Kolkata: “It was early morning on March 19 when they attacked us. We all were sleeping. They entered the house we rent and started beating us up with cricket bats,” said Salamat Sheikh.
Salamat is from the Samserganj village in Murshidabad district of Bengal and is among hundreds who work as hawkers in the Bhadrak district of neighbouring Odisha. Salamat and around 29 others from Samserganj used to live in small, rented quarters at the Chunapatti village in rural Bhadrak.
Days after the Citizenship Amendment Act was implemented on March 11 – four years after it was enacted – Salamat said that he and the 29 others were labelled ‘foreign intruders’, ‘Rohingya’ and ‘Bangladeshis’ and were subjected to physical violence.
The perpetrators, said Salamat, are members of the local Hindutva outfit, the Gau Rakshak Brigade. The affected workers say it functions under the aegis of the Sangh Parivar.
This behaviour, said Salamat and some of the other hawkers, is new. “We have been selling mosquito nets, clothing and towels for over 25 years in Bhadrak. We are known to give good prices and have built quite a rapport with our customers. We have never faced a problem like this,” said Mozharul Islam, another hawker who said he was beaten up. “We showed them our voter ID and Aadhaar but they did not listen to us and threatened to ‘deport’ us,” he added.
Following the attack, it was their landlord Bulu Samanta, locals – and other migrant workers – who took the men to a hospital for treatment. A local cycle repair shop owner, Anwar Mir, helped them lodge a police compliant.
A top officer of the Odisha district police said, “One person in connection with the incident was arrested and sent to judicial custody. The case is under investigation.”
Most of the hawkers refused to be named for fear of future attacks.
The incident, largely unreported, came to light when social activist Teesta Setalvad posted of the matter on X on March 20, drawing the attention of the West Bengal government. The traumatised workers posted a video, seeking help and made an application through the West Bengal Migrant Workers’ Welfare Board’s portal. They were eventually contacted by a Bengal government representative and brought back to the state by the board chairman and Trinamool Congress Rajya Sabha MP Samirul Islam.
A fact-finding report from human rights organisation APDR has identified 87 migrant workers from Samsherganj area who are currently working in Bhadrak. Many of them say they are facing security threats.
‘Increase in threats’
Speaking to The Wire, Rahul Chakraborty, assistant secretary of the APDR said, “There are thousands of migrant workers from Bengal currently working in Odisha and Assam. They are being harassed for their identity. Post-CAA implementation, there is a sharp increase in threats.”
Based on the 2011 census, West Bengal ranks as the fourth-largest contributor of migrant labourers in the nation, following Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Rajasthan. Between 2001 and 2011, approximately 580,000 individuals migrated from Bengal. However, in the last 13 years, there has been a four-fold increase in out-migration. A staggering 2.1 million migrant workers from West Bengal have sought registration on the Karmasathi Parijayee Shramik portal, a governmental platform documenting migrant labourers from the state.
“The registration process for migrant workers is ongoing. In Murshidabad, over 350,000 workers have already signed up. They now realise how important it is to register on the government portal. The recent assault on labourers by extremist communal elements in Odisha, just after CAA, reflects the BJP’s agenda of communal politics,” said MP Islam.
Avoiding the CAA issue, BJP state president Sukanta Majumdar blamed the state government for the workers’ condition. “That poor people of Bengal have to go to near famine-stricken Kalahandi area to earn their living shows the sad state of affairs in the state,” he said.
“Migrant workers were arrested in Mumbai. They were called trespassers for speaking in Bengali in Delhi. It has started again after the CAA. The Bengal chief minister must not remain silent,” said state Congress president Adhir Chowdhury.
In August 2023 during communal violence in Gurugram, around 50 migrant workers and their families had to return to Bengal after Hindutva activists ordered local landlords to kick out Muslim tenants.
Translated from the Bengali original by Aparna Bhattacharya.
