When Employer Solidarity Failed Gurugram’s Domestic Workers
The few voices that spoke of the flight of threatened Bengali-speaking workers out of cities mostly complained of the inconvenience it caused. No one rallied for us, say workers
Moments after returning from work as a domestic worker on July 29, Mahajabi Khatun, 30 had started packing up her sparse belongings in her one-room jhuggi in Gurugram’s Sector 53. A battered suitcase with a broken handle sat by the charpoy, half-filled with clothes. Another lay open in the corner, its torn zip awaiting repair. Steel utensils were stacked in a plastic tub, and the walls were bare except for clothes hanging on a hook and a bag full of papers.
Mahjabi was in a state of panic as she prepared to flee the city – there had been a wave of police detentions targeting Bengali-speaking residents in Gurugram and she was terrified she and her family would be next on the list. She had decided to wait for two days only so she could collect her wages and then leave for her village in West Bengal’s Bardhaman district on August 2. She did not even have enough savings to buy train tickets for herself, her husband and two children to Bardhaman.
“Even last night, the police picked up two men from our basti,” she said. “Even at 1 am or 2 am you have to wake up from your sleep and open the door to the police. They keep knocking, and if you’re even a little late to answer, you are a suspect.” Her voice trailed off as she imagined the worst.
In Gurugram, over the past month, hundreds of Bengali-speaking migrant workers — mostly Muslims from West Bengal and Assam — have been detained in police “verification” drives following a May 2, 2025 Ministry of Home Affairs directive. Marked “secret,” the guidelines instructed all states and union territories to fast-track checks for alleged illegal Bangladeshi immigrants and Rohingyas. Those picked up have been taken to “holding centres” and asked to produce documents to prove their citizenship. But even documents did not seem to help.
“The police are not even looking at our Aadhaar card or any other documents,” Mahjabi said. “We don’t know what they want. They just start beating people, then put them into the jeep and say they will tell us what’s happening at the police station.”
Terrified of being rounded up, by late July, at least 1,000 Bengali-speaking migrants had fled Gurugram; social workers believe the true number is well over 3000. In the city’s jhuggi settlements where most Bengali-speaking migrant workers live – Sector 10, Bengali Market, Khatola village, and Chakarpur – padlocked doors outnumber those left open, and an uneasy silence has settled over the lanes.
Mahjabi’s husband, a daily-wage construction worker, had already stopped going to work after hearing that another labourer had been picked up directly from the site where he worked. “Maybe we’ll stay in our village until the mahaul [situation] gets normal here,” she said, adjusting the dupatta that kept slipping as she bent over to pack.
These stories are also being reported in other metros across the country with big populations of Bengali-speaking workers. In the Mumbai suburb of Mira Road, Mumtaz* was returning for lunch at home after a busy morning of work as a domestic worker when the Kashmira Road police stopped her, and accused her of being a Bangladeshi.
Mumtaz was able to speak to her brother in West Bengal before the police confiscated her phone. He then informed her friend in Mumbai who rushed to the police station with the identity documents, only for the police to declare them “duplicate”. The police, Mumtaz alleged, bullied her – they accused her of being complicit in the death of her husband who died in a construction accident.
She said that the police kept insisting on a birth certificate, which she had lost in a flood. Her family back home kept sending document proofs, including land ownership documents, to Mumtaz’s friend who then showed it to the police. Finally, Mumtaz’ family managed to go to their local police station with a panchayat member, attesting to her identity. She was let go only at 7pm after the West Bengal police officer spoke to the Kashimira police officer.
The Terror Of ‘Verification’ Drives
In the weeks since the detentions began, the trickle of departures from Gurugram’s Bengali settlements has turned into an exodus. The city’s Bengali-concentrated slum pockets—home to domestic workers who clean, cook, and scrub floors in its gleaming skyscrapers and gated apartments—now stand half-deserted. Some employers, wary of police detention, told their workers not to come at all; others begged them to stay, unwilling to lose trusted help, we found in our interviews with at least a dozen workers across the Bengali settlements.
Residents of these bastis in Sector 53 reported that police knocks on the doors of shanties have become routine at all times of the day, even at a time when monsoon has left the lanes waterlogged. According to them, at least 15 to 20 people have been picked up in recent days on such allegations, and later released.
Mahjabi arrived in Gurugram almost a decade ago with her husband, brother-in-law, and sister-in-law. Her husband had taken on short-term construction contracts, while she became a domestic worker, a job she has held ever since. At the time, she was employed in two households: one where she had worked for three years, and where she had been employed for just over a year. She cleaned and cooked for these households.
“I told my employers what’s been happening — they already knew,” Khatun said. “But what could they do in all this? What can you expect in such a situation?” She paused, then added: “I just wanted them to clear the salary sooner. One agreed, but the other household wanted me to complete the month so they’d have time to find a replacement.”
When we visited Mahjabi’s settlement again last week in Gurugram, we found her jhuggi padlocked.
Leave Or Stay?
That question hung over every conversation in the bastis – Q-Block (South City I, Sector 41 area), Slum behind DPS International School (near Sectors 58 and 70), Bengali Market, Sector 49, Gada Market area – as the detentions unfolded. Beauty, who lives in Sector 53, said her employer had been supportive and insisted that she not return to her village in Palashi, in West Bengal’s Nadia district. “She even said, ‘I’m here for you. You call me if the police try to pick you up.’”
But as Beauty pointed out her employer could not shield her all day from police action: “You tell me — I’m only at her place from 8am to 4pm. What if they pick us up in the evening? At night? Or pick up my husband at his construction site? Do you think I’ll get a moment to call her? The police don’t even look at our papers. The risk isn’t hers. It’s ours.”
Her worry wasn’t unfounded. Just days earlier, her neighbour Shabnam, also a domestic worker, had been stopped by the police when she was returning from work. They demanded her ID, but she had left it at home. “She was terrified,” Beauty recalled. “Somehow she managed to call her madam, who came down and told the police she’d been working in their house for years. Only then did they let her go. Now imagine if her madam had refused to come, or if she had already reached her jhuggi with no one to intervene on her behalf — they would have taken her.”
Shabnam left for her village two days later. Beauty was beginning to think she should do the same.
“This is worse than Covid,” she said. “When we come to work in another state, if we face a problem, who do we go to? The police? The administration? But they are the ones harassing us.”
Mumtaz has been working for the same Mumbai households for the last 10 years. Two days after the incident she returned to work. When asked about how her employers had reacted to her detention, she said one of her employers is the daughter of a retired police officer with close ties to the BJP. “She told me that if they don’t let me go by 6 pm, she will come to help me,” she said. “Wo log kaam se matlab rakhte, humse nahi [their concerns are limited just to my work]. Everyone knows I am not a Bangladeshi but they are not going to spend time helping me. And if they have to, they will replace me with someone else.”
A few of the women we met in Gurugram said that even when employers wanted them to continue, the decision wasn’t theirs alone. “Zyada to mard log pakadte hain… par ab pati jayega toh humko bhi jaana hi hoga (they mostly pick up men, but if my husband goes, I will have to go too),” one worker explained.
In vulnerable households, women have even less agency than their male partners, said Adil Hossein, a political anthropologist at Azim Premji University. Most women, like Mahjabi, migrate to the city as secondary earners and take up domestic work because it is convenient.
“As a result, when households decide to leave, women tend to follow,” said Hossein. “Also, women often have fewer identity documents, especially if they were married in another state. The documents regime demands multiple forms of verification, which a married woman may not be able to produce. That becomes a huge problem if they are targeted. We saw something similar during the Assam NRC process, where Bengali women—regardless of religion—were disproportionately affected.”
The detentions in Gurugram are not the first time Bengali-speaking domestic workers have been pushed to return home on the allegation of being “Bangladeshi”. Hossein pointed to Operation Pushback in the 1990s under the Delhi chief minister Sahib Singh Verma. It also happened during the first Sena-BJP government in Maharashtra in 1995.
More recently, during the 2023 Haryana riots—beginning in Nuh and spreading to Gurugram—hundreds of migrant families, many employed as domestic workers, fled amid violence and threats of arson and demolition.
‘Nearly 80% Domestic Workers Disappeared’
According to the Gurgaon Citizens’ Council—an umbrella body of over 80 resident welfare associations (RWAs)—many domestic workers, car washers, and garbage collectors have left their jobs in recent days. “About 80% of domestic workers and garbage collectors have disappeared,” a council representative told The Hindu. “Door-to-door garbage collection has stopped, and households are struggling to manage domestic chores.”
Social media, too, has seen a wave of reels lamenting the absence of domestic workers — visible in the accumulated dirt of apartment corridors and kitchens. Yet the reaction has been less about outrage over the detentions and more about the inconvenience: questions about who will clean up, and in one case, an internet user even tagging Blinkit to suggest they start a garbage collection service.
Precarity Of Domestic Work
What’s missing in this chatter is the question: how can employers show up to protect the very workers they rely on so heavily?
Domestic work is one of the most precarious forms of women’s labour in India — often not even recognised as “labour” at all, but pushed into the realm of “help”.” In a sector employing an estimated 20–90 million women, there are no social security benefits, and formal contracts between worker and employer are rare.
The work takes place in private homes, shielded from oversight, and is shaped more by personal relationships than legal protections.
“One is, home is a place of work — but it is also a personal space, not a recognised workplace. So whatever gets done there is not recognised as labour,” said Shalini Sinha, India country representative at Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO). “Labour relations and decent work are pushed to the background. And second, it’s women’s care work, which has now become monetised and economic — that too makes it undervalued.”
She described the arrangement as “almost feudalistic — you are ‘like our family,’ so maybe you can do one more task. Yes, we pay you, but there are no working hours”. Some workers live with the families that employ them; others move between multiple homes in a day. In either case, Sinha noted, “the very structure of the work keeps them outside most existing labour laws.”
This vulnerability has been thrown into sharp relief during the current detention drive. With no binding agreements or protections, even knowing how much they can ask of their employers is uncertain. Some were told simply to leave; others were urged to stay; a few received help, either through intervention in cases of detention or small sums of financial support.
When BehanBox asked workers what they hoped for from employers, their answers were hesitant, often trailing into silence. The most common requests were for timely wages or, at best, an advance to buy tickets home. Many had been working in the same households for years — some for as long as five — yet remained without even the most basic safeguards or a clear sense of whether their employers would stand by them in a crisis.
Sinha noted that part of the hesitation to defend workers stems from the very nature of their employment: the employer is not a company or an institution, but a household. In such cases, it is far easier for employers to shed responsibility. Support, when it comes, is often a matter of mercy rather than obligation.
She argued that the responsibility for protecting domestic workers should be shared. “The collective bargaining for rights has to be both with the state as well as with the employer body,” she said. She pointed out that employers should have already carried out police verifications and checked documentation when they took on the domestic worker. “Why can they not say that this person has been working in my sector for 10 years? We’ve done the verification — why can they not take responsibility?”
Most women workers, she explained, were employed in a single Gurugram sector or housing estate. This means that the RWAs are in a position to verify their employment — verification that the police could then refer to directly, without troubling the workers themselves. More importantly, she stressed, the RWA’s recognition system should be central to any such process.
Standing Up
If a domestic worker has already been enumerated by the RWA, issued an identification number and card, why would the local administration not recognise it, Sinha asked. “Why can the RWA not stand up for them? They are the employers — and with that comes liability. In this instance, can their identity at the place of work not be recognised as valid?”
In situations where RWAs do not possess the information, this can serve as a lesson why verification is necessary —while ensuring that the workers’ identities are not shamed in the process.
Beyond RWAs, individual employers, too, can take simple but meaningful steps to support workers in such moments of fear and uncertainty. Shilpi Shukla, a resident of South City 1, employs a Bengali Muslim domestic worker, Shah Nara, who had been deeply anxious about leaving—especially worried about how her daughter’s education would continue if they returned home.
For Shukla, the first step was fact-checking the rumours that were spreading and sharing only verified information. “I found the police helpline numbers for West Bengal and gave them to her,” she said. “And I told her—should anyone, pretending to be a police or government official, try to extort money, bully, or harass you, whether on your way to work or in your locality—call this number immediately.”
Her housing society then took the initiative to connect with the local councillor, who arranged for a senior police official to meet with all the domestic workers in the area. “The idea was to reassure them that nothing bad was going to happen,” Shukla said. “Even our presence—simply standing beside them in the company of the police—improves how they are treated.”
But most employers remain either unsure of what to do or unwilling to get involved.
Khatoon, a domestic worker in Gurugram, recounted how she had to take matters into her own hands when her friend’s brother and husband were picked up by the police. “We went to the police station, then to the court, and then back to the police,” she said. “All of us women went with her, along with some men. Only this group will stand up for us—and we will stand up for them.”
(Additional reporting by Shreya Raman, Mumbai)
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