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On August 8, hundreds of migrant workers were picked up from settlements across Bengaluru as part of the Karnataka government’s Operation Mukta, a drive to identify undocumented immigrants.
For many Bengali-speaking workers, however, the exercise felt less like verification and more like a detention drive.
Workers from West Bengal told TNM that police took them to stations and other facilities, checked their Aadhaar and voter IDs, and in several cases went through their phones, including call logs, messages, photographs, and videos. Some said they were assaulted, while others were separated for further questioning because they had made phone calls to relatives in Bangladesh.
One worker, Farooq SK, said police initially told them they would be released within minutes after their documents were checked. Instead, they were taken for biometric verification and kept waiting for hours. Police also checked their phones repeatedly.
“Phones have personal matters,” he said. “The police take the phones and go through them.”
The operation came after months of growing attention around alleged Bangladeshi illegal immigration in Bengaluru. Hindutva activists and social media influencers have repeatedly targeted Bengali-speaking migrant workers, alleging that they are undocumented Bangladeshis.
For instance, Hindutva activist Puneeth Kerehalli has publicly confronted migrant workers and accused them of being Bangladeshi. His claims have also been amplified by television news coverage and social media.
Activists say this has created an atmosphere in which Bengali-speaking workers are viewed with suspicion even when they are Indian citizens.
Legal researcher Darshana Mitra of the National Law School of India University pointed out that West Bengal, Assam, and Bangladesh share linguistic and cultural overlaps. People living near the border may also have family members across it.
Yet, she said, the distinction was being flattened into “Bengali-speaking Muslim equals Bangladeshi”.
Activists who visited some of the settlements described people being packed into halls and asked to establish that they were Indian citizens. PUCL’s Aishwarya R said the process was arbitrary, with police also checking private phone data and treating calls to Bangladeshi numbers as grounds for further scrutiny.
The Karnataka government has defended the operation as necessary to crack down on illegal immigration. Data presented in the Assembly showed that 868 of 911 undocumented immigrants identified by the government were Bangladeshis.
But legal experts question whether mass detentions based on suspicion, particularly suspicion arising from language, have any legal basis. Mitra said there is no general power under the Immigration and Foreigners Act for police to conduct wide-ranging raids against people suspected of being foreigners on an indeterminate basis.
Migrant rights activists say focusing only on the workers obscures the much bigger problem of human trafficking and the networks that profit from it.
Social activist Ameen Sailani said he approached the Foreigners Regional Registration Office in February with information about what he described as a trafficking network operating in Bengaluru. He provided names, phone numbers, and locations, he said.
After filing the complaint, Ameen said he received death threats and was forced to shut his business. He alleges that traffickers bring people into India with promises of jobs before forcing them into low-paid work, including garbage segregation.
Rafikul Biswas from Nadia, who has lived in Bengaluru for over a decade, knows what it is like to be caught in the system. Bengaluru Police previously accused him of being Bangladeshi and put him in a detention centre for four months. The Karnataka High Court later quashed this.
During his detention, he suffered two heart attacks.
Yet, during Operation Mukta, he was picked up again.
The operation has therefore raised a larger question about who gets targeted and who gets overlooked.
Indian workers from West Bengal and Assam also find themselves branded as illegal immigrants. Meanwhile, activists argue that the agents and middlemen who facilitate trafficking remain largely untouched.
As Bengaluru continues to depend on migrant workers for jobs ranging from construction to waste collection, the consequences of treating an entire community with suspicion extend far beyond one police operation.
Watch TNM’s full investigation into Operation Mukta and the people caught in its crosshairs.
