A ‘Bangladeshi identification drive’ cannot become a Bengali Muslim identification drive. Somebody’s language and ethnic identity cannot become a constitutional substitute for proof of foreign nationality. The Karnataka police’s recent crackdown on Bengali Muslim migrants has clearly crossed the line from evidence-based identification to identity-based profiling.
From August 8, the Bengaluru police have launched a massive ‘verification’ operation purportedly to identify suspected foreign nationals. This drive, called Operation Mukta, resulted in the forceful and unlawful detention of hundreds of Bengali-speaking migrant workers for 10-12 hours, who were all made to show documents to police officials.
The detained people were not taken to police stations or detention centres but to nearby marriage halls, community halls or convention centres. Those targeted were mostly Bengali-speaking migrant workers working in the city as waste pickers, municipal garbage collectors, construction workers, auto drivers, delivery workers, and street vendors, among others. The women were mostly domestic workers and also worked in waste segregation.
They were all mostly workers who had migrated from West Bengal and Assam and were predominantly Muslim, barring a few from Scheduled Caste (SC) communities. Very few of the hundreds of workers detained had migrated from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Tamil Nadu and other districts of Karnataka.
It is manifestly arbitrary when the police enter workers’ settlements because they are largely inhabited by a specific ethnic group and subject them to verification merely because of their identity.
The Supreme Court’s verdict on July 13 in the Sabitri Dey @ Swasthi Dey v Union of India case is particularly significant. The court reaffirmed that questions of citizenship and foreigner status cannot be reduced to a mechanical exercise. The process must be fair and lawful.
Relying upon Louis De Raedt v Union of India (1991) and National Human Rights Commission v State of Arunachal Pradesh (1996), the court reiterated that Article 21 protects even foreigners and persons whose citizenship is disputed. The “procedure established by law” therefore means a procedure that is fair, just and reasonable and cannot be arbitrary, oppressive or fanciful.
The state can claim the authority to identify and take measures against foreign nationals present in India under the Immigration and Foreigners Act, 2025. But that power cannot be transformed into a presumption that a person is a foreign national because they speak Bengali, come from a particular region, follow a certain religion, work as a migrant labourer or live in an informal settlement. Such profiling is constitutionally impermissible.
Article 14 permits reasonable classification; it does not permit the state to manufacture a suspect class. The Supreme Court’s foundational judgement in State of West Bengal v Anwar Ali Sarkar requires any classification to rest on an intelligible differentia having a rational connection with the object sought to be achieved.
The question, therefore, is straightforward: what ‘intelligible differentia’ distinguishes a Bengali-speaking migrant worker from any other migrant worker in Bengaluru for the purpose of identifying a Bangladeshi national? Look hard and one finds none.
The class bias too is impossible to miss. The targeting is not merely linguistic, religious or ethnic. It is also plainly class-based. It is predominantly poor Bengali-speaking migrant workers living in informal settlements who are subjected to these drives, while Bengali-speaking workers in relatively secure, white-collar or professional employment and living in apartment complexes are conspicuously outside their reach.
The state is therefore not merely constructing a linguistic suspect class. It is constructing a class-based and racialised suspect population out of migrant workers. There is something profoundly disturbing about the poorest migrant workers being repeatedly required to prove that they belong to the country in which they are born and struggle through life.
Indian law protects all
The premise that it is acceptable to treat a person as less than human because they may be Bangladeshi is itself constitutionally untenable. Article 21 protects “persons”, not merely citizens. Any process for identifying foreign nationals must therefore conform to the requirements of fairness, dignity and legality.
In National Human Rights Commission v State of Arunachal Pradesh (1996), the Supreme Court intervened to protect Chakma persons facing persecution and affirmed the state’s constitutional obligation to protect every person within its territory from threats to life and liberty. The state’s power to identify or deport a foreign national is consequently not a licence for arbitrary detention, violence or humiliation.
The rule of law requires evidence, procedure and individual determination. There is no constitutional space for collective suspicion or collective punishment. In a 2025 directive, the Supreme Court reiterated that collective punishment has no place in our constitutional scheme. The court relied on Justice VR Krishna Iyer’s observations in Gujarat Steel Tubes Ltd. v Gujarat Steel Tubes Mazdoor Sabha (1980), saying, “...we have rejected, as a nation, the theory of community guilt and collective punishment.”
The principle is elementary: no person may be punished except for their own guilt. If the state has credible material indicating that a particular individual is a foreign national, it must proceed against that individual according to law. The absence of documents immediately available to a worker in a precarious condition cannot become evidence of foreign nationality; still less can the linguistic identity of an entire working-class population become a ground for suspicion.
The position is particularly clear after Md. Rahim Ali v. State of Assam (2024), where the Supreme Court held that the state cannot simply pick a person at random, knock on their door and act on the basis of a bare suspicion that they are a foreigner.
Before action is taken, authorities must have some material basis or information giving rise to the suspicion that the person is a foreigner and not an Indian citizen. That principle directly confronts identification drives founded on nothing more than language, appearance, place of origin or economic status.
Migration within India
For workers who migrate from West Bengal and other parts of India in search of livelihood, internal migration is not a concession granted by the state. Article 19(1)(d) protects the freedom to move throughout India, while Article 19(1)(e) protects the right to reside and settle anywhere in the territory of India, subject only to constitutionally permissible restrictions.
The Constitution does not create an internal passport regime under which a worker from West Bengal or Assam must continually establish their “Indianness” merely because they have migrated to Bengaluru for work. The migrant worker who builds Bengaluru’s apartments, lays its roads, cleans its offices and works on its construction sites does not become a lesser citizen because they speak Bengali.
The police have repeatedly relied upon the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) memo from May 2, 2025. The memo, classified as ‘secret’, directs state governments and Union Territory administrations to establish Special Task Forces to detect, identify and deport or send back “illegal immigrants” from Bangladesh and Myanmar.
It also directs the establishment of holding centres for their detention.
Most significantly, it contemplates that where a suspected Bangladeshi or Myanmar national claims Indian citizenship and residence in another state or union territory, verification is to be undertaken by the concerned authorities. It further provides that the person may be kept in a holding centre for 30 days pending verification. This raises fundamental questions of statutory authority and constitutional legality.
The first and most fundamental defect is that the letter appears to create a power that the Immigration and Foreigners Act does not confer. Indeed no law permits detention of persons merely because they are suspected of being foreign nationals.
Second, the memo effectively hands the executive the power to suspect, verify, detain and determine a person’s status without prescribing meaningful safeguards. Thirdly, the memo sanctions executive adjudication without due process, under the guise of verification.
The absence of any right to challenge either detention or an adverse determination is a direct assault on the rule of fair hearing and the most basic requirements of natural justice. Additionally, the power to suspect without prescribing the basis for suspicion makes the entire exercise arbitrary and enables racialised and class-based profiling.
The central point here is that the executive cannot create, by letter, a power of detention and citizenship adjudication that Parliament has not conferred by law. What is being presented as a verification exercise is, in substance, an unaccountable regime of suspicion, detention and executive determination, without statutory authority and without due process.
In fact, the memo has enabled the systemic and arbitrary detention of migrant workers from West Bengal in various other states, including Delhi, Maharashtra, Odisha and Uttar Pradesh. The subsequent pushing of detainees into Bangladesh is sought to be justified on the basis of this MHA memo, which authorises inter-state verification and detention of suspected “illegal immigrants”.
The illegal detentions erode the dignity and personhood of detainees while impeding their right to pursue their livelihoods. It also violates Article 22, which lays down essential procedural safeguards against arbitrary arrest and preventive detention. This includes the right of the detainee to be informed of the grounds of detention and the right to make a representation against the detention order at the earliest opportunity.
The most publicised case is that of six Bengali Muslims, including a heavily pregnant Sunali Khatun, who were pushed over the border to Bangladesh in June 2025 pursuant to a detention order under the May 2025 memo.
The legal challenge to this illegal pushback was initiated by Sunali’s father
Bhodu Shekh with a habeas corpus petition in the Kolkata High Court. In a landmark order, the court ordered the Union government to bring them back within four weeks.
The Union government challenged this in the Supreme Court. However, during the pendency of this appeal, the Union government agreed to bring back Sunali and her eight-year-old son Sabir. In July 2026, the remaining persons, including Sunali’s husband, also returned.
Foreigners’ tribunals
The legal position must now also be assessed against the Immigration and Foreigners Act, 2025, which came into force in September 2025, together with the Immigration and Foreigners Rules, 2025, the Immigration and Foreigners Order, 2025, and the Immigration and Foreigners (Exemption) Order, 2025.
The Act creates the statutory framework for determining foreigner status. There cannot therefore be a free-standing executive process for determining citizenship outside that statutory framework.
Chapter VI of the Immigration and Foreigners Order provides for foreigners' tribunals. Paragraph 16(1) permits the Union government, state government, UT administration, district collector or district magistrate to refer the question of whether a person is or is not a foreigner to such a tribunal.
Even where the statutory burden of proof ultimately falls upon the individual, the determination must take place through the procedure prescribed by law, with a meaningful opportunity to contest the allegation and produce evidence.
The real danger
The problem is not whether authorities can identify foreign nationals. The constitutional question is how it does so.
Migrant workers from West Bengal and Assam, particularly those employed in low-income and informal sectors, are being subjected to scrutiny based on linguistic identity, regional origin, economic insecurity and precarious living conditions. A process that begins with collective suspicion and proceeds through detention, document demands and inter-state verification risks turning poverty, language and migration into proxies for foreign nationality.
Citizenship is foundational to the constitutional order. A person’s citizenship status cannot be subjected to an arbitrary process that stigmatises them and places their fundamental rights at risk.
Determination of citizenship or foreigner status has consequences of the highest order and must therefore comply strictly with law, evidence and procedural fairness. It cannot be reduced to an improvised police exercise.
The rule of law requires that anyone entrusted with determining the rights, liberties or legal status of individuals act through procedures that are just, fair and reasonable under Articles 14 and 21. Citizenship, as the gateway to the enjoyment of the constitutional order, cannot be placed at the mercy of linguistic profiling, class prejudice or executive suspicion.
When authorities cross that boundary, what is presented as a search for foreigners risks becoming something altogether different: the construction of a suspect class out of India’s own migrant working poor.
Views expressed are the author’s own.