‘Acted In Hot Haste’: What Calcutta HC Said When Ordering Bengali Migrants' Repatriation to India
New Delhi: The Calcutta high court has set aside the Union government's detention and deportation orders issued earlier this year against two migrant worker families from West Bengal based on which they were pushed into Bangladesh.
Holding that the authorities had “acted in hot haste” and may have “clearly violated” official instructions on deporting suspected foreigners, the division bench of Justices Reetobroto Mitra and Tapabrata Chakraborty on Friday (September 26) also directed the Union government to bring back to India the six deportees with roots in West Bengal's Birbhum district within four weeks' time.
Those deported include Sunali Khatun, a 26-year-old woman in an advanced stage of her pregnancy.
The high court's order comes on the back of a spate of detentions as well as deportations to Bangladesh of Bengali-speaking Muslim migrants including Indian citizens from a number of cities in India.
The bench on Friday issued its directive in two habeas corpus pleas in which the petitioners alleged that their relatives, having moved to Delhi to seek employment, were picked up and subsequently deported this June.
Bhodu Sekh, one of the petitioners, said that his daughter Khatun, her husband and their son were deported, while the other petitioner Amir Khan said his cousin sister and her two minor children had been expelled.
They also alleged that their relatives were threatened and made to sign documents of whose contents they were unaware before being deported to Bangladesh via Guwahati.
In both cases the bench said it was “explicit” that the Union government and other respondents had “acted in hot haste” and “admittedly did not follow the provisions” of the home ministry's May 2 instructions for identifying and deporting undocumented foreigners.
The authorities' haste in Khatun's case was evidenced by the fact that her interrogation report states she illegally crossed into India in 1998 even as her Aadhaar and PAN cards indicate she had not yet been born then, the court observed.
Having perused the details of either case, the bench concluded that the deportation proceedings “raise a suspicion that the concerned authorities, while acting in hot haste, have clearly violated the provisions” of the May 2 instructions.
It then directed the government to coordinate with the Indian high commission in Dhaka and “take all steps” to bring the six deportees back to India within four weeks of the communication of the order.
The bench also rejected the government's prayer that the orders be stayed.
Its order has led to a war of words between the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the BJP.
TMC national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee said as quoted by The Telegraph: “The court has ordered their repatriation within four weeks. They [the BJP] are arresting and detaining people just for speaking Bengali. On Vidyasagar’s birth anniversary, along with the slap that the high court delivered today, they must also apologise.”
Calling the cases “an awful mistake” and “isolated”, BJP spokesperson Debjit Sarkar said: “But lakhs of Bangladeshi infiltrators cannot be allowed to stay in our country using this instance as a shield. The case of Sunali Khatun was collateral damage, and the government must be more careful before deportation.”
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