On July 24, an 85-second video appeared online showing a frail, young man in torn blue trousers and a faded red T-shirt. He was crying, his voice breaking as he said he had been thrown into Bangladesh by Indian police and the Border Security Force (BSF).
The man was 21-year-old Amir Sekh from Malda district of West Bengal. Days earlier, he had been a migrant worker at a construction site in Rajasthan. Now, he was across the border with no money, no phone, no papers, pleading for someone to bring him back.
Rajasthan is one of several Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-ruled states—including Gujarat, Maharashtra, Delhi, Haryana, Odisha, Assam and Uttar Pradesh—where police have launched anti-migrant drives targeting suspected Bangladeshi nationals.
Because Bangladesh and West Bengal share a language, Bengali, or Bangla, thousands of West Bengal natives, mostly Muslims, have borne the brunt of being suspected as “Bangladeshis”. Reports say that the harassment includes prolonged detentions and alleged physical torture.
In the video, Amir narrated how the police in Rajasthan held him as a suspected Bangladeshi, kept him locked up for two months, and then handed him over to the BSF, who pushed him into Bangladesh two days before the video was filmed.
He insisted he was from Jallapur gram panchayat in the Kaliachak 1 block of Malda—one of Bengal’s three Muslim-majority districts.
The video, shot on a phone in Bangladesh’s Satkhira district, was shared by social media users in Bengal. It went viral. Had it not, Amir might still have been languishing in a Bangladeshi jail. He had no documents and could not recall any family members’ phone numbers.
“It was nothing short of a miracle that the person shot the video and sent it to Bengal,” Amir later told Decode. “I would still be in Bangladesh otherwise.”
The Journey Of The Video
After being pushed across the border, Amir stayed in a village in Satkhira, washing dishes at a roadside eatery in exchange for food and shelter. The eatery owner allowed him to stay till his family could be informed.
On his third day there, a Kolkata-based trader, on a business trip to Bangladesh, heard of Amir’s ordeal.
The trader asked Amir to narrate his story on camera and shared the clip with a contact in Malda. That contact visited Amir’s home village to verify the claim.
It was through him that Amir’s family first saw the video. They immediately reached out to people they thought could help, including Asif Faruk, head of the migrant workers’ group Parijayee Shramik Aikya Mancha, a West Bengal-based organisation.
Faruk decided to post the video publicly on Facebook. He said his organisation carried out basic checks and confirmed Amir’s family had been living in Malda for generations. “I posted the video online without delay. Such videos on social media had previously helped earn the attention of authorities,” Faruk said.
Faruk has been playing a key role in assisting Bengali-speaking migrant workers who are facing harassment as suspected Bangladeshis in different states. The video began circulating across Bengal, drawing in politicians, journalists and administrators.
A Young Man’s Ordeal
The video only hinted at what Amir had endured.
In April, he had left Malda to work in Odisha, from where he went to Rajasthan. On May 19, Amir’s family received a call from his number. The caller identified himself as an officer of Rajasthan police.
He informed them that Amir had been detained as a suspected Bangladeshi. Amir had his voter ID and Aadhar cards with him but the police allegedly refused to acknowledge them as original. They asked the family members to send all available identity documents over Amir’s WhatsApp number.
Amir’s uncle, Ajmal Sheikh, told Decode that following the call from Rajasthan police, the family sent photos of his grandparents’ passports, parents’ voter ID and Aadhar cards, and Amir’s birth certificate and school-leaving certificate (he studied up to class 4) as well as the family’s land records dating back to 1941.
After receiving all these documents, the people claiming to be from Rajasthan police asked them to show the school where Amir studied. The family went to the school compound and showed the building over a video call.
Despite it all, Amir’s phone went dead a day after. Since all contact had been through this number, the family had no alternate way to reach out.
“We only knew that he had gone to Rajasthan’s Sikar. We had gone to Kaliachak police station to report the matter but the cops showed no interest. We returned home confused and kept waiting for news,” said Ajmal.
Amir said the police kept him at the station for three days, and then transferred him to an auditorium converted into a detention centre. For two months, he lived in solitary confinement cooking the rice, lentil and potatoes that he was given. Then, one morning, he was taken out, put on a flight, and sent to the Indo-Bangladesh border in North 24-Parganas district of West Bengal.
Around 1 am on July 22, BSF personnel brought him to a border gate.
“They held me at gunpoint and asked me to run for Bangladesh territory. The no-man’s land between the countries was a forested marshy tract. I have no idea how long I walked or the distance I covered in the dark of the night,” recalled Amir.
In Bangladesh, he was apprehended by the Border Guards Bangladesh (BGB), which patrols Bangladesh’s border. When Amir revealed that he was an Indian forcefully pushed out of the country, the BGB personnel took him to a house at the nearest village. He was given food and a place to sleep. The next morning, the BGB said he could move freely in that village.
The BGB’s move to allow a foreign national to move freely may sound strange to readers unaware of the recent chain of developments. Amir was not the first Indian to be pushed out of India. On August 17, authorities in Bangladesh released a list of 120 persons—clarifying that it was not exhaustive—who were Indians pushed into Bangladesh whom Bangladesh subsequently sent back to India. A young couple in the list, Fazer and Taslima Mandal, were from West Bengal’s North 24-Parganas district.
In their case, it was the BGB that informed Fazer’s father that his son and daughter-in-law had been pushed into Bangladesh. BGB personnel had kept the couple at their camp office for two days, allowing their family to approach the authorities in India. Subsequently, the West Bengal government took up the matter with the BSF authorities and facilitated their return.
In Amir’s case, since he could not recall phone numbers, the BGB allowed him time to find help. That help arrived in the form of the viral video.
But it had an unintended impact on Amir—as the video went viral, Amir was arrested in Bangladesh, as the authorities feared that the matter had become too public.
When The Video Went Political
In West Bengal, Amir’s sobs forced politicians to respond.
A couple of hours after Faruk posted the video on Facebook, Samirul Islam, a Trinamool Congress (TMC) MP and head of the state Migrant Workers’ Welfare Board, sent a team to meet Amir’s family.
By next morning, Sheikh’s sobs had spread further and found its place in news reports, shared by hundreds.
Isha Khan Chowdhury, a Congress MP from Malda, wrote to the Prime Minister and Home Minister demanding intervention. Local news channels ran the video and reported the visit of state government officials.
Social media was filled with comments ranging from outrage and sympathy to ridicule and suspicion. The reactions varied. One post of the video, which was shared over 700 times, recorded almost 600 ‘emojis’, including 282 ‘sad’, 185 ‘like’, 81 ‘angry’ and 21 ‘laughter’ marks.
Mental health activist Ratnaboli Ray called the exclusion of court, due process and the accused’s voice from the deportation method as ‘horrifying’. Her comment drew six laughter emoticons.
Another commentator said the harassment as suspected Bangladeshis were crossing limits and such actions were going to embolden Bengali ethnic rights groups like Bangla Pokkho, which has been growing in influence over the past few years.
On July 26, two days after the video was first posted, Amir’s home in Bengal was filled with political representatives. Khan Chowdhury sent a team of representatives and spoke to his family over video call. A Bangla Pokkho team interacted with the family and uploaded on Facebook a video showing that the Sekh family has land records dating back to 1941—an indisputable proof of Indian citizenship.
By that time, Sekh’s video had reached a much wider audience, with many people sharing it.
A Battle Had Begun
By early August, two parallel tracks were underway to bring 21-year-old Amir back to India. Khan Chowdhury lobbied central officials, while Islam’s team pushed the family to pursue legal remedies, filing a habeas corpus petition at the Calcutta High Court.
The matter was notified to the Union government and the Rajasthan government on August 8 and the court was scheduled to hear the matter on August 13.
But in Malda, Amir’s family was caught in a fog of confusion and half-promises.
On August 11, they received a call from someone claiming to be a BSF official, telling them Amir had been located in a Bangladeshi jail, had been bailed out, and would soon be handed back.
Ajmal Sheikh told Decode that the person connected him with people in Bangladesh over a video call. He saw his nephew coming out of the jail. They allowed Amir to speak to them before boarding a car.
“He was crying, he couldn’t even speak properly. He looked miserable. He told us he had been beaten, his whole body ached, and just wanted to come home,” Ajmal’s voice choked as he narrated the moment.
Twist in the Tale
On August 12, hours before the court hearing, Khan Chowdhury announced Amir had been returned to India. In a video posted on Facebook, he said, “Today, the BSF West Bengal ADG called me and informed me that Amir Sk has been brought back to India from Bangladesh. I have given his family’s contact number. Amir Sk will return home very soon.”
Within minutes, Islam claimed in a Facebook post that it was the fear of the court that had prompted the Union government to have arranged for bringing Amir back “through the backdoor.”
The family’s ordeal did not end there. August 12 turned into a day of waiting — hours stretching with no clarity on when or where Amir would be handed over.
On the morning of August 13, the family and local officials in Malda were told the handover was being delayed. According to them, BSF officials were allegedly pressuring Amir to acknowledge that he had not been deported but had strayed into Bangladesh by mistake.
A few hours later, in the Calcutta High Court, the Union government’s counsel made a similar claim. Amir’s father had even received another phone call earlier that morning from someone identifying himself as BSF personnel, who said Amir had been “apprehended at the India-Bangladesh border on August 12.”
Deputy Solicitor General Rajdeep Majumder told the court that Amir “attempted to cross over to Indian territory from Bangladesh on August 12. As he could not produce appropriate documents as regards his identity, he was apprehended and handed over to the state police.”
The family’s lawyer countered that Amir had been “forcibly detained” by Rajasthan police and BSF personnel weeks earlier during an identity verification drive in Sikar, where he was working as a construction labourer.
The case was adjourned, with the next hearing fixed for later in August.
Meanwhile, politics spilled onto social media. TMC’s Samirul Islam swiftly rejected the Union government’s account: “We have all the evidence of deporting Sekh. We have his video from Bangladesh. We also have evidence that the Rajasthan police deported him. Our legal battle under the leadership of CM Banerjee will continue,” Islam wrote on Facebook.
Many, Many Viral Videos
Amir’s case was dramatic, but not unique. Videos of helpless Indians stranded in Bangladesh have appeared on social media platforms repeatedly, over the last few months.
In May, a similar clip went viral showing three men pleading for help from across the Bangladesh border. They had been picked up in BJP-ruled Maharashtra, suspected of being Bangladeshis, and pushed across by the BSF. The video—shot by unknown Bangladeshi nationals—sparked outrage in Bengal. Within days, the men were brought back.
Another group of seven Bengal natives, including women and children, appeared in a separate video. Their families are still waiting. They plan to submit the clip as evidence in the Calcutta High Court, which is already hearing two cases of “illegal and forced deportation” of Bengal natives detained in BJP-ruled Delhi.
The outcry over Amir Sekh’s video was louder perhaps because such arbitrary deportations no longer feel isolated—they appear systematic.
Social media has become the key battleground. Videos have not only helped deported persons return but also assisted migrant workers detained in BJP-ruled states before they could be pushed across. Some of these clips spread on Facebook and X; others circulate in closed WhatsApp groups.
In WhatsApp groups run by activists like Faruk, video pleas now arrive constantly: shaky clips of detained workers, desperate families holding up documents, appeals to be recognised as Indian.
Some of these lead to high-profile rescues. Others vanish into the noise of the internet.
Politicians like Samirul Islam, TMC Lok Sabha MP Mahua Moitra and Congress MP Isha Khan Chowdhury have shared such clips on social media to protest what they describe as harassment of Bengali-speaking workers.
The reactions, however, remain bitterly divided. One video showing a group of five migrant workers from Murshidabad district of West Bengal detained in Odisha was viewed over 1.7 lakh times and drew over 100 comments and 1,400 ‘reactions’.
Many comments expressed concern at the rapid spread of harassment. But others, often from accounts aligned with the BJP, dismissed or mocked the claims. Some asked why workers needed to migrate from Bengal “when Didi (Mamata Banerjee) gives them so much.” Others alleged the men were Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh members, or “looked Bangladeshi.” Some accused them of faking distress to cover up crimes.
Faruk confirmed to BOOM that the men in the video, all from Hariharpara block of Murshidabad, had valid Indian citizenship documents and were released by the Odisha police after the state government was dragged to the Calcutta high court in connection with the detention of another person.
A Tug of War
For Amir, the video meant survival. His story revealed how quickly someone can be stripped of rights and identities—until a phone camera intervenes.
In the video call that Amir had with his uncle Ajmal from Bangladesh a day before his return, he said he was longing to rest. However, even as the trauma of detention and deportation has finally ended, rest remains elusive.
Since arriving home on the night of August 14, politicians have lined up to meet him. Among them were local TMC MLA Abdul Ghani, the party’s Malda district president, and district Congress leader Mahibar Rahman. Local TMC leaders even took him around for felicitation events.
Promise have poured in as well. Congress MP Isha Khan Chowdhury has promised to arrange for a permanent job for him in the district. Local TMC leaders have also assured him that he does not need to migrate out of Bengal, as they would arrange employment for him locally.
Meanwhile, Khan Chowdhury took to social media to outline the steps he had taken for Amir’s return, saying he would not have spoken publicly about them had it not been for the political sparring that began in Kaliachak after Amir came home.
Amidst the political credit-mongering, Amir has one priority—to recover from the body aches, fatigue and mental trauma. His family, however, has another. “We will pursue the case in court,” said his uncle Ajmal Sheikh, adding that they don’t want the perpretators of the “gross injustice go unpunished”.