Kolkata: A Division Bench of the Calcutta High Court, on Friday, directed the Union Home Ministry to submit to the court a report on allegations that some migrant workers from West Bengal residing in New Delhi have been deported to Bangladesh.
The Division Bench of Justice Tapabrata Chakraborty and Justice Reetobrata Kumar Mitra also directed the West Bengal Chief Secretary Manoj Pant to contact his counterpart in the Delhi government and get a report on the same matter from it, which will also have to be submitted to the court.
The next hearing on the matter will be on July 16.
The Division Bench gave this direction on Friday acting on a petition by an advocate at the same court that some migrant workers from West Bengal who were in Delhi for their livelihood had recently been branded as Bangladeshi infiltrators and subsequently deported to Bangladesh.
The said advocate informed the court that those who have been deported to Bangladesh included an eight-year-old child, who was staying in Delhi with her parents.
Recently, another case was filed at the Calcutta High Court accusing the Odisha government of unnecessarily detaining a group of migrant workers from West Bengal after branding them as illegal Bangladeshi infiltrators.
However, the petitioner for the Delhi-related case, informed the Division Bench that at least in the case of the Odisha incident the detained migrant workers from West Bengal were not deported to Bangladesh, which happened in the Delhi case.
The development at the Calcutta High Court happened just a day after a social media war broke out between the BJP’s Information Technology Chief and the party’s central observer for West Bengal Amit Malviya, and the West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee over the reported eviction and harassment of Bengali-speaking migrant workers at Delhi’s Jai Hind Colony.
Malviya claimed that the Trinamool Congress was unnecessarily politicising the Jai Hind Colony development which was prompted by a court order identification of 26 illegal Bangladeshi infiltrators being apprehended from that area a few days back.
On the other hand, Mamata Banerjee accused the BJP of spearheading an anti-Bengali agenda after being rejected by the voters of West Bengal in elections.
She also stated that this harassment of migrant workers from West Bengal had been happening only in BJP-ruled states.
(IANS)
