Raipur: Police in Chhattisgarh have released 19 people detained in Bilaspur district after an inquiry into their documents confirmed that they were Indian nationals, officials said.
The group was part of a larger batch of 23 workers taken into custody by the Special Task Force from the Sirgitti area on September 5. Their speech patterns and residential addresses had reportedly led investigators to suspect that they were Bangladeshi infiltrators. The detainees were later moved to a holding facility at Raipur Central Jail.
Police sought records from the detainees’ native areas in West Bengal, including Murshidabad, Malda and Jangipur, sources said. Officials examined electoral rolls, records held by local administrations, family information and documents relating to permanent residence before determining the citizenship status of 19 of them.
Bilaspur Senior Superintendent of Police Rajnesh Singh said the 19 individuals had been cleared and released after the verification process, as reported by The New Indian Express.
“19 people have been cleared and released after verification. Further steps regarding the remaining four will depend on the reports we receive,” Singh said.
The remaining four are still in police custody while their records are examined further. According to police, questions remain over their stated permanent addresses. Their names were also found to have been removed from voter lists during a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise, officials said.
PUCL Condemns Police Action
The Chhattisgarh chapter of the People’s Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL) condemned the action, claiming that the detainees had not been given sufficient time or a fair opportunity to produce documents proving their citizenship.
“Without serving any show cause notices and giving time to the suspected individuals to substantiate their document credentials, all 23 were detained by Bilaspur police on flimsy pretexts,” Shabnam Sengupta, Syed Sadiq Ali, Kamini and Asif Khan of the PUCL’s Chhattisgarh unit said.
The rights group alleged that the episode reflected a wider pattern in which migrant workers, labourers and people belonging to linguistic minorities are targeted during drives against illegal immigration without adequate evidence.
“The Bilaspur debacle underscores a growing, alarming pattern in anti-illegal immigration enforcement: sweeping up domestic migrants, manual labourers, and linguistic minorities on weak unconvincing grounds, holding them in confinement, and putting the burden of proof to demonstrate their right to exist in their own country,” they said.
The PUCL representatives said the verification process weakened the case against the detainees, stating, “The aggressive stance collapsed once actual paperwork caught up with the enforcement drive.”
They added that records collected from the detainees’ home districts — including electoral rolls, local government registers, family lineage details and permanent residence documents — confirmed that they were Indian citizens.