Across India’s vast and uneven labour market, a shared experience has gradually become normalised in the lives of Bengali Muslim migrant workers over the past decade: fear. The fear of being suspected, labelled, detained, attacked, or killed—not for what one has done, but for who one is perceived to be.
This fear is not abstract. It is shaped by names, accents, faces, and rumours. It travels with workers across state borders—into construction sites, brick kilns, factories, railway platforms, marketplaces, and rented rooms. Incident after incident has made one reality impossible to ignore: the harassment, humiliation, and killing of Bengali Muslim migrant workers are no longer aberrations or isolated crimes. They constitute a structural social and political condition of contemporary India—one that demands serious reckoning, particularly in the context of the 2026 West Bengal Assembly elections.
In Odisha’s Sambalpur, Jewel Rana, a young man from Murshidabad, was allegedly lynched on suspicion of being “Bangladeshi.” In Karnataka, a migrant worker from Malda died after being assaulted, though official narratives attempted to attribute his death to unrelated causes. In Howrah, the body of a worker was recovered bearing severe injury marks; his family insists that his only “offence” was speaking Bengali. In Delhi-NCR, Haryana, Chhattisgarh, and Odisha, Bengali-speaking Muslim workers have repeatedly reported detention, interrogation, and humiliation under the pretext of identity verification. The most recent addition to this grim list is Alai Sheikh, a street vendor from Murshidabad, killed in Jharkhand—allegedly after revealing his home address.
These cases are connected not by geography, profession, or circumstance, but by identity. They are not outcomes of workplace disputes or criminal altercations. They are deaths rooted in suspicion. Identity itself has become a site of lethal vulnerability.
Dehumanisation, Identity, and the Politics of Suspicion
Viewed collectively, these incidents reveal more than episodic failures of policing or law enforcement. They point to a deeper and increasingly normalised process of dehumanisation. Bengali Muslim migrant workers occupy a space of triple marginality: they are workers in a largely informal economy, religious minorities in a majoritarian political climate, and in many states, linguistic minorities whose accents immediately mark them as “outsiders.” This layered vulnerability pushes them perilously close to the edge of state protection.
At the centre of this suspicion lies a single word that has acquired extraordinary power: “Bangladeshi.” In contemporary India, this term no longer functions as a neutral geographical or national descriptor. It has become a political weapon—one that transforms doubt into justification.
The irony is stark. This tagging directly contradicts historical and documentary reality. The draft voter list under SIR 2026—an official exercise of the Indian state—demonstrates that a substantial portion of West Bengal’s Muslim population consists of pre-Partition residents. These families did not migrate to Pakistan in 1947. They consciously chose to remain in India, often at great personal cost. Their roots in the land predate independence itself. Their citizenship is not merely legal; it is historical, social, and documented.
Yet the “Bangladeshi infiltrator” narrative persists—not because it is true, but because it is politically useful. It offers a convenient explanation for economic stress, demographic anxiety, and political polarisation. It allows structural failures to be displaced onto vulnerable bodies. This is not casual misinformation; it is organised political propaganda. And its consequences are not rhetorical. They are written in injuries, detentions, and deaths.
The Right to Life and the Reality of Conditional Citizenship
This reality compels a renewed examination of Article 21 of the Indian Constitution, which guarantees the Right to Life. Traditionally understood as protection from arbitrary deprivation of life and liberty, judicial interpretation has expanded this right to include dignity, livelihood, and personal security. Yet the lived experience of Bengali Muslim migrant workers exposes a widening gap between constitutional promise and social reality.
The question today is no longer merely whether people survive, but whether they are allowed to live with dignity and without fear. If the Right to Life does not translate into a practical right to live—to exist freely in public spaces without constant threat—then constitutional guarantees remain symbolic.
For Bengali Muslim migrant workers, citizenship itself has become conditional. Such conditional citizenship strikes at the core of democracy. Citizenship is not a privilege granted by social approval; it is a constitutional right. When citizenship becomes subject to public suspicion rather than legal recognition, the consequences are predictable. Streets turn into courtrooms. Mobs assume the role of judges. Doubt becomes verdict.
International human rights law has long recognised that dehumanising language precedes violence. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights obligate states to protect life and dignity without discrimination. India’s own Supreme Court, in Tehseen S. Poonawalla vs Union of India (2018), recognised lynching as an assault on the rule of law and issued clear preventive directives. Yet implementation remains uneven. Many states have failed to enact comprehensive anti-lynching legislation. In West Bengal, despite repeated incidents linked to linguistic and citizenship-based suspicion, there is no specific law addressing identity-driven dehumanisation, nor an effective interstate protection framework for migrant workers. Safety thus depends more on administrative discretion than on enforceable rights.
2026 and the Test of Democratic Conscience
It is against this backdrop that the 2026 West Bengal Assembly elections acquire meaning beyond routine political competition. This election is not merely about governance or development; it is about dignity, security, and the right to live.
The question before political parties is unavoidable. Will Bengali Muslims continue to be treated primarily as a vote bank—mobilised during elections and forgotten thereafter? Or will they be recognised as citizens whose lives demand institutional protection?
Genuine commitment would require more than rhetorical invocations of secularism. It would demand concrete measures: laws against dehumanising labels and hate-based suspicion; recognition of lynching as a distinct offence; interstate mechanisms to protect migrant workers; mandatory constitutional training for law enforcement; and active use of official records such as SIR 2026 to counter disinformation.
These demands are not radical. They are remedial. They seek equality, not exception.
Silence in the face of ongoing dehumanisation is not neutrality—it is consent. And the cost of this consent is paid by people like Jewel Rana and Alai Sheikh, whose only act was seeking livelihood. If the right to live does not occupy the centre of political discourse in 2026, the implications will extend far beyond West Bengal. They will confront the democratic conscience of the republic itself.
Can India guarantee unconditional security to its minority citizens, or will suspicion continue to define belonging? This question can no longer be postponed. It demands an answer—not in slogans, but in laws, institutions, and action.
