Mangaluru: At around 5 am on August 8, a team of police – very few in uniform, several in plainclothes – descended on a makeshift settlement near Sobha Dream Acres in Belagere, East Bengaluru. Police banged on doors, ordering residents to gather their documents and board a waiting pickup vehicle. Those who questioned the police were beaten and shoved into the vehicle. No reasons were given. Within a few minutes, over 100 people were stuffed into the vehicle and driven away.The raid was part of a broader sweep across Bengaluru’s informal settlements under the Karnataka government’s newly launched ‘Operation Mukta’. Within two days, police across the city – particularly on its periphery – had reportedly picked up more than 3,000 people. With police stations having no place to accommodate so many of them, they were taken to various privately-owned convention centres and wedding halls. Speaking to The Wire, many people alleged that the police first destroyed the CCTV cameras installed in the area and then entered their bastis (settlements). Some CCTVs in adjoining buildings were also allegedly switched off.Different media platforms have cited different numbers, and the police have declined to give any clarity on the exact number of detentions or how many of those detained actually turned out to be undocumented persons. Karnataka home minister Priyank Kharge claimed that the government was conducting a “strict and serious search and verification” and stressed that there would be “absolutely no compromise” in dealing with “illegal immigration”.‘Snatched our phones, scanned through all the apps’Hasan Ali*, a 55-year-old man who worked as a labourer at a construction site in Belagere, was one of those dragged out of his house. “It was so sudden. We were just waking up and the police were already at our doorstep, asking us to line up outside our houses. They weren’t sparing women, children, anyone,” Ali says. As Ali stepped out of the house, he pushed his children and wife out through the small back exit of his kaccha structure, adjacent to Sobha Dream Acres, an upmarket housing complex. “I had warned them to stay hidden. I thought I would be arrested, and all I wanted was to ensure my college-going children and my wife were safe,” Ali adds.Ali spent close to ten hours at a marriage hall very close to Varthur police station, under whose jurisdiction the Belagere area falls. The scene there, he says, was “scary.” Young mothers with newborn children, old people who could barely move, young boys and girls who were so embarrassed that they refused to look up – all were made to sit on the bare floor, he recounts.A group of Bengali migrants detained and taken by Bengaluru Police in a truck. Photo by arrangement.At this marriage hall, the police had set up two desks. “Both desks demanded different sets of documents from us. One asked for our entry in the SIR in West Bengal. The other wanted proof of residence in Karnataka, our ration card, and Aadhaar,” says Saheba*, a woman in her mid-30s who was among those detained. Not that the police let people go once they showed the documents demanded. Saheba is enrolled on the electoral roll in Malda district in West Bengal. She, along with her family members, had even travelled to her hometown during the West Bengal state assembly election. But none of this mattered.“They snatched our phones and scanned through all the apps, photo galleries, and our WhatsApp messages. The police demanded explanations for downloading chat applications like IMO,” Saheba claimed. IMO, a free, cross-platform instant messaging and international video-calling application, is commonly used by people to communicate with relatives and friends overseas. While the Union government restricted its use in 2023 under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, citing national security and safety concerns, it continues to be widely used – not just, as is often alleged, to make calls to Bangladesh, but also to UAE and several other parts of the world.Saheba didn’t have the application downloaded on her phone, but her 14-year-old son did. “The police started questioning him about why he had this app on his phone,” she claims.A similar line of questioning continued across the roughly 90 locations that the police claim to have raided between August 8 and 9. Searches were conducted in Whitefield, Varthur, Kadugodi, Balagere Road, Bellandur, Marathahalli, Mahadevapura and parts of Electronic City, including Hebbagodi. At one of the marriage halls near the Bengaluru Central Jail premise, where over 200 people were held up, the police asked individuals to sing the national anthem to “prove” their nationality.Like Ali and Saheba, most of those detained were daily-wage workers at construction sites, delivery workers or domestic helpers, and belonged to Muslim or Dalit communities.‘Police violated every laid-down process’Rights activists and lawyers who have been on the ground trying to help those detained say that the entire exercise – which the Karnataka government terms a “verification drive” – was carried out in a heavy-handed fashion, violating human rights and dignity of those already on the margins. None of these detentions were carried out following legal procedures and people were held up inside private properties and not at designated “detention centres” mandated under the law. Aishwarya R., an activist associated with the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), recalls how the day unfolded. PUCL is among the few organisations that have been working closely with the Bengali migrant population settled in the city. “We started getting calls from local activists and residents early in the day. There was no clarity as to why people were picked up, where they were taken, which police were involved, or whether the FRRO was also part of the exercise – nothing,” Aishwarya says. She, like many other volunteers, travelled across the different makeshift detention centres the police had set up that day, demanding grounds for the arrests. “They [the police] told us we were obstructing their work and that we would be arrested if we continued seeking answers,” she alleges.A group of Bengali migrants, rights activists and lawyers at a police station in Bengaluru. Photo by arrangement.Speaking to the media, M. Narayana, DCP (Electronics City), claimed that over 105 of those detained were “Bangladeshi illegal immigrants.” The question, then, is why over 3,000 people were stuffed like cattle into pickup vehicles and taken away at the crack of dawn, asks lawyer Sushravya, who was on the ground providing legal aid to those detained. “The police violated every laid-down process. People were not told the grounds for their detention; they were whisked away as if they were involved in some grave crime. Some were beaten up, humiliated. They lost a day’s earnings. And in the end, police claim only about 100 of them are Bangladeshis,” Sushravya said. Police picked people up indiscriminately. It didn’t matter if those detained had a supporting court order, as in the case of Rehman*, who had been targeted a year ago and was sent to a detention centre for over four and a half months, only to be released after the Karnataka high court ordered his release once his citizenship had been established.Rehman, along with 200-odd people from Somasundarapalya area were taken to Bandepalya police station. “There were so many of us, the police couldn’t house us all. The police had to move us to a convention centre very close to the police station,” Rehman told The Wire over a phone call. Despite showing documents and the high court’s order, Rehman and his wife were let go only in the evening, he claims. Rehman’s case is an important legal fight. His lawyer, Clifton D’Rozario, had to fight a long-drawn-out legal battle to secure a favourable court order. When Rehman was still housed at ‘Home of Hope’, government’s designated detention centre, D’Rozario had moved the high court challenging his detention. Rehman’s documents, most importantly his inclusion in the West Bengal SIR, were presented to the court. But within four days of Rehman being declared Indian on August 4, the police detained him again under ‘Operation Mukta’.Just to avoid police harassment, Rehman says, he carries all his documents always with him. “It is not only the police, even at the workplace when we demand wage parity, the employer threatens us to report to the police,” he says. Rehman’s display picture on WhatsApp says it is of a young child with a message “proud to be an Indian” written on it. “We have to prove our legal existence every moment,” he says.Now, following push back from rights activists and lawyers, on August 9, the police set up verification centres at a few locations and the process that day was relatively peaceful.A verification drive being conducted in one of the many bastis in Bengaluru on August 9. Photo by arrangement.Activist R. Kaleem Ullah, who is associated with the women’s group Vimochana and has been working with the migrant population in the city for over three decades, says Bengali-speaking Muslims and Dalits live in utmost precarity. Kaleem Ullah says it’s not that the police lack the local intelligence to know who in their locality is a legal resident and who is undocumented. “But they want to instill fear among everyone living on the fringes. For a handful of undocumented people, why did the police think it was okay to harass an entire community?” he asks.Kaleem Ullah sees a pattern in the police’s recent action. In April, several Bengali migrants went to their hometowns to cast their vote in the state assembly election. “Soon after the elections, as they began to return home, several right-leaning media houses and social media influencers launched a hate campaign against those returning on trains from West Bengal. The media followed them till their bastis and ran baseless claims on their channels,” he claims. This, according to Kaleem Ullah, caused a frenzy, pushing the Congress government in Karnataka to react.Kaleem Ullah says these indiscriminate raids have also created a sense of suspicion among people. He says: “You enter a Bengali-speaking basti, and you sense an acute hostility towards anyone newly entering the space. The locals here are forced to tip the police, regardless of the legal status of the person migrating here. They feel a new person squatting in the area will bring another round of police scrutiny. This wasn’t the case before.” “The state has succeeded in turning people against each other,” he adds.Names marked with an asterisk have been changed to protect the identity of those detained.