1968, 1972, 1979, 1983, and so on, claiming hundreds of thousands of Bengali Muslim lives. Today, CM Hemanta Biswasarma openly tells Assamese citizens to not pay fair wages and fares to Miyas, and to trouble them so much that they’re compelled to self exile.
From Bengal to Bengal-uru
Bengali Muslims and Namasudras continue to migrate for the most menial and inhumane jobs across the country, as they are systemically cut off from formal education and employment. They continue to be destitute, and also the easiest target for Hindutva politics as the permanent bogeyman for their voters. This vitriolic propaganda has now morphed into the NRC-CAA-SIR ghoul that’s terrorising the nation.
The witch-hunting unsurprisingly started in Assam in 2017, rendering hundreds of thousands of people stateless and in detention, most of them Hindus, Matuas and Namasudras. This unconstitutional bill went on to become an act as we watched. The ghoul was unleashed on mainland India.
The mass anti-CAA protests which was led by the women of Shaheen Bagh, and across the country, deterred the government for a while. The pandemic in 2020 gave them the perfect cover to demolish the protests and imprison the dissenters. Five years later, the ghoul is back as SIR, a back-door, wild card re-entry of CAA, where Indians have to prove that they are Indians.
What if they can't prove it? Nobody knows. Will they be deported, will they be detained, will their bank accounts be frozen, nobody knows. There's no clear plan of action after the D-lists are out. And this is the exact situation that every fascist regime dreams of – mass panic, vigilantism and lynchings – in pursuit of their so-called ‘final solution’. Uncertainties, fears and mayhem around citizenship strengthen them.
The government deliberately induces suspicions among citizens, creates scapegoats, and distracts us from actual issues that affect the populace, strengthening the foundations of a Hindu nationalist ethnostate through xenophobia and crony capitalism at the cost of the most vulnerable.
And once again at the target of the propaganda machinery are Bengali migrant workers. To their credit, the ruling administration didn’t shy away from owning the deliberate attack they unleashed on their poorest citizens, as Home Minister Amit Shah explained the chronology of the “Detect, Delete, Deport” project, where the system will detect undesirable people, delete them from voter lists, and deport them.
Although aimed at “ghuspetiyas” the drive seems to target any and everybody through its mindless, automated, mechanised processes full of errors, loopholes and logical fallacies. Once again the nation is in queues, all in the name of evicting illegal migrants. Millions of names are being deleted from voter lists across states. But the government has consistently failed to show any significant number of Bangladeshis and infiltrators caught in their nonsensical identity ascertaining drives — just like in Assam NRC — just like on August 8 in Bengaluru.
In Karnataka, the state is under Congress administration. Bengaluru has the highest number of Bengali migrant workers in the country, owing to its booming IT corridor, uber urban lifestyle generating endless garbage, its pleasant climate, and the reputation of being somewhat more secular than north Indian states.
As human rights activists, we have witnessed the dark contradictions of this seemingly shiny city. The treatment of Bengali migrant workers in Bengaluru is abysmal, to say the least. Not only are they subjected to inhumane living and working conditions, they’re forced into bonded labour, exposed to ethnic violence, and slandered in relentless hateful reports by Godi Media. Despite continuous flagging by activists, hate speech against Muslims and Bengali migrant workers is at an all time high in Bengaluru.
There’s barely any positive reportage to counter the dangerous narratives of right wing propaganda, which incites repeated incidents of arson, violence and the kind of police brutality we saw on August 8.
Foreigners are also human
What happened last Saturday is an open violation of the Right to Life and Dignity of any human on Indian soil; native or foreign. It is the combined failure of the state, media, activists, and trade unions of Karnataka, who barely address the systemic violation of Human and Labour rights, and the travesty of law and order against Bengali migrant workers in Bengaluru.
Are there undocumented Bangladeshis in Bengaluru? Yes. Poor Bangladeshi workers, and sometimes even Rohingya refugees, desperate for livelihood, are trafficked without legal documentation across the border, mostly through Assam (under the noses of the double engine administration) to Bengaluru with impunity.
The trafficked labourers manage the last leg of manual waste segregation at cheaper wages than workers from West Bengal and Assam. They live and work under fear of detection, deportation, exposed to violence, rapes, extortion, sex trafficking, arsons, and murders. On the other hand, migrants from West Bengal, Tripura and Assam are often framed as Bangladeshi and face severe discrimination and violence.
The profitable nexus among businesses, landlords, real estate developers, politicians, NGOs, and antisocial elements is a strongly connected, multi billion rupees market of labour exploitation, doubling as fodder for right wing propaganda of hate and Islamophobia. Many of the trafficked Bangladeshi workers in Bengaluru hold Aadhar and Pan cards, but more shockingly, Voter ID cards. Who is providing them with these IDs? Importantly, which party are they voting for?
But on August 8, the police didn’t distinguish between Bangladeshis or Indians. Instead they rained abuses and lathis on poor workers, and illegally detained them. Bengaluru has two types of Bengali migrant workers engaged in manual waste segregation – Indian Bengalis, and trafficked Bangladeshi Bengalis. Both groups are overwhelmingly Dalit or Pasmanda Muslim. The filial connections among them are strong and complicated, with shared history, trauma, international politics, and dangerous borders.
Many of them are direct descendants of displaced people from plantations, partitions, wars, conflicts, famines, cyclones, and genocides in the eastern subcontinent for centuries. They speak different dialects of Bengali and Assamese languages, with shared, intersecting ethnicities, foods, habits, and culture. Many of the Indian migrants’ villages are along the international border lines, permanently marking them for suspicion.
These workers are primarily engaged in manual wet and dry waste segregation. They are paid based on the waste they segregate, and are not allowed to leave the settlement without permission. The thekedars usually pay them a lump sum amount to pay off older loans before bringing them to Bengaluru, and the loan is used as a verbal bond holding the family back, with compounding interest.
They live in make-shift shacks in small areas that double as waste dumping grounds around the edges of the city, usually next to high drains and water bodies used for waste dumping. They have no toilets. Water is purchased at very high prices. Electricity is provided for 6-8 hours each day.
They have no designated sanitation areas, causing cross contamination of diseases rapidly. Children and adults are regularly infected, injured and burned while working. When it rains heavily, the waters of the neighbouring sewer overflow right into their homes. There’s no segregation between living and waste areas.
Police regularly visit the settlement and collect protection money or Hafta. If they’re unable to pay, the men are beaten and wrongfully detained. Based on racial profiling, Govt PHCs and hospitals refuse crucial medical services like anti-Rabies vaccines or burn care which directly endangers their life. Government schools deny admissions to their children. The children are exposed to child labour, early marriages, and illiteracy.
All of this happens to both Indian and Bangladeshi Bengali migrant workers. Under what humanitarian crisis would people choose such dangerous lives? Both groups suffer a multitude of indignities and violence, and both groups deserve their right to life and dignity under Article 21. But in reality, both groups end up just serving as disposable labour, and the proverbial sacrificial scapegoat at the altar of Hindutva.
August 8 was a grim reminder of the same horror shows we’ve seen unfolding in Assam, Gujarat, Delhi NCR, Orissa, and Uttar Pradesh over the last few years. They also often deport them through dangerous land or sea routes, a process that the Union Home Minister has called ‘Pushback’. But this could be a first for a Congress governed state, where the police act as thugs in the name of “finding infiltrators and Bangladeshis”.
These pushbacks, which violate international as well as Indian law, leave people stranded in a no-man’s land between the two nation-states, and their international borders. On many occasions the Indian and Bangladeshi border guards have been known to shoot them down like game animals. Some of the deported people are lost at sea, some on land. Some are deported alone, some with their families.
Our constitution provides the right to life and dignity to every one, despite their identity or nationality. While there are laws and processes of the nation state, India, the country at its soul, offers safety and security to everyone within its borders. Citizens, refugees, migrants, illegal immigrants or trafficking victims, everyone deserves safety on Indian soil.
So the problem needs a multi-layered approach. Starting with immediate action on the international trafficking rings, ironing out law and order within the states, ensuring Right to Life and decent Labour Rights for the migrant workers, humane and constitutional solutions for the trafficked workers from Bangladesh, and enabling better living and working conditions for all migrant workers in Bengaluru.
But where does one start? It’s preposterous to believe that a surveillance state like India cannot detect thousands of people being trafficked across its international and state borders freely and continuously, especially through a center-ruled state like Assam. If true, this is the biggest internal security failure in the history of independent India, and calls for immediate resignation of Home Minister Amit Shah, and CMs and HMs of states involved.
But if the center and state governments are aware of the trafficking and human rights violations happening under their watch, and are allowing it to happen, and then demonising the same poor workers as infiltrators and Bangladeshis, raiding their homes, detaining them, throwing them across borders or into the Bay of Bengal, if the government is willingly bringing the poison of Ali, Coolie, Bangali politics from Assam to Karnataka, and the rest of India, that raises questions only a revolution can answer.
Avisikta A (June) is a queerfeminist and human rights activist who focuses primarily on displaced and migrant populations. She is the co-founder of Garima Trust.
Views expressed are the author’s own.