Jai Hind Camp, also called Jai Hind Bengali Basti, is a colony of migrant workers only 15 kilometres from the Lutyens bungalows of New Delhi. Yet the basti, with its fetid cesspools and mountains of garbage, seems a universe away from the manicured rose gardens of Lutyensland.
In the basti, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s hollow claim of ‘Viksit Bharat’ stands cruelly exposed. Electricity has been cut off. There is no water supply. In the monsoon, rainwater fills the hovel-like rooms, and snakes float in the sludge, sometimes biting the children sleeping in their mothers’ arms. Mosquitoes swarm about like clumps of black dust. The slum lanes are pitted tracks, potholed and precipitous. Walking on the pitch-dark alleyways at night feels like a tryst with death itself.
Now, there is another threat hanging over the residents of Jai Hind Camp. Most of them are being branded “Bangladeshis”, “Rohingya”, “illegal migrants”, “ghuspetiye”, or “outsiders”. Across India, Bangla-speaking migrant workers in BJP-ruled states are being systematically targeted, humiliated, and harassed. After Muslims, “Urban Naxals”, “Khan Market Gang”, and “Tukde Tukde Gang”, the Bengali or Bangla speaker is the BJP’s latest enemy.
Workers of Jai Hind Camp
I, along with my party colleagues, visited Jai Hind Camp on 14 and 15 July. We came in solidarity to offer whatever help we could to fellow Bengalis. The first thing we discovered was that all the residents of Jai Hind Camp—all of them—are proven citizens of India. They are neither Bangladeshi nor Rohingya, nor are they “illegal”. All of them possess not only Aadhaar cards, PAN cards, and Voter ID cards, but also land records of the small patches of land their families own in North Bengal’s Cooch Behar.
Their holdings in Cooch Behar are enough only for small subsistence dwellings, forcing them to wander in search of construction work. The Jai Hind Camp was established in the 1980s, and migrants from Cooch Behar started moving to Delhi in the following decades.
Today, they work as rag pickers, garbage segregators, and domestic workers in nearby Vasant Kunj. Having lived here for decades, their children and grandchildren now speak fluent Dilliwallah Hindi.
“Our fathers and grandfathers were the labourers who built many Vasant Kunj homes,” they said. “When the Asian Games stadiums and Delhi kothis were being built, the labour went from our camp. Then how are we suddenly being called videshi (foreigners) or Rohingya or Bangladeshi?”
As an aside, an important question must be considered: Why has India still not created a systematic, rational policy for urban migrant workers? They build our spanking roads and shopping malls, but once the work is completed, why are they left to rot in slums, on the borders of our posh colonies?
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An insidious campaign
Because their roots are in North Bengal, the majority of migrant workers in Jai Hind Camp are Bangla speakers. And now, their language and identity are their biggest crimes. Their mother tongue is, in the eyes of the police, almost akin to a punishable offence—their citizenship is being questioned only because they are Bangla speakers.
Most of them have been victims of police action. Cops come at night, pick them up, take them to the station, accuse them of being Bangladeshis or Rohingya, and demand land records as proof. Of course, once the records are shown, the police are compelled to let them off.
This isn’t the case in Jai Hind Camp alone. In BJP-ruled Maharashtra, migrant workers from Bengal were beaten, branded “Bangladeshi infiltrators”, and handed over to the Border Security Force (BSF). But once they showed detailed proof of identity, even the BSF was forced to return them. In BJP-ruled Odisha, over 400 Bangla-speaking workers were recently detained. The Odisha authorities were later forced to release them after the Bengal police and state administration stepped in. Many of the detained workers showed incontrovertible evidence that they were Indian citizens. In BJP-ruled Gujarat too, Bangla-speaking migrants have been attacked. In a tough directive, the Calcutta High Court has now asked none other than the Modi government to explain why these sudden country-wide raids have been taking place against Bangla speakers.
The Sangh Parivar’s campaign against West Bengal and Bengalis is like the Right wing’s older campaign against Kashmiris. Through the 1990s and 2000s, allegations were made that Kashmiri Muslims were somehow “Pakistan sympathisers”, which only alienated the Kashmir Valley further. Now, an even more insidious campaign has started to brand citizens of Bengal as “Bangladeshis”, “Rohingya”, or “outsiders”. It’s a political campaign to somehow create the fear of “outsiders” (read Muslims) in Bengal and spur communal polarisation ahead of the Bengal Assembly polls of 2026. Intent on stirring a Hindu-Muslim divide, the BJP is using the terms “Bangladeshi” and “Rohingya” as shorthand for Muslims.
However, by attacking the Bangla language and even targeting Hindus, such as the recent raids by the Pune police against Hindu Matua migrants, the BJP has made a terrible mistake. It has only succeeded in painting itself as an anti-Bangla and anti-Bengal party.
To attack Bangla is to attack one of the languages that built modern India. It is the language of Subhash Chandra Bose, Swami Vivekananda, and even Syama Prasad Mukherjee, who founded the Bharatiya Jana Sangh—the BJP’s precursor. It is also the language of Rabindranath Tagore, who wrote the national anthem. Even the BJP’s preferred slogan, ‘Vande Mataram’, is drawn from the poem composed by Bengali litterateur and scholar Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay.
Bangla is one of the 22 languages recognised by the Constitution. For the BJP to somehow imply that speaking Bangla casts a shadow over citizenship, or that only Hindi is the repository of Indianness, is unconstitutional and illegal. It strikes at the heart of the idea of a plural, multilingual, multicultural India.
The Bengal Renaissance—the intellectual and social churn of the late 19th and early 20th century—produced the modern greats for India. Science pioneer JC Bose, first Chief Election Commissioner Sukumar Sen, statistician PC Mahalanobis, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, filmmaker Satyajit Ray, novelist Mahasweta Devi, and, more recently, filmmaker Aparna Sen and writer Amitav Ghosh, are all legatees of the Bengal Renaissance spirit of free intellectual striving and creative efflorescence. To now posit Bangla and its speakers as somehow “anti-national” or “foreign” betrays the BJP’s customary ignorance of the very foundations of modern India.
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‘Othering’ the Bengalis
Today, Bengal remains true to the plural ideals of India’s founding vision. A new Jagannath temple at Digha is drawing hundreds of devotees, while the state’s stupendous Durga Puja has been inscribed on the UNESCO list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Eid and Christmas are celebrated with equal fervour in Bengal. The songs of Kazi Nazrul Islam and Tagore are sung by Bengalis across communities. When North India was seized by communal riots in the 1980s and 1990s due to the BJP’s Ayodhya Mandir mobilisation, Bengal remained largely peaceful. Over 1.5 crore non-Bengali migrant workers live in the state with the freedom to speak their own language and follow their own customs.
The BJP’s agenda is clear. After successive defeats in the 2021 Assembly and 2024 general elections, the party is attempting to pigeonhole Bengal as a place of “Rohingya/Bangladeshis/Muslims”.
The BJP is even trying to paint West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee, who visits temples, mosques, and churches—as every elected leader in multicultural India should—as a “Muslim sympathiser”. This is bizarre. Banerjee herself hails from a family of pandits of the Kalighat temple, yet she believes in upholding a rooted pluralism. If infiltrators from Bangladesh and elsewhere are coming into India, surely the onus to stop them falls squarely on the BSF and the home ministry. Why has the home ministry abdicated this responsibility of protecting our borders? Why is the central government instead playing politics over infiltrators?
The BJP’s hate-filled politics of trying to paint Bangla speakers and Bengalis as “Bangladeshis” and “Rohingya” is not only a horrendous, prejudiced abuse of the nationality of a neighbouring country, but also a nasty attempt to “other” the Bengali from the rest of Indians. Bengal can never become a laboratory project like Gujarat or Uttar Pradesh, where the BJP is easily able to demonise the minority community to consolidate its hold on the majority. The ugliness of the BJP’s politics lies precisely here—this constant search for “enemies” to attack and vilify.
The cultural traditions of Bengal will not accept this wicked politics. Whether we live in Delhi or Kolkata, Bengalis are too proud of our state and language to accept a narrative that casts us as inferior to Hindi or the states of the Hindi belt. The free and questioning spirit of the Bengal Renaissance lives in us still.
The BJP’s Hindi imperialism did not work in Tamil Nadu. It is doomed to fail in Bengal.
Sagarika Ghose is a Rajya Sabha MP, All India Trinamool Congress. She tweets @sagarikaghose. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)