In the name of a nation: The Bengali migrant worker and Indian citizenship Premium

Migrant workers face detention and deportation amid citizenship crackdown in India, sparking political tensions and economic challenges.

On July 21, 2025, Ms. Banerjee addressed her party’s annual Martyrs’ Day rally. This is a commemoration of the day 13 people were killed in 1993, when police fired on the Youth Congress, then led by Ms. Banerjee. Before lakhs of supporters in Kolkata she claimed that the BJP government at the Centre “was unleashing terror on the Bengali language” and announced that a “language movement” would continue until the Assembly polls, due in 2026.

From the stage of the mega Trinamool event, the party chairperson read excerpts from what she called a secret notification issued by the Union Government in May 2025, and sent only to BJP-ruled States, which stated that if someone was suspected of being Bangladeshi, they should be detained for a month and sent to detention or holding camps.

Amidst thousands of migrants returning and the disruption of work, the debate on Bengali language and identity continues to rage. On August 3, 2025, the Delhi Police issued a letter referring to the Bengali language as Bangladeshi, which the Trinamool took up as an insult to the “Bengali-speaking people of India”.

The very next day, while justifying the action of Delhi Police, BJP IT cell chief Amit Malviya said, “There is, in fact, no language called Bengali.”

The West Bengal BJP leadership said that the drive is to identify Bangladeshi infiltrators and not migrants of the State. Leader of Opposition Suvendu Adhikari and newly appointed State BJP president Samik Bhattacharya speak of “sanitising the voter list and removing lakhs of Bangladeshi voters”. They insist on a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the voter list on the lines of what is happening in Bihar.

The flight of industries and unemployment remain major challenges in West Bengal. The National Statistical Office’s (NSO) Annual Survey on Unincorporated Sector Enterprises (ASUSE) made public in 2024 pointed out that West Bengal lost 3 million jobs in unincorporated enterprises from 2015-16 to 2022-23.

In 2024, the Union Finance Minister had said that the share of industrial production in West Bengal had declined from 24% at the time of independence to 3.5% in 2021.