BehanVox: The Exodus Of Gurugram’s Domestic Workers
This week in BehanVox: the histories of caste census in India, Karnataka's historic gig worker legislation, and more
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Hello and welcome to BehanVox! This week we report on the ‘verification drive’ in India’s metros against Bengali-speaking workers who are fleeing home by the thousands to escape the crackdown. Why are their employers silent, we ask. We also have a great interview to tell us why the caste census is as much about understanding the source of disadvantage as about dismantling and destroying ‘caste apartheid’.
Story So Far
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.
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 3,000. 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.
There is a padlock over her door now, but we had met Mahjabi Khatun when she was busy packing up her spare belongings and reading to flee to her village in West Bengal’s Bardhaman district. Her husband’s colleague and others she knew from her community had been picked up by the police for questioning and no document seemed to convince the authorities of their Indian nationality.
“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.”
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. 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.
As Anuj Behal reports on the verification drive that is terrifying Bengali workers into returning home, we raise the question – why are employers not stepping up to defend the workers who are such a critical part of their life?
Read our story here.
Two months ago, the union home ministry had declared the next census and it was going to be unprecedented in more ways than one. First, it was being held after a gap of 16 years, second, it was to be the very first digital census, and most significantly, it was to be the first in independent India to enumerate castes. The last had been a long pending demand of the opposition that the ruling BJP had been pushing back against.
The idea of a caste census comes with several political, administrative, and intellectual histories and divisive questions. How do we begin to define ‘caste’ where the Constitution does not? And is caste a viable unit for sharing power, privileges, or resources equitably? Trina Vithayathil, scholar at Providence College, traced these overlapping discourses in her book, Counting Caste: Census Politics, Bureaucratic Deflection, and Brahmanical Power in India.
In an interview with Saumya Kalia this week, Trina unpacks the various issues around caste – bureaucratic obstacles and the myth of castelessness – since Independence. Any caste census exercise should also include the knowledge of those most marginalised by caste apartheid, patriarchy, and neoliberal capitalism to ensure the collected data supports policies that lead to annihilation of caste, she says.
“The census could document, for the first time since 1931, the relational nature of caste including how caste privilege and power operate. Caste-wise data on the “general” and OBC administrative categories, alongside the data on SC and ST categories, would challenge an ideology of castelessness that narrowly frames caste as a source of disadvantage and could inform policies and programmes to dismantle and destroy “caste apartheid”,” she says.
Read the interview here.
Talking Point
Gig Work Welfare Law: The Karnataka Assembly passed the Karnataka Platform-based Gig Workers (Social Security and Welfare) Bill, 2025, this week. It will do the following: provide a dispute resolution mechanism, establish Gig Workers’ Welfare Board, create a welfare fund for platform-based gig workers, provide for registration of workers, aggregators and platforms, and provide income security, reasonable working conditions to workers. As we have reported in our stories, gig workers work in a framework where ideas of flexibility and fairness are overridden by demands of the algorithm, customer whims and profit margins.
Love Hate: The recent death by suicide of Sona Eldhose, a young woman from Kothamangalam town in Kerala, has revived the right wing hysteria around the subject of the so-called “love jihad”. According to reports, she was being bullied by the family of her fiancee to switch her religion and already vulnerable to taunts from the community, she ended her life. The state BJP is now demanding legislation against such relationships such as the one operational in Gujarat.
BehanVox Recommends
Tradwives Trend: In this long read, Divya Aslesha and Nolina Minj track the tradwife phenomenon, women that glorify tradition and expound the virtues of early marriage, on social media platforms. As they get millions of views, the debate that arises is whether they are promoting conservative lifestyles and regressive values.
Food Security and Women: Researcher Aishwarya Singh, in this paper, discusses the gender dimension of the right to food, and how the food security regime in India treats women’s labour as a free resource to implement the state’s welfare agenda.
Baby Windows: Laura Spinney, in The Guardian, documents the network of controversial ‘baby windows’ or ‘baby hatches’ across the US, Poland and Netherlands – where a person simply deposits a baby in a secure vault, often in the wall of a public building and walks away.
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