Despite having all the valid identification documents, fourteen Bengali Muslims from Odisha were pushed into Bangladesh by the Border Security Force after being labelled as Bangladeshi nationals on December 26, 2025.
Their families alleged that the action was an unlawful expulsion that has left them without any means of contact with their detained relatives, even though they have been living in Odisha for nearly seven decades and are registered voters there, Maktoob media reported.
The families, all residents of Ambika village under Ersama police station in Odisha’s Jagatsinghpur district, said the group had been picked up nearly one-and-a-half months earlier by local police on allegations of being “Bangladeshi,” and although they repeatedly produced Aadhaar cards, voter identity cards, ration cards, and old land records, the authorities refused to examine the documents and continued to hold the fourteen members in detention.
According to relatives of Sheikh Jabbar, a seventy-year-old member of the group whose family has lived in Odisha for generations, the police not only ignored their pleas but also vandalised their homes and threatened them with arrest when they attempted to seek information about where their relatives were being kept, which meant that for weeks they remained unaware of what was happening to the detainees.
The fourteen, who include four children, five women and five men from the same extended family, were later pushed across the Gede border in West Bengal’s Nadia district, and although the families learned about this only through media reports, Bangladeshi border officials subsequently confirmed that the transfer had taken place during the night, when dense fog was used as cover.
Lieutenant Colonel Md Nazmul Hasan of Bangladesh’s 6 BGB Chuadanga Battalion stated that the BSF had opened a border gate and pushed in fourteen Indian citizens, including elderly persons and children, and he added that an earlier attempt to push them across another border point had failed, after which Bangladesh lodged a formal protest and initiated talks for their return.
While the families insisted that their forefathers had migrated from West Bengal’s Namkhana region to Odisha around seventy years ago for work and that all the younger members were born and documented in Odisha, they also said the detention appeared to have been triggered simply because they speak Bengali and practise Islam.
The West Bengal Pradesh Congress Committee president wrote to the Congress leadership, warning that Bengali-speaking migrant workers were increasingly being targeted in BJP-ruled states, and a human rights organisation described the pushback as a gross violation of constitutional and Supreme Court safeguards, while preparing to move court if no action is taken.