How crackdown on ‘illegal' Bangladeshis fuels fear and anxiety among Bengali workers

Indian Express

9 hours ago

'Only Bengalis can truly detect the subtle difference in dialect between the Bengali we speak and the one spoken in Bangladesh,' says Sujeet Banerjee, the vice-president of the Samast Bengali Samaj Association and the owner of a gold-testing business in Ahmedabad.
To weed out illegal Bangladeshi migrants who have crossed the border into India and have been living in Gujarat, since May, the local police has been collecting, documenting and verifying the identity papers of thousands of migrant workers engaged in jewellery making at KT Plaza and Sahajanand Complex at Ratanpole in Ahmedabad's Walled City and hundreds of smaller units across the city.
These highly skilled workers, aged between 18 and 45 years, have since decades been travelling in excess of over 2,000 km from across West Bengal to work in the Walled City, the nerve centre of the gold market in Ahmedabad.
According to the Samast Bengali Samaj Association, a workers' collective, nearly 1.5 lakh Bengali migrants are currently engaged in gold, silver and imitation jewellery making units, besides stone embroidery work in the garment sector in the city. At Ratanpol's Sahajanand Complex, the other major gold jewellery manufacturing unit in the city, around 10,000 workers are employed in its nearly 1,200 units.
On the fourth floor of an old building near Ratanpole, up a flight of dingy stairs, nearly 350 Bengali migrants sit in cramped quarters, using blow torches to fashion ornaments out of a costly yellow metal whose price has touched nearly Rs1 lakh per tola (10 grams).
Occasional whispers in chaste Bengali can be heard in the dark corridors of this four-storey building, where toy shops occupy the bottom two levels and gold jewellery manufacturing units the top two floors.
Business has been slow, say workers, adding that they have not been getting as much work as they usually do, with many shops shuttered and others working at just half their normal capacity due to the rising prices of gold in an industry dominated by artisans from Kalkatta (Kolkata). However, another development has hit work of late.
While such verification drives have been held all over Gujarat, in bigger cities like Ahmedabad, Vadodara and Surat, these started in April itself after the April 22 terror attack in Pahalgam.
In Ahmedabad, the police launched a massive crackdown in the area around Chandola lake, where 4 lakh square metres of 11 lakh square metres land had been encroached upon for the last several decades. In the operation, which began at 3 am on April 26, the city police detained 890 people.
By May 1, only 209 of these 890 people turned out to be Bangladeshis nationals and the rest were released. In later operations, the Crime Branch rounded up 56 more Bangladesh nationals and started their deportation proceedings in coordination with the Gujarat Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS).
On August 1, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Crime Branch) Ajit Rajian told The Indian Express, 'All illegal immigrants were found living in the Chandola lake area itself. Even if they were working in other parts of Ahmedabad, that area alone was viable for them to find accommodations. After the initial drive (on April 26), following which we detained 209 people, 56 people who had fled from Chandola during the demolitions were detained.'
Even as the police were cracking down at Chandola lake, KT Plaza received a visit from the police, says a jewellery unit owner. He adds, 'Since they had asked for identification documents for all our workers, the KT Plaza Owners' Association collected the copies of all the Aadhaar cards and voter IDs, and submitted them at the Kalupur police station. The business owners at Sahajanand Complex did the same.'
Vishakha Dabral, Deputy Commissioner of Police, Zone 3, confirmed the police reached out to local associations to contact the units that employ migrants. 'Besides verifying their nationalities through various methods, we also put our local intelligence to work. They checked rental accommodations to make sure that all renters had undergone police verification. No illegal immigrants were found at these units.'
When the police came knocking, asking for their identification papers, a manager at a jewellery making said the the workers were 'concerned' at first. 'We assured the workers that they won't face any problem. Once the documents were verified, nobody was detained from our units.'
Confirming this, inspector H R Vaghela of Kalupur police station says, 'While the Chandola raid was underway, we conducted a verification drive of Bengali migrants in the Walled City. Not a single illegal immigrant was found.'
Confirming that Bengali workers had not faced any harassment after the verification drive, Abdul Rauf Yakub Shaikh, the president of the Samast Bengali Samaj Association, says, 'Bhasa main problem hai, jiski wajah se thoda misguide hota hai (the subtle difference in dialects makes identification difficult). The police verification drive has been going on for over a month at both places (Sahajanand Complex and KT Plaza).'
To a question on the dawn crackdown at Chandola, the manager at a jewellery making unit adds, 'The matter in Chandola was completely different since Bangladeshis were detained there. But here, in the gold market, that (being a foreigner) is simply not possible since this business runs on trust.'
Banerjee of the Samast Bengali Samaj Association agreed with him.
'This is a highly skilled business that takes years to master. So everyone is known and are verified Bengali migrants,' he says.
To a question on the living situation of these migrant workers, a local unit owner said, 'While many workers live where they work, in most units, they live elsewhere. The difference between Kolkata and Ahmedabad is that Hindu workers and Muslim workers live in different neighbourhoods. Since many Bengali Hindus also consume meat, we do so in a respectful manner.'