Mumbai: In January this year, Kirit Somaiya, a Bharatiya Janata Party leader from Mumbai, travelled over 300 kilometres north to visit Malegaon and address a decade–old local land dispute among the region’s political leaders.
After his visit to this Muslim-majority satellite town in Nashik district, Somaiya suddenly announced that over a thousand “Rohingyas and Bangladeshis were illegally residing in Malegaon” and had procured illegal Indian documents, living without any fear. This claim grew to “four thousand illegal immigrants” in just a few days.
Somaiya’s allegations were not backed by any evidence, but was rather a common communally charged trope that many right-wing activists and political leaders have been indulging in over the past decade. Somaiya’s statement was enough for the BJP-led Mahayuti government to promptly set up a Special Investigation Team (SIT).
In less than a week, Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis announced an SIT, headed by the special inspector general of Nashik region. A special office was soon set up in Malegaon.
SIT summons mostly locals, 19 arrested
Since then, the SIT has summoned hundreds of individuals who have applied for or obtained their certificates in the past year.
Based on the SIT’s scrutiny so far, it is confirmed that these individuals are not illegal Rohingya or Bangladeshi immigrants. In most cases, they are not even migrants from other states, but locals who have lived in Malegaon for generations and only lacked citizenship proofs.
The Malegaon police have arrested 19 individuals, including local applicants (of them one is a teenage college student and two are women), a few touts, lawyers and a local journalist among others. These individuals were not arrested for being “illegal immigrants” but for allegedly tampering with birth certificates or committing other document-related frauds. The sections applied in the FIR do not indicate that the police have found any substantial proof to claim these individuals are illegal foreigners on Indian soil.
Somaiya, however, taking credit for the state’s action, has continued to claim that the entire exercise is a “crackdown on Bangladeshi and Rohingya Muslims” in Malegaon. Having seen the state government act promptly to his claims made in Malegaon, he has been touring across other parts of the state, making similar allegations and pressuring the police to file cases against Muslims in other districts as well. Amravati district is one of Somaiya’s most recent targets.
A specimen of the notice being issued by the SIT to the people of Malegaon. Photo: By special arrangement.
Advocate Tauseef Saleem, who represents many of the arrested individuals, told The Wire that many of those arrested in Malegaon had applied for their birth and other documents through agents.
“Most of them don’t even know how to go about procuring their documents. They approached local agents and ended up in trouble. The police claim their documents were tampered with, but the so-called tampering is essentially a wrong spelling of their last name or an incorrect date of birth,” Tauseef claimed.
‘My family has lived here for several generations, SIT asked me how I entered India’
The allegations made by Somaiya, however, have whipped up a frenzy across the satellite town. Abdul Sharif (name changed), a 25-year-old man whose family has lived in Malegaon for several generations, applied to have his name updated on his Aadhar card.
“When I was born, my family mistakenly added my grandfather’s name instead of my father’s. I applied to correct this two months ago, and it was fixed without any hassle,” he shares. However, on February 17, he was served a notice and asked to appear before the SIT within a day. The notice, issued in Marathi, read: “If you don’t present yourself before the SIT within a day, it will be assumed that you have no explanation to offer, and the authorities will be free to initiate necessary action.”
Sharif says that at the SIT office, he was barely asked about the changes to his middle name.
“They kept asking me questions about my entry into India, how long I’ve lived in Malegaon, and how many more people entered with me,” Sharif told The Wire.
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Shahid Nadeem, a human rights lawyer from Malegaon who is currently practicing in the Supreme Court, shared that his parents were also called for an inquiry and document verification by the SIT. After a thorough review, he says, his parents were allowed to go. In their case, there was no allegation of document tampering, yet they were summoned by the SIT. Shahid says there is a palpable fear of arrest, harassment, and detention among the people across Malegaon.
“People have lived here (Malegaon) for several generations, and suddenly they are all looked at with suspicion. Neither the state government nor the SIT team has done anything to assure the residents that this is a routine exercise and not carried out with an intention to intimidate or criminalise a community,” Shahid says. “Such inquiries, he says, “can’t be carried out at the cost of the vulnerable population of this town.”
Malegaon’s long history of police violence and criminalisation
Malegaon has a long history of police violence and criminalisation. As a Muslim-majority town, it has long been an easy police target, with youths being wrongly implicated in terror-related cases. One glaring example is the 2006 Malegaon twin bombings, in which 37 people were killed and over 100 injured.
The police, under the then Congress-led UPA government, arrested several Muslim youths in the case. The Muslim men, mostly educated working professionals, maintained they were being wrongly framed but it took five years for the truth to come out.
In 2011, when the National Investigation Agency (NIA) took over the case from the local state Anti-Terrorism Squad, it was acknowledged for the first time that the blast was indeed the handiwork of Hindu extremists. In many other cases, several Malegaon youths have been arrested, only to be later acquitted, but the town became tainted as a “breeding ground” for terror activities.
In 2020, with the growing unrest against the then newly passed Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), and the two other imminent nationwide exercises, the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the National Population Register (NPR), minority communities, particularly Muslims, began collecting their birth and other citizenship documents.
Aasif Shaikh, a former MLA from the region, explains that the sudden surge in the number of applications began after 2020 out of fear of the new citizenship laws.
“People across age groups have been applying for all kinds of documents. All these years, no one felt the need to prove their existence or nationality. But at the end of 2019, everything changed. Muslims were suddenly told that they could no longer take their nationality for granted,” Shaikh says.
Shaikh, along with other socially aware citizens, has set up a ‘Defence Committee’ in Malegaon. He says that every day, several dozen people approach the committee’s office after receiving an SIT notice.
“The notice is worded in such a way that everyone is treated as a suspect. People who innocently applied for their documents are being tainted as frauds, or even worse, illegal immigrants,” he says.
Shahzad Akhtar, an editor of the Malegaon-based YouTube channel ‘Maidan E Sahafat,’ has been documenting the daily plight of the locals. He says that on a daily basis, at least 100 people gather outside the SIT office, with every scrap of paper they have to prove they are legal residents of the country.
People during the verification process of their documents at the SIT office. Photo: By special arrangement
“It has been over a month and a half since the SIT was formed. If the SIT had found any suspicious individuals in the city, they would have arrested them by now. But that hasn’t happened. This entire exercise was carried out just to harass the locals and punish them for voting against the BJP in the 2024 parliamentary elections,” Akhtar observes.
‘Entire exercise is a consequence of BJP candidate’s loss in Lok Sabha elections’
Malegaon, which falls under the Dhule Lok Sabha constituency, has roughly over two lakh voters. In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, over 1.8 lakh are believed to have voted for Congress’s Shobha Bachav, who won against the two-time BJP Member of Parliament with a narrow margin of 3,000 votes. Bachav’s win is directly attributed to the support she received from the Malegaon region.
According to both Akhtar and Shaikh, the entire exercise is a consequence of the parliamentary election. “What better way to teach a community a lesson for voting against the current regime?” Shaikh asks.
Bachav, who is said to have won due to the votes from this region, has, however, been absent from action. In January, when the SIT was formed, the locals approached Bachav and asked her to raise the issue in Parliament. But she did not, Shaikh says. The Wire attempted to contact Bachav several times for a response, but she did not reply.
