One might note, however, that the only ‘action’ reliably reported in recent months is the targeting of poor internal migrants who sound vaguely foreign to Hindi-speaking ears.
And it is here that the Sigra non-saga intersects disturbingly with a much darker story — one that exposes what can happen when the BJP’s simplistic ‘Bangladeshi infiltrator’ narrative is applied not just clumsily, but brutally.
Just months ago, in an episode far grimmer than the Sigra farce, a young Bengali-speaking woman — 26-year-old Sunali Khatun from West Bengal’s Birbhum district — was arrested in Delhi, accused of being an illegal Bangladeshi, and forcibly pushed across the border. This, despite possessing valid Aadhaar and voter-ID documents. Her crime? Speaking Bangla while being poor enough to be invisible to the state until it needed bodies to fit its favourite storyline.
Sunali was not just vulnerable — she was heavily pregnant at the time of her deportation in June. Yet she, her husband Danish Sheikh, their eight-year-old son, and another family were handed over to the BSF and pushed into Bangladesh with no trial, no credible evidence, and no respect for due process. From there, she was taken into custody and held in a prison in Chapai Nawabganj.
Her own testimony, published in the media after her eventual return, is harrowing: “It was torture.” She described being kept in a solitary cell, terrified, with only her son for company. Her husband was separated from her; she did not know if she would ever see him again. Her pregnancy advanced under conditions unfit for any human, let alone someone who had committed no crime.
It took 162 days, sustained legal pressure, media scrutiny, and finally the intervention of the Supreme Court of India, for the government to hurriedly negotiate her return on “humanitarian grounds”. On 5 December, she was brought back through the Mahadipur border in Malda and immediately hospitalised. Her husband remains stuck in Bangladesh, his fate uncertain.